Tell me a bit about your love of Halloween! Where did it start?

Ever since I was little, I’ve enjoyed the thrill of walking out in the dark to gather tricks and treats while in costume, seeing everyone’s decorations, and watching spooky movies while trading candy. It’s the time of year when things are the best, from the weather to the food to my state of mind. I’ve always loved Halloween!

I grew up with divorced parents who lived on opposite ends of the country, so holidays can bring complicated feelings sometimes. But at least with Halloween, my parents could agree that it was a time for dressing up and being creative. Both of my parents can sew and were very creative, so they always made my costumes. I got to pick weird things and they would indulge me. Some of the standouts from childhood were a multi-armed ladybug, a mad scientist, a cactus (or a pickle, depending on who was interpreting it), a vampire hunter, and Hellboy, which was the first costume I ever made by myself. I thrifted a big London Fog trench coat for a few dollars, threw on some cargo pants and a black tank top, and made my own “prosthetics” and props. These consisted of making the horns, stone hand, and gun out of toilet paper tubes, masking tape, and poster paint. Memories!

What makes Halloween your favorite holiday?

I love most holidays because I like any excuse to decorate and go all-in on kitschy celebrations of the season, but Halloween has always felt like it was all mine. Sure, other people in my life liked Halloween, but that love also seemed to fade as they got older. I was an adamant trick-or-treater and even made up Halloween caroling with my friends in high school so that I could still go door-to-door and experience the night and all its wonders. I adore the creativity of Halloween, and it lights me up when people make their own costumes or decorations or choose to go all-out for a party or an event.

How do you celebrate Halloween these days?

Nowadays, when the season hits, I try to start my Halloween and seasonal activities as early as possible. Things usually kick off around late June for Code Orange hunting in my area, so I tend to do a lot of window shopping to satisfy my collecting crow brain. I’ll often grab a spiced hot chai (early in the season) or double fist pumpkin cream cold brew and a PSL (in the season) and hit every big box store to do some market research and see if my predictions for this year’s themes and hot items came true. Then I tend to spend a lot of my money at local small businesses or with artists and stores I follow online and do my best not to go broke!

For non-shopping activities, I love to visit as many pumpkin patches and corn mazes as I can as to soak up all the “vibes” for the coming year. In recent years, I’ve started to have more anxiety in big crowds (and sometimes the ‘normies’ make my favorite spots not fun), so it’s nice to hit up places just as the season kicks off to really enjoy some quality time with the curated spaces. I also tend to do a lot of driving around and exploring, so I’ll look for my favorite houses that do the best or wildest yard displays and try to find new local seasonal treats from coffee shops.

As the season finally starts to settle in, I’ll trek to some of the more atmospheric cemeteries in the evenings and early mornings and revel in the quiet and moodiness. The sights, sounds, and smells of the Halloween season keep me going through the rest of the year, so I spend the most time outside during these months.

And last, but certainly not least, I have a solid rotation of haunted houses that I work on visiting starting the first week of September. There are about 10-15 local Utah haunts that I try to work my way through, but it all depends on finances as they’re my biggest spend of the season. 🧡

In the article, we talked about how the jack-o-lantern water tower led to a moment of letting go and reconnecting with your love of Halloween. Can you tell us a little more about that moment?

I started to reconnect with many things that I used to love as a child but slowly let go of over time. I reconnected with my love of all things “macabre”, including my deep interest in death, both medically and conceptually, the supernatural, scary stories, and my deep and unbridled love of the color orange. I began to reconnect with art and storytelling, films and filmmaking, and music. I had a Halloween playlist that I would put on while I drove around, immersing myself in thoughts and plans for future Halloweens. I would visit all the festivals, all the costume shops, all the pumpkin patches, all the corn fields— and I couldn’t wait to start dressing how I wanted again. I reconnected with my love of alternative fashion and started finally building a sense of style that truly felt like me.

It's interesting that you grew up with two parents who sewed, but that wasn’t your initial creative direction. What makes you passionate about sewing now?

I never meant to make bags, but I have somehow always been surrounded by them and the making of them. My mom worked for her parents making duffle bags and totes and all sorts of other kinds of bag as part of their manufacturing contracts, so in the background of my childhood I often saw the process happening but didn’t take much interest in it beyond “pretty fabric, I like these thread colors”.

