Screenprinted Sweet Peas

One of the blogs that I follow is Carole Barkett's 'Country Mouse Studio' and a couple of days ago, I was delighted to see that Carole had written about making bookmarks for sale on Zazzle because it's something I've often thought I'd like to make, but hadn't been able to find them in the list of 'products' to create.

But now, thanks to Carole, I know that the tall, thin business cards can be used as a bookmark, so I've been able to use a design that I've always thought would make a very nice bookmark.

I originally created the 'sweet peas' design for a repeating pattern on fabric - working out the repeats is something I always find fascinating and sweet peas are one of my favourite flowers. In fact my priorities in my tiny walled garden are colour and fragrance and as well as sweet peas and climbing roses, I have lots of lavender, mock orange (philadelphus) and jasmine (providing the cold spell in January hasn't killed it!).


Devising a system to make sure that the images are printed on the fabric in exactly the right place involved an 8 ft x 4 ft table and several reels of black thread - and wasn't easy! But I succeeded in printing enough fabric to make a roller blind for my glass-panelled kitchen door to the garden of my house in Norwich. It was very pretty but the white background quickly turned a creamy colour, presumably because of the proximity of all the cooking, steam etc. It actually didn't look at all bad - a more 'natural' colour than the stark brilliant white it was originally. But when I moved house, I abandoned it so I am really glad to be able to use that design again now!

I also think it looks attractive on a frosted glass mug in my Zazzle store where you can also see the finished bookmark. (The baby's sweet peas are from a more recent wet-in-wet watercolour painting.)