Are you a Shrinking Violet?

The Violet is one of the Birth Month Flowers for February.

Poems about violets often refer to them as blooming in April and Yardley even have a range by the name of "April Violets". I shall keep a close eye on my front garden this year and notice when the violets start to bloom. 

What is the word that we most often hear in connection with violets? 

There’s the African Violet, the Dog Violet and the Parma Violet – the one that is sometimes used in confectionery and cake decoration - 

And of course there’s the ‘Shrinking Violet’.

Not because it can literally shrink – though when exposed to too much sun, it may shrivel up and die.

‘Shrinking’ in this case is another way of expressing modesty, humility or even shyness, human traits that have often been associated with violets because of their habit of hiding away in woodlands, close to the ground and often hidden by leaves.

Violet motif for the
repeating pattern.

Poems suggesting these qualities in the pretty little wild wood violets abound! Here's a selection.

While modesty and humility are surely positive qualities, shyness isn’t necessarily a good thing. It has been suggested that shyness is the result of too much preoccupation with oneself and how one appears to the rest of the world. And it can certainly hold us back from becoming all that we’re capable of becoming.

I’ve been a ‘Shrinking Violet’ in my time – until a very wise elderly relative pointed out to me that my ‘walking small in order that others may walk tall’ was not serving any good purpose!

But when I was looking up quotes about violets I came across one that stood out from the rest and I think it’s my favourite. It doesn’t deny that violets are not particularly showy; they don’t grab our attention like the daffodils and tulips that flower around the same time.

But they are tenacious! And there's power in that tenacity – as I discovered when I first dug over the ground beneath my Magnolia tree. 

'Tile' for the
repeating pattern.

When I moved into my house, there was grass beneath the tree but it wasn’t a pretty sight. It didn’t get enough light and it was impossible to mow because of the roots of the tree, even though I bought a strimmer especially for the purpose. Hence my decision to dig it all up and make a wild, woodland area of my front garden.

As I dug out the grass and the dandelions, I began to see the violets hiding closer to the ground. I was planning to scatter wild flower seeds in the soil so I dug out the violets as well – with some difficulty because of their long, enormously strong roots! 

But now, ten years later, the ground is covered in violets again! 

So whenever I have time in the autumn, I plant daffodils and irises around the tree, removing just a few of the violets to make room for them. As the tree has grown over the years, it has become harder and harder for anything else to grow beneath it – except for the violets! 

So maybe the violets are telling us something, especially those of us who are introverts by nature. Perhaps their lesson is that we don’t need to put on a show, to draw attention to ourselves in order to be purposeful. 

As the quotation suggests – and as I discovered in my front garden! – tenacity and modesty, strength and humility can happily rub along together!

Please feel free to pin or download and print
 this 300 dpi image (for your personal use only).

PS I recently discovered that the Violet is associated with Mother's Day.

Originally known as Mothering Sunday, it fell on the fourth Sunday in Lent and in the 16th Century, it was the occasion for everyone to visit their 'Mother Church', ie their nearest large church of cathedral, for a special 'Mothering Sunday' service.

Later, the idea of honoring all mothers on that same date meant that domestic servants were given a rare day-off to visit their mother church or, more often, to go home to visit their mothers, whom they probably hadn't seen for months or even as long ago as the previous Mothering Sunday. The servants would gather a posy of wild flowers along the way and the most prevalent wild flower at that time of year was, yes, you've guessed it - the violet!

This year, Mothering Sunday (or Mother's Day) falls on Sunday, 30th March in the UK.

Violets, Pretty Mother's Day Greeting Card by poshandpainterly
 

There are plenty of Mother's Day greeting cards and gifts to choose from in my Zazzle stores but here's a link to the cards that feature the Violets.

  

Pretty Violets Wrapping Paper to Customize by poshandpainterly
   

February Birth Month Flower - Violet

I’ve never much liked violets. 

I tend to prefer bright, colourful flowers like Pot Marigolds and Daffodils. By comparison, I always thought of violets as rather drab and dreary, too much leaf for such tiny flowers and anyway, purple is by no means my favourite colour, especially in the garden. I tend to think of Violet in particular as an 'old lady' colour . . . 

But I’ve noticed that when I draw flowers for painting or for making a pattern, it feels as if I get to know them. It’s almost like getting to know a person, like making a new friend.

And that’s exactly how it was with the violets I needed to paint for a new series of February Birth Month Flower Birthday Cards!

Violets, February Birthday Card for Cousin by poshandpainterly
 

In fact, even before I’d made the violets into a birthday card design, my enthusiasm had grown so much that I began to make ‘Violets’ repeating patterns and coordinates to create all sorts of pretty products for my Posh & Painterly store!

