Creativity meets technology

Venus Zine kicks back with designer, craftster, and writer Natalie Zee

By Cat Morley
Published: June 26th, 2006 | 6:57pm

Natalie Zee has always had a love for fashion and technology. But now, she has discovered a way to combine the two very different worlds: with her online blog, Coquette, where she discusses fashion designers, gadgets, crafts, and technology, proving that geek really can be fashionable.

The self-taught designer has recently been snapped up by MAKE Magazine, where she exposes interesting craft projects from all over the Web.

First up, tell me about MAKE Magazine and what your role is?
MAKE Magazine brings the do-it-yourself mindset to all the technology in your life. It celebrates your right to tweak, hack, and bend technology any way you want. CRAFT Magazine celebrates the resurgence of crafts and the new work that is being done by tech-savvy makers who use technology to discover new ideas and share projects. This new renaissance of crafting is taking crafts beyond traditional boundaries but still connects us to our history.

I wear a few hats on the MAKE/CRAFT team, in short: blogger, writer, Web designer. In addition to posting craft related topics up on the MAKE blog, I'm associate editor for CRAFT Magazine and also the art director for the MAKE Web sites. We launched the new makezine.com site in January which I designed and I'm currently working on the new craftzine.com site which will launch in the fall along with the new magazine.

You have a love for fashion and technology. Where do you think this interest came from?
I have always loved fashion. I used to draw fashion sketches for fun as a kid. I think fashion and technology fascinates me because I love innovation. I love that this is a medium that is untapped and is just starting to be explored. I love that it's mixing these two different worlds: beauty and functionality. But technology can be aesthetically beautiful, too. Fashion needs to change, be more functional. Enough with retro. We've seen the same visual styles and fabrics. But now technology can be weaved into the fabric, helping it change color, shape, and to communicate.

You also have a Web site of your own; tell me a little bit about it?
For a few years I always wanted to start a blog. I was getting tired of reading fashion Web sites that didn't have things to my taste, or gadget sites that kept telling me about Hello Kitty USB's as their "girl tech". I also wanted a place to talk about crafts and share my own projects (this is way before CRAFT, the magazine, even existed). I originally wanted to do a bunch of separate blogs but my fiance, Gilles, told me that would be insane. He said that maybe it wasn't the norm but that all these loves were me and that I could easily put fashion, technology, and crafts together in one place. So he convinced me well enough. I got the name "Coquette" from Gilles because, if you haven't guessed yet, he's French and he would say I was so "coquette" (girly, stylish) whenever I would dress up. It was personal enough, and I thought coquette was a great adjective to fit in with technology too: technology can be stylish but with my own touch.

These days I post just about anything, but it's mostly in regards to fashion. It's definitely one of my passions and I always want to share new things I find with everyone. It's become a little community of fashion and crafting bloggers, and I've met some great friends who share the same interests from it.

How long have you been running it?
It will be one year in July. I can't believe it. I started with just a few of my girlfriends (and gay guy friends) reading it, and now people are reading it all over the world. What I didn't expect was to find a really cool network of blogging women out there. We all support each other. I think the friendships I've made through it have made a difference.

Where do you find the inspiration for your articles and your blog entries?
I read a lot from the Web, magazines, and books, so I think a lot of those things spark my interest. Sometimes, just being out and about, I'll see something or talk to someone and find out about something new. I'm really inspired by vintage crafting books and old fashion photography, like Melvin Sokolsky. And I can't get enough of Japanese crafting (books, sites, tools, whatever I can find!).

Something old-school in me is that I subscribe to the paper version of the New York Times and read it each morning. I know there are RSS feeds for it, but there is something visually compelling about scanning headlines and reading articles. The Thursday and Sunday Styles are my favorite and it's a good way to gauge trends coming up: aside from fashion, even crafting appears in those sections.

How do you find all these great things on the internet?
Thank you for saying this! I think it's really the geek girl in me. I can multi-task pretty well, and I'm constantly out there looking. I have a pretty full RSS newsreader that covers a lot of the topics I'm interested in which I scan over numerous times throughout the day. Other times, I get e-mail from friends or submissions to the Make Blog or Coquette.

Finally, what advice would you have for aspiring craftsters out there who would like to start crafting, and maybe even set up their own creative blog?
The best advice I can give is to start making things, and start a blog if you are interested. Don't think about it too much. If you are interested in it and have a passion for it, allot some time to dedicate to it. You'll find that you'll start to have a groove, and then it all becomes totally natural.