Monkeying around with new designs will come to fruition for Philip and Mieko Markwart at the Made in Hawaii Festival next month.

Their company, One by One Enterprises, has been a fixture on the local craft fair circuit for decades, and has served the couple as its primary source of income “for about 40 years,” Philip Markwart said.

Markwart has been “monkeying around” with designs for the upcoming Year of the Monkey in 2016, and after their debut in the online version of this column, they will make their in-person debut at the Made in Hawaii Festival in August.

The festival is marking its 21st year, and Markwart estimates that One by One has been an exhibitor for 15 to 18 of those years.

The new monkey designs and many others will be on T-shirts and dish towels, which many customers collect each year, which is not to say that every animal design is for a specific lunar year.

It is likely this year’s back-and-front-printed monkey T-shirts, with a face on the front and tail going up the back, will be a popular gift for people trying to send a message to the recipient — and yes, they will be available in keiki sizes, Markwart said.

Sometimes, Year of the (fill in the blank) designs remain so popular that Markwart will remove the year reference and continue to sell the items due to robust sales.

Some of the company’s other bold designs are part of its Kanji Koncepts line and include Japanese kanji and what we English speakers might call plays on words such as “Sushi or Not Sushi.”

“It’s a revival of an earlier line,” he said. “Most of them have been tweaked and changed a bit.”

The kanji for sumo, for instance, is printed on the shirt tilted at an angle.

“If you notice at the beginning of a match, the (sumo wrestlers) come out onto the ring and they stretch, they raise their legs one at a time and … squat down, to stretch,” he said. “That’s the exercise, the routine, the stretching” that the tilted kanji reflects.

His wife, Mieko, created ceramic lamps and other objects for a run of years, and customers clamor for her to resume the activity, which could happen, Markwart said, though not in time for next month’s event.

She sews, though, and her clutch bags, eyeglass cases, purses and other items will be available for purchase at the festival.

Philip’s ceramic cups are also popular at events like the 2015 Joy of Sake event Friday at 6:30 to 9 p.m. at the Hawai‘i Convention Center. “We like to be there,” he said. One by One has been a vendor at Joy of Sake for about eight years, he estimated.

The cups are “wheel-thrown” and are either gas-fired, with glaze, or “the finer pieces are wood-fired with no glaze,” but emerge from the kiln bearing an organic design and pattern created by all the elements that come together during the firing process. No two are ever alike.

The ceramic cups also will be available at the Made in Hawaii Festival and other events at which they’ll appear leading up to the holiday season.

Sake cups, which can be used for other liquids, of course, range in price from “the teens” up to more than $100 for the higher end of the line, which take seven to 10 hours to make, and he can only fire 25 at a time in the kiln.

The Markwarts have sustained themselves not just based on graphic T’s, dish towels and small ceramics, but also on additional, higher-end, more specialized artwork.

Some of his ohe kapala art, using traditional kapa-printing techniques on material made from paper mulberry used to make kapa cloth, has been purchased by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts for display in public buildings around the state.

He also was once commissioned to create a 135-foot-long art installation at Osan Air Force Base in South Korea. The installation, in 2000, depicted a story of a flying horse, which was a symbol of the base, encouraging other horses that they also could take flight.

Back when the couple was just starting out, Philip had a couple of different jobs, he said, but after their first couple of craft fairs in Hawaii in the late 1970s, he decided “I’m just going to try this” full time.

They did the starving-artist bit for a while, but they built a business “and built a history, and upon reflection I’m extremely happy a lot of those little dreams came true,” he said.
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“Buy Local” each Aloha Friday is about made-in-Hawaii products and the people who make them. Reach Erika Engle at 529-4303, erika@staradvertiser.com, or on Twitter as @erikaengle.