White Porcelain Teapot, Sweet Violets Pattern by poshandpainterly
   

I made my patterns using Photoshop and if you’re interested in how to do it, you’ll find some easy to follow instructions HERE, on some of my blogs from 2013. 

The main violet pattern was based on an ogee-shaped repeat, instructions in #4. But if you’re a newcomer to repeating patterns, you’ll probably benefit from starting with #1 and working your way through.


If you don’t have Photoshop, don’t despair! 

I made some of my best and most popular repeating patterns, such as this one, using paper, paint, scissors and sticky tape! 

Mock Orange and Weigelia Bone China Coffee Mug, Bone China Mugs by helikettle
 

I found the very clear instructions for making repeating patterns without a computer on another blog, Design Sponge .

Good luck with this - but just think carefully before you get into making repeating patterns - you may easily find yourself getting addicted like I am! 

What does your garden say about you?

‘What a strange thing to say’, was my first reaction to this quote. 

And then I thought about it and yes, there is quite a lot of my ‘autobiography’ in my garden.

There are the plants that have moved house with me, some of them many times; a constant reminder of other homes I’ve had, other cities where I’ve lived. 

Customizable Save the Date Card, Mock Orange Business Card Template
 

As soon as I knew I was going to be leaving Hereford, I took some of the shoots that were growing around the base of the Mock Orange and put them in pots with some soil. By the time I was ready to sort out my garden in Abergavenny, they had grown roots and in next to no time I had a bush that has grown into a small tree!

And there are still a few that my mother sent to me many years ago, wrapped in damp kitchen paper and foil, from the garden of the house I grew up in. They bring back memories of childhood, when the garden seemed vast and I loved to lift up the stones in the rockery and watch the woodlice scurrying around underneath. Apparently I was so fond of woodlice that I asked a grown-up whether they, too, went to Heaven when they died. Obviously a very compassionate little girl, I felt so sorry for the grass because it didn’t have a lovely fragrance that I sprinkled it with my mother’s best perfume – or so I’m told!

The primroses I grow nowadays are the brightly coloured, showy ones that come in pots and I usually keep them on the shelf in my front porch.

This primrose pattern (below) started off as a screenprint, back in the '80s but I kept the original drawing and used it to make a repeating pattern that has become popular on greeting cards as well as mugs and phonecases.

Primroses February Birthday Card  
   

But as a child I used to go to the woods with the Wolf Cubs – my mother was Akela! – and pick the beautifully scented wild primroses. 

I can clearly remember how they were tied in bunches and hung from long sticks that the bigger boys carried over their shoulders. And the primroses were somehow transported from the Isle of Wight, where I lived, to the East End of London, where apparently the children had never seen a copse, let alone a primrose!

Primroses Birthday Card

So yes, there are bits and pieces of my autobiography in my garden, plants that friends have given me, sometimes to mark a special occasion, like the salmon pink geranium I was given when one of my children was born - and I expect you’re the same. 

Pink Geranium Mug  
    

It’s nice to reminisce but probably boring for other people to hear. 

But another similar quote I came across is perhaps more to the point and I’m not sure I like what it’s saying -

“Show me your garden and I shall tell you what you are” 

Alfred Austin

Does my garden really reveal that much about me? I would like to think it didn’t because my gardening is so haphazard that it’s a bit of a chaos really!

At first glance, people generally admire my garden – it’s usually full of colour and fragrances, as well as birds, bees and butterflies. 

But look a bit closer and it’s dreadfully untidy – a real hotchpotch of plants quietly running riot. But that’s just how I like it. I don’t like neat gardens and heaven forbid that I should ever try to constrain Nature to a straight line!

I've never been very interested in expensive plants from Garden Centres; I think you can make a very pretty and easily maintained garden using plants like Valerian, Antirrhinums and Mountain Cornflowers that some people would call weeds. I sometimes, when I have time, collect the seeds from the pods to scatter in following years. Sometimes they grow - sometimes they don't. And I certainly get my money's worth out of wallflowers! I let them stay, year after year, until they get so old and woody that they're easy to pull up.

From my bedroom window

My lawn is very long on dandelions and other weeds and short on grass. But as long as I keep it mowed in summer, it looks pleasantly green and that’s all I ask of it, especially when the weather’s dry and proper lawns are turning brown!

I don’t stick to the rules when it comes to gardening. I tend to just do what seems likely to work, as long as it doesn't take up too much of my time. Sadly, I do occasionally ‘lose’ a plant that I’m fond of, through sheer neglect. But far more often the rather ‘broad brush’ gardening techniques that I inherited from my mother – dig a hole, put plenty of water in it, spread the plants all round in a circle, fill the hole and stamp it down firmly! – produce the desired results. 

In fact I seem to have a bit of a way with dead-looking sticks that I’ve bought very cheaply. And once resurrected with a dose of TLC, they often go on to become glorious additions to my little patch.
 

I bought the 'Dreaming Spires' rose very cheaply in a supermarket, the Mock Orange was one of my transplants from my Hereford garden and the Honeysuckle was a very dead-looking stick!

As I write this, I realise that Alfred Austin has a valid point. My garden does say quite a lot about me! 

What does yours say about you?

Please feel free to pin or download and print
 this 300 dpi image (for your personal use only).

Snowdrop Quotation to Inspire You

I love this quotation by 20th century American author, Anais Nin!

It fits so well with my belief that flowers, plants and anything that grows make the clearest metaphors for life and ‘what it’s all about’. 

I’ve never read any of Nin’s work so I don't know what sort of ‘blossoming’ she may be referring to. But that doesn't matter; there are innumerable ways in which we can all blossom – or alternatively, remain, painfully, tight in the bud!

Buskers take a very public risk!

So often fear prevents us taking the plunge, raising our heads above the parapet or however you choose to describe that moment when we show the world what we, uniquely, have to offer. 

For some of us it may be our upbringing that has held us back from being all that we know, deep down inside, that we are capable of being; or maybe it was something in our experiences at school. Or maybe we tried once before but met with failure or even ridicule.



But there comes a tipping point, when, as the quotation says, it becomes more painful to hold back than to take the risk. It has happened to me and I’m sure it will have happened to many others. Some will have been lucky enough to receive all the encouragement they needed. But even then, there were probably moments of self-doubt to overcome – few of us are totally self-confident.

Young busker in Abergavenny

Some will take the risk at an early age and live lives that are comfortably aligned with their true selves and their talents. Others, like me, take longer to be convinced that it’s worth the risk. We try all sorts of other things first, trying to avoid that fateful step from which there’s no going back, that blossoming, that ‘unfolding of our petals’. 

But it's never too late, as George Eliot wrote, to be what you might have been!

Are you one of those ‘on the brink’? Or do you know someone in that position, a friend or a relative you wish would just embrace their talents and, like the plucky little snowdrop, start to show the world what and who they truly are? 

The snowdrop doesn’t hold back from bringing beauty into our world and hope into our hearts, in spite of the worst that the winter weather can muster. 

So why do we?

Please feel free to download this A4 high-res sheet
if it will inspire you or someone you know!

 (Just click on it then right-click and 'Save as...')

When will the Snowdrops appear?

It’s January, and thanks to the mildness of the weather, all sorts of summer flowers, are still bravely trying to brighten the winter dreariness in my little back garden, alongside the Winter Jasmine.




As well as the roses I wrote about last week, there’s the faithful perennial wallflower, Bowles Mauve, that only seems to stop flowering for about a month in early spring. It can get a bit straggly, especially in a garden like mine that has high walls all round so it has to stretch upwards towards the light. But for sheer lasting colour, there's not much to beat it!

There are even a few of the big white Daisies left over from the summer. They look decidedly battered by the gales and sleety rain but it's good to see them even so. 

I read somewhere that their unopened buds can be pickled and eaten as capers – though I don’t recommend trying it without a proper recipe!





My unused path to the garage is covered in fallen apples, ready for the blackbirds who appreciate them when the weather turns really cold, even managing to find them through substantial layers of snow!

I don't know what kind of apples they are as they were planted by the previous owner but they're not particularly nice; so I'm happy to leave most of them for the birds.

Bulbs are beginning to push up through the earth – what energy that must take when the ground is so cold and hard! – a reminder that winter will eventually give way to spring. 

But as yet there are no snowdrops flowering. And that doesn’t surprise me – I always think of snowdrops as a February flower, followed by other bulbs, such as daffodils, from March onwards.

The poets seem to be in agreement that snowdrops put in their appearance in February. Alfred, Lord Tennyson calls them, ‘February Fair-maid’ and here’s another poetic reference, by Hartley Coleridge, that seems to suggest that February is the time when:

‘One month is past, another is begun,

Since merry bells rung out the dying year . . .

. . . The virgin snowdrop like a lambent fire,

Pierces the cold earth with its green-streaked spire.’

Another name for the Snowdrop is ‘Candlemas Bells’, Candlemas being on February 2nd and you can read more about this plucky little flower here. 

Bank of River Monnow, Allt yr Ynys: Poster/Print  
 

You may need to click on this print to see the snowdrops, just tiny flecks of white in the grass, and I know I painted this riverbank landscape from a photo that I took in February. So that settles it, snowdrops bloom in February.

But no, somewhere someone has decided that they bloom in January!

I had a bit of a shock, a couple of Februaries ago, when I started to think about making a ‘snowdrop’ design, based on a screenprint I'd made years ago, for my daughter’s birthday on February 17th. I knew that there were ‘Birth Month Flowers’ – I’d seen the categories on Greeting Card Universe - and assumed that Snowdrops would feature in February. I used the internet to look up the various birth month flowers and to my amazement found that the snowdrop is the flower assigned to January! 

