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  
   

Snowdrops and Victorian Bathrooms!

In the end I couldn’t think of any way to avoid repainting the background to last week’s snowdrops in a stronger, darker blue.

It wasn’t quite the sunshiny effect I was hoping for and I didn’t enjoy painting carefully in between all those stems and leaves but I think the end result was a big improvement!

 I was able to make it into a variety of cards by adding different coloured borders, as well as the ‘February Birthday’ card for my daughter.

Snowdrops February Birthday Card by helikettle

What I hadn’t realised is that the snowdrop is actually one of the ‘January Birthday’ flowers, along with the carnation. So I made some cards for January birthdays too - and a few others besides! Click here to see all the snowdrop greeting cards.

Having brought myself up to date with cards for upcoming family birthdays, I couldn’t wait to get back to designing some more repeating patterns.

I wanted to do something a little less flowery next, working my way towards some patterns that would be suitable for Messenger Bags for men and boys as well as for women and girls.

Browsing through a book of authentic Victorian stencil designs, I came across a highly embellished ‘fleur de lys’ motif that I thought would make a great repeating pattern that could be viewed either way up if necessary – as in the case of the flap of the messenger bags.

I’ve always had a tendency to ‘re-invent the wheel' so I didn’t use that design in the book, even though it was copyright-free but just took it as inspiration for my own design.

This is how it worked out  - but it may be rather too pale to see, depending on your computer screen.

When my neighbour saw it, he said it looked like a Victorian bathroom – it reminded me of a very old-fashioned Public Convenience, and apparently, that’s what my neighbour really thought but was too polite to say so!

This one shows up a bit more clearly and, with the pencil lines removed, it's starting to look more like wallpaper than bathroom tiling –

Once I’d worked out the pattern and its repeats by going through all the processes that I described a fortnight ago, I painted one ‘block’ in gouache:

The next stage is to place these ‘blocks’ side by side in my photo-editing program and fill in the background colour on the computer to make sure it's even and you can't see the 'joins'.

How will it work out? Will the 'tiles' match up? I’ll let you know next week . . .


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Early Flowers and Late Flowers - Snowdrops and Nasturtiums

Nasturtiums are one of my favourite flowers.

They go on flowering well into the Autumn and as the afternoons grow shorter towards winter, I've often been cheered by their bright glow in the dusk as I look out from my work. So after the trials and tribulations of piecing together my repeating pattern last week, I was all the more determined to bring that experience to an outcome that I'd be pleased with.

And this is it: the tracing from last week's post with colour added!

And here is the Messenger Bag that this was originally designed for:

Scarlet and Yellow Nasturtiums Courier Bag by helikettle

You'll see why I needed a large area of repeating pattern, if you go to my:

 Mugs, Mousepads & More - cases etc

blog

- where you can see the whole of the back of the Messenger Bag, as well as a range of sleeves and planners that complement it.

Of course, as I love creating pretty tea pots, pitchers, mugs etc, the design also found its way onto some of them as well - not forgetting a few greeting cards -

Mugs, Mousepads & More -  teapots etc

Pleased as I was, in the end, with my 'Summer Garden' design, I hoped to move on to something less challenging for my daughter's birthday card.

Her birthday is in February, the month that I always associate with snowdrops. Lord Alfred Tennyson called them 'Fair Maids of February' and, delving into my huge old file of screenprinting designs that I've hoarded since the 1980's, I came across this scruffy little tracing -

This was great news as, although I have crocuses flