Cherry Blossom 2020: Design Launch April 5

Here in Washington, DC the cherry blossoms are in peak bloom.

We love the clear, fresh colors of these delicate blossoms.

Especially enchanting is that dizzy feeling we get when we stand under a blooming cherry tree and look up.

We share that marvelous moment with you when we launch this year’s cherry blossom dress.

Coming on April 5!

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On March 1 It’s the Daffodil Shirtwaist

Wear the Daffodil Shirtwaist and celebrate Wales.

Our first dress of 2020 is a green pindot on crisp white cotton that captures that fresh moment of early spring when the first green shoots emerge. A vibrant daffodil print for collar and button band finishes the story.

Fitted sleeveless bodice has a back yoke, partial roll collar, and button-down front. Eight-gore flared skirt has side seam pockets. Side zipper, fully lined.

To Welsh friends we say Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus!

Happy St David’s Day!

For more about the Daffodil Shirtwaist visit the Shop.

On March 1: Celebrate Wales

On March 1 we launch the first design of 2020.

This date is St David’s Day, also known as Welsh National Day.

We have long loved the rolling, green Welsh countryside, the beauty of Welsh song, and the intriguing Welsh language.

Our first encounter with Wales came in third grade at our hometown library. One early spring day the checkout librarian, who had an ‘English' accent, was wearing a green onion pinned to her sweater. When asked about the vegetable she explained that it was the first of March, St David’s Day. On that day a proud Welshwoman wore the national symbol, the leek.

Years later we lived in London. Sometimes we stopped in at the Wales Tourist Board on Regent Street to arrange a weekend rental for ourselves and a group of friends. While we spent happy hours hiking the green slopes of the Brecon Beacons and exploring the fantastic ruins of a few of Wales’ many castles, perhaps best of all was waiting at the bookings desk on Regent Street, secretly hoping the phone would ring. If it did, chances were the nice lady answering would launch into an animated conversation in Welsh— a language that delights the ear.

The Welsh people are known for their love of song. With such a lovely lilt to its language, it is no surprise that Welsh culture expresses itself so eloquently in music. Choruses of extraordinary power may be found in the tiniest towns. Welsh folk music has given the world heartbreakingly beautiful melodies.

In more recent decades the daffodil, which in Wales blooms around the time of St David’s Day, is worn on March 1. Some sources say that the Welsh word for leek, Cenhinen, is easily confused with the Welsh for daffodil, Cehinen Pedr. Others say the fragrance of the leek may be improved upon by the daffodil. Either way, these national symbols reflect very well the freshness of the Welsh countryside in spring. The first design of 2020 celebrates this extraordinary place.

February 29: Get Ready for the Big Event

Shopping online for a special event?

Seen an Anikka Becker piece that you’d like to get to know better?

Visit us at the upcoming Bridal Fair and Fashion Show at the Officers Club at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.

See AB pieces on the runway.

Get a fitting with Anikka.

This event is open to the public!

Saturday, February 29, 2020

11 am-2 pm

Bridal Fair and Fashion Show

Officers Club

Fort Belvoir, Virginia

Coming on March 1

The first dress of 2020 launches on the first of March!

What’s so special about March 1?

It’s the beginning of both National Umbrella Month and National Celery Month.

It’s St David’s Day, the Welsh National Day, and it’s also the birthday of Yellowstone National Park.

One of these special occasions inspired our first design of 2020.

Stay tuned!

So many of you have asked

Yes, we are delighted to dress members of the bridal party!

And we’re thrilled to start 2020 showing at

the Bridal Expo in Lynchburg, Virginia.

Create memories with a dress your bridesmaids can wear forever.

Give special attention to the mothers of the bride and groom.

Treat yourself for the bridal shower, rehearsal dinner, or honeymoon.

For more information click here:

The Bridal Expo

January 26, 2020

12-4 pm

The City Armory

Lynchburg, Virginia

In DC on December 14

We’re thrilled to have been invited to participate in DC Swim Week’s Annual Holiday Pop-Up on December 14.

The sponsor of Washington’s premier summertime fashion event, DCSW opens its showroom for holiday shopping.

So stop by. We’re offering free fittings and color tests as well as a chance to take advantage of the 112 Sale in person.

DCSW Holiday Pop-up

December 14, 2019

12 noon-6 pm

2201 Wisconsin Ave NW, Suite 200

Washington, DC 20007

Free admission Free parking

RSVP here

It's here! And so are we.

Holiday Shopping is here!

We launch the Season this week with our fellow designers and artists of the Pennsylvania Guild of Craftsmen.