My dad, traveling all over the world to attend conferences and give speeches on ethics in science, would often gift me the conference bags he was given at these events. I cherished them and refused to use any other kind of bags when I was going to school. Often, I would show up to class with messenger bags and backpacks with logos and slogans from medical firms and pharmaceutical companies, which I’m sure was odd at the time, but I honestly never thought anything of it until this moment. How bizarre! At least on the plus side, I never had to buy a backpack for school.

As an introverted kid, I was also always carrying around notebooks to write stories, books to read, sketchbooks, and drawing supplies incase things “got boring” wherever I went. I was frequently teased about it and told to “put down my bag and stay a while.” In hindsight, I suppose I’ve always had a connection with bags, but I certainly did not foresee it becoming my full-time job! I’m still surprised by it; but I do love the process of designing and production, so I look forward to continuing to work with bag making for the foreseeable future alongside my other interests and passions.

What’s it like working with your mom on PetriCoffin, and what is your favorite part of the creative process?

When I started PetriCoffin, I only had some basic sewing knowledge and mostly learned how to make them by watching behind the scenes processes from others and problem solving with my mom during the prototypes. I mostly stick to sewing the faces and backs of the bags, while my mom mainly assembles the parts together into the finished piece. Now with 3 years of experience working on them, I’m capable of putting the bags together on my own, but my mom’s 20+ years of sewing experience really shines when the bags fully comes together; so I have her take the lead on completing each one. She works MUCH faster and more efficiently than I do!

As for my favorite part of the process, I really enjoy the steps of pattern making and designing a new colorway. It’s like a puzzle that I get to figure out, and making all the adjustments and choices for materials and hardware is really fun

You definitely have a signature style with your jack-o-lantern faces. How did you pick this one?

It warms my heart to be able to talk about my “Joyful Pumpkin” face design. It still makes me smile to look at it, and I’m so glad that so many others have continued to enjoy it too!

In the beginning, I had all sorts of designs for jack o’ lantern faces that I wanted to try. However, I always cross-reference my ideas and designs with existing work by others in the Halloween bag sphere to avoid accidentally reproducing something or cutting in on someone’s signature look. In my research process, I often wound up with designs that weren’t very unique, so it took some thinking.

In the past I had developed the branding and logo design for my mom’s shop and had referenced Googie [architecture] and some mid-century design by using boomerang shapes and curvilinear lines in her typography. Her shop is a little funky and retro, so when I worked on her design elements, we wanted to reference the ‘50s with the pastel pinks and blues and some iconic mid-century sparkles and boomerang shapes.

Because the Joyful Pumpkin is a collaboration between her and I, I wanted to make a face that referenced that, as well as clue people in to my interest in vintage fashion and design history. That’s the reason for the soft shape of the eyes, as well as to give them a warm smiling appearance. The same goes for the bold but gently tapered shapes of the nose and mouth. I initially wanted to make a ‘scary’ pumpkin, but it just wouldn’t turn out right on the page. The more friendly face also helped the bag translate into many different colors and patterns, so I think in the end it was the right choice to choose a joyful expression over a frightful one.

One of my favorite details is the zigzag stitching around the face elements. Where did the decision to do that come from?

I tried using a straight stitch like other bag makers to trace the lines of my design, but it never ended up looking right. After messing around with the various stitch patterns on my little hobby machine, I wound up falling in love with the sort of back and forth, patchwork-like stitch pattern that is now on all my pumpkins. I thought it worked well to clue in a little more spookiness and variability, so it wasn’t perfectly clean and brought a much-needed textural element to bring the face together.

Similarly, at the time nearly every pumpkin bag was a circular bag, so I decided to go a bit more vintage-inspired again by doing a shape closer to that of a bowler bag combined with a more organic pumpkin shape, while still maintaining a good area of storage space that wasn’t impeded by curves that may be too extreme. Same goes for the curved lines on the pumpkin face and back — most bag makers had been doing fairly straight lines, flattening the faces and making them more graphic. I wanted to accentuate the organic form of a pumpkin a little more, so I curved them to give the slight illusion of them bending around a fuller pumpkin shape. I think it gives a nice subtle visual trick to the bag that isn’t too overstated.

You have a GREAT variety of seasonal designs when it comes to colors and prints. What made you want to branch out into making more beyond purses for Halloween season?

I’ve always loved bright and vibrant colors and patterns matched with black on anything and everything, so it only seemed natural to make the pumpkins in as many options as possible. I love matching my outfits to how I’m feeling or whatever is inspiring me at the moment, and I don’t personally limit my own sense of fashion to dark or more traditional alternative colors to communicate that I’m spooky. I think it’s more about the spirit of the season or the iconography for me, rather than the color palette.

Especially in the first year, I was just exploding with ideas and color combos because I was in full creative control and had access to a vast cache of fabrics and vinyls that had been sitting around unused for almost 20 years. My mom purchased the remaining old stock of fabrics and supplies from her parent’s business after her father died, and her mother stopped taking on contracts. A lot of that leftover stock happened to be odd colors that weren’t very utilitarian.

I made a big swatch book out of most of them and used that swatch book to design most of the pumpkins I came up with in the first year. Designs and patterns that arose in years 2 and 3 were usually specifically motivated by a certain vibe I wanted to achieve, so I would purchase specific fabrics for the desired look instead of relying on stock we had on hand.

In general, I also just wanted to make a joyful pumpkin for every kind of Halloween lover: for the pink obsessed, y’allternative or western leaning, horror lovers, Frankenstein enthusiasts, and all the rest! The sheer variety in the Halloween community is one of the reasons why I love it so much.

Now the hardest question of all: what is your favorite design/print you've made to date and what makes it your favorite?

That is SUCH a hard question — it’s like asking which child is my favorite! I can’t narrow it down to one, but I can name my top favorites. To be honest, I think I love my Harvest pumpkin the most, as it feels the most uniquely me. It’s made with a lovely multidimensional rusty orange velvet that has these interesting vertical striations in the fabric, with a simple black vinyl face and brass hardware.

The runners up would be my Classic pumpkin, which is black vinyl with the orange velvet face, as well as the Chartreuse pumpkin, because it’s my favorite shade of green. I’m also quite fond of the Giallo pumpkin with its shiny holographic blood-splatter fabric for the face and the fun big slashes on the back! And lastly (before I wind up just naming them all), it would be a tough toss-up between Pasture, a black floral vinyl pumpkin with a yellow-green crushed velvet face, and Whiskey, made of the same black floral vinyl with a warm camel brown corduroy for the face.

What's something you haven't done yet with your business that you'd like to try?

I’ve really wanted to try my hand at designing clothing, and I have a small bucket in the studio that’s been accumulating my sketches and ideas over the past three years that I may start tapping into! Besides that, I have a few projects in the works for new bag designs that include more conceptual, one-of-a-kind pieces.

I’ve also been meaning to teach myself screen printing, as I have quite a lot of ideas that would be better suited for something like that versus stitching all the lines and details. I’ve dabbled a little with hand-painting bags with leather paint, but it’s a pretty time-consuming process and I’m hoping to be able to streamline certain production timelines a bit more.

When you send a bag off to its new owner, what do you hope the customer gets out of the experience or item they purchased?

Sometimes my bag production timelines can be a bit lengthy, so I spend quite a lot of time looking at order forms and people’s names. I think a lot about what their lives must be like and where they live, and it makes me so happy to think that Halloween people all over the country (and the world!) chose one of MY bags to accompany them on their journeys and adventures. I hope it becomes an item that they use every day!

While I’m honored that some people come to value them so highly, sometimes I’m a little sad when they say they only use their bag for special occasions or not at all. My hope is to make something that is functional and brings Halloween into the everyday sphere, so that they can feel the magic of the holiday in the off season too.

I genuinely credit celebrating Halloween 24/7/365 for part of my mental health journey and recovery. Finding something so special and magical to hold on to on the really hard, dark days has made things more bearable for me, and I really hope that what I make and send out into the world can do that for someone else. The objects we use become part of the fabric of our lives and props in the stories we tell ourselves, and if we intentionally choose things that bring us joy, maybe that means our stories can have a happy ending too.