So, if you’re stuck for an original birthday card for someone born in January, this might fit the bill - 

Snowdrops January Birthday Card
 

On the other hand,

 if you are just looking for cards with snowdrops, 

you'll find a whole bunch of them

HERE

Snowdrops February Birthday Card  
   

Finding Art on your Doorstep

Doodled beginnings of an illustration of the Emerson quote

“Art is not to be found by touring to Egypt, China or Peru; if you cannot find it at your own door, you will never find it.” Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Some twelve years ago I decided to see how I got on with trying to sell my pastel paintings, in effect ‘coming out’ as an artist. 

When I told a friend about this, her immediate, excited reply was to tell me how lucky I was because this would mean that I could go to Venice. Although Venice is one of the few places I would love to spend some time, I was totally at a loss to see the connection between trying to make a living from my art and going to Venice. 

I still am – and I was delighted to come across Emerson’s quote because it expresses my own approach to art. I don’t believe that we need to travel to find inspiration; for me at least, inspiration can strike at any moment, no matter where I am or how familiar or apparently 'ordinary' my surroundings.

I might suddenly notice the play of the light on the lace curtains in my bedroom –

- or, probably more often, something outdoors, in my local area or especially in my little garden, simply begs me to paint it or to make it the basis of a pattern or greeting card design:

Lipstick Pink Roses

Periwinkles

Mother's Day Card - 'Tulips'
   

Tulips in the park I cross each time I go shopping

So, over the coming months, I plan to introduce you to the ‘art’ that I've found ‘at my own door’ – or perhaps just a little bit further afield - beginning, tomorrow, with some Roses at Christmas:

PS By trial and error, I've learnt a valuable tip today! Next time I attempt to illustrate a quotation, I'll definitely make things much easier for myself if I put the text in place first and illustrate around it!

.......

Click

HERE

for some of the

Gifts and Greetings for Gardeners

that I've designed

From Greeting Cards to Repeating Patterns . . .

Mock Orange and Weigelia Bone China Coffee Mug, Bone China Mugs by helikettle
 

A few days ago, a customer ordered three of the coffee mugs in my Zazzle store. I was over the moon!

I didn’t make a huge amount of money from the sale and it was just one sale among many at this time of year. But it meant an awful lot to me because the three mugs were ones I had created with my repeating floral patterns earlier this year.

So the sale came as a kind of affirmation that I’m on the right track in shifting my main focus away from greeting cards towards pattern making. And as well as that, my own reaction showed me that the bold floral patterns are my first love – which is probably a helpful pointer in determining my ‘signature style’.

Over the course of the past ten years, I’ve gone from Fine Art – my pastel paintings – to greeting cards – to repeating pattern design and I feel I have finally homed in on what I love to create the most.

Wallflowers Birthday Card by helikettle

I do enjoy designing greeting cards but I absolutely love creating patterns! I find it quite addictive – I just wish my technical knowledge could keep up with my enthusiasm!

One of the things I find difficult about creating greeting cards is that I really dislike cards with verse inside, particularly if it is ‘sentimental’. And unfortunately it seems that there are many customers for whom the ‘verse’ is just as important as the artwork.

 

Sunflowers Birthday Card by helikettle
online at Zazzle.

As I wrote in an earlier blog post, I prefer to let the design do the talking, conveying the sentiments more subtly through the image. And while that suits plenty of people, it also excludes many potential customers for my cards.

To my great relief, there is no ‘verse’ to worry about in Pattern Design! It’s simply a case of putting together shapes, lines and colours in a pleasing way . . .

 

Pretty Scarlet and Yellow Nasturtiums Jumbo Mug by helikettle
 

. . . or is it?

Many years ago, when I first discovered William Morris and the Arts & Crafts Movement, I read something to the effect that a pattern should always evoke a feeling, recreate an atmosphere, transport the beholder to a place they would like to be. I have searched the internet in vain, trying to find the exact quote. But the gist of it has always stayed with me.

So, in a way, a pattern carries just as much of a message as a greeting card. It just does it in a much more subtle, sometimes almost subliminal, way.

But there’s nothing very subtle about flowers, which I must admit form the basis of most of my designs to date. Most of us love gardens and flowers and in the case of a city flat-dweller, a floral blind or coffee mug may be the nearest they get to a garden on a day-to-day basis. And that provides me with the motivation to keep on working – or, more accurately, playing – with the constantly inspiring ‘source-book’ that Mother Nature provides!

Pretty Spring Primroses Bone China Coffee Mug, Porcelain Mug by helikettle

What feelings do floral patterns (not necessarily mine!) evoke in you?