Stop in and shop our holiday specials November 16-17 at the Winter Fine Craft Fair in historic Gettysburg, PA.

Give a gift or treat yourself.

Summer is always coming.

Take a moment with us to enjoy Gettysburg and beautiful Adams County, center of Civil War history and home of the apple blossom festival.

In Fall, Go In Town

Fall starts September 23.

And no place does fall like our beloved hometown, Boston.

This fall we get down to business in Boston with the clean, structured lines of a blouson in khaki linen with roll collar.

New Yorkers may talk about going to The City, Angelinos to Downtown LA. In Chicago they visit The Loop, in Washington The District.

But only Bostonians go In Town.

Take a moment to go In Town

with us.

For more about the blouson in khaki linen with roll collar visit the Shop.

Next Stop: Downtown

It’s Labor Day Weekend, the traditional end of summer.

It’s time to say farewell to the pool deck and the patio lunch.

And take the downtown train to the stores, the skyscrapers, and the snap of the city streets.

We won’t let you go alone.

Anikka Becker Fall Look coming September 22!

To see all Anikka Becker designs visit the Shop.

Dress for a Summer Day

We’ve created a new piece especially for our upcoming show!

July 27-28 we’ll be in the Brandywine Valley at the Fine Crafts Fair in Wilmington, Delaware.

Known for its rolling countryside, stone farmhouses, and a rich culture of museums and formal gardens, the Brandywine’s beauty reaches its peak in high summer.

We are struck by its astonishing array of greens, which range from misty mornings to still, sunlit meadows to cool, dark forests. To celebrate this unique combination of natural and cultivated beauty, we created the Dress for a Summer Day.

Here’s a look at the Brandywine in its many shades of summer green.

You can see the Dress for a Summer Day at the Fine Crafts Fair, Chase Center on the Riverfront, Wilmington, Delaware, July 27-28 or online any time in the Shop.

To see more about the Dress for a Summer Day visit the Shop.

Who is the American Woman? Meet Tracie Pouliot, Printmaker and Hometown Heroine

Too often a look at the national landscape tells stories of loss. Plant closings, job loss, and empty storefronts have sapped the vitality from towns all over the United States. This has been especially keenly felt in New England. Once home to thriving textile, shoe, furniture, and fishing industries, today it may be described by statistics on foreclosures and addiction. When we visit we find towns that are only shells of themselves. But we also find wonderful stories of people who bring fresh air and a new sense of community to their hometowns. Tracie Pouliot of Gardner, Massachusetts is just such a person.  

The daughter of a furniture maker, Tracie is an artist whose medium is printmaking. She holds a BFA from Pratt Institute in New York and a Master’s degree in Community Art from the Maryland Institute of Art. In between her years in school, she spent two years with Americorps working on a community farm. But that’s only part of her story. Tracie is also the founder and driving force behind the Chair City Community Workshop, a fantastic place brimming with energy, creativity, and community pride in downtown Gardner.  

Gardner is a small city in central Massachusetts. Founded in the 18th century in an area with abundant timber and water power, it rose to prominence in furniture manufacturing. Heywood Wakefield, Nichols & Stone, Conant Ball, and Temple Stuart are just a few of the dozens of furniture companies whose home was Gardner. The city was best known for the manufacture of chairs, at its peak producing over 4 million each year and filling schools, libraries, and restaurants all over the US. Gardner became known as the Chair City, and in 1905 celebrated this title by building the largest chair in the world.   

For 25 years Tracie’s father worked for Nichols & Stone, the company that went the longest way putting the Chair in Chair City. Tracie recalls her father taking her and her sister to the factory as children. She sums up the importance of these visits when she explains, ‘The smell of sawdust is significant for me.’ During summers while she was in college, Tracie returned to Gardner and worked at Nichols & Stone as a floater. ‘At the time I was jealous of friends who had neat internships in cool cities, but it turned out that working in the factory actually influenced my artistic practices and interests as much as art school did.’ 

Nichols & Stone was the last of Gardner’s big furniture factories; it closed in 2008. Tracie had first-hand knowledge of how such a closing affected its many employees. ‘… it was really clear to me my community must be struggling in many ways with the loss of Nichols & Stone. I didn’t want people’s stories to go untold and I wanted to understand how a factory with such a great reputation and quality product with many employees who actually loved working there could close, and how an entire industry that built a city could just seemingly disappear.’ 

In 2009 Tracie started talking with the former employees of Nichols & Stone. ‘My first interview for this project was with my dad, Mike Pouliot.’ At the time she was living in North Carolina and holding down a full-time job. She traveled back and forth to Gardner to interview.  

‘Eventually I was able to save money, quit my job, and focus on my art.’ Tracie began to listen to the interviews she had recorded and wondered how to share them. She began to see her own medium of printmaking in the context of telling the stories of the workers in Gardner’s furniture industry.  

Tracie says an early interview with a former Nichols & Stone employee showed her what this project would become. ‘She worked there straight out of high school and was just a few years shy of retiring when they closed. So you can imagine all the life events she shared with her coworkers over the years. She had best friends, mentors, people who helped her grow up in the factory. They would decorate their work stations, bring in food to share, celebrate weddings, babies, and holidays together. She also loved the work, and was good at it. Her story so clearly explained the loss that happened when an entire industry moves. It was financial, but is was also about her identity, her social circle, her creativity, and her pride. These are all the things that make us feel like ourselves, and all of a sudden those things were swept out from under her.’ 

Tracie goes on to explain, ‘…the audio alone from the interviews with furniture workers is really compelling—there is definitely something special about hearing someone’s voice when they are talking from the heart… [but] this is a city of people who make things, and inspect the craftsmanship of things, and touch things to find out more about them. Whatever I did with these interviews had to be well-made and had to be an object people could interact with. So books seemed natural since I was dealing with words.’ 

Then, as Tracie explains, the real work began. She did a fundraiser to raise money for a traditional letterpress and industrial paper cutter, found space downtown, and wrote grants to get money to pay for bookmaking materials. 

Today the downtown storefront is the Chair City Community Workshop, which houses the letterpress and other equipment and materials needed to make a handcrafted book. The Workshop is also a gathering place where people can learn how to use the letterpress, volunteer their time making woodcuts, binding books by hand, and participate in events and social gatherings. ‘The Workshop is organized so that anyone could come in off the street and help out. I try to have a few tasks available for each shift for a range of abilities. Folks can stay a few minutes or a few hours. ‘  

The Workshop has now produced the Chair City Oral History Series, collected from 12 Nichols & Stone employees. Each interview is recorded in a handmade book, printed in an edition of 400. With the completion of each book, the Workshop hosts a book release party, often attended by the furniture maker about whom the book was written.  

The Workshop has received funding from the Pollination Project, Mass Humanities, and Massachusetts Cultural Council. It also receives support from individual contributions, in-kind donations, and ‘tons of volunteer time.’ Tracie speaks publicly and charges a fee, but as she explains, ‘for the most part it’s time we are not compensated for but have all decided is worth spending on doing this.’ 

It is an absolute delight to walk into this humming center of activity, where individual citizens, school groups, and civic organizations volunteer their time printing, binding, making woodcuts, and getting to know each other. We are in awe of the commitment to craft, history, and hometown shown by this American Woman. Thank you, Tracie!

Photo by Paul Gingras

Photo by Paul Gingras

Photo by Paul DeMeo

Next Stop: Charleston!

We are especially thrilled to have been invited to show Anikka Becker designs at the Piccolo Spoleto Crafts Exhibition in Charleston, South Carolina. A place full of happy memories, Charleston is a second home.

And a city so beautiful it’s hard to know where to look first. Still in possession of many of its historic buildings, Charleston is a unique city. Walk its quiet streets among live oaks hung with Spanish moss, pass through its magnificent wrought iron gates to visit hidden gardens, or feel the sea spray along the waterfront avenue known as the Battery. It’s like no other place.

And what is Piccolo Spoleto? Since 1977 Charleston has been the home to Spoleto USA, a 17-day performing arts festival that Charleston shares with Spoleto, Italy. It’s also the parent festival of Piccolo Spoleto, a concurrent celebration of visual and literary arts. Among them is the Piccolo Spoleto Crafts Exhibition, now in its 40th year. Anikka Becker is delighted to be a part of it.

For the occasion, we created a special piece. Stay tuned.

Piccolo Spoleto Crafts Exhibition

Wragg Square, between Meeting and Charlotte Streets

Friday May 31: 10 am to 6 pm

Saturday June 1: 10 am to 6 pm

Sunday June 2: 11 am to 5 pm

Happy Mother’s Day: The Glad Dress

When we first saw that stunning gladiolus print we were captivated by its freshness. The spray of exuberant blooms in vivid colors is a celebration of the highest order.

Finally, we thought, this will do it.

To the lady who taught us the value of kindness, a library card, an ever ready smile, and the elegant hotel breakfast, we offer the Glad Dress.

Happy Mother’s Day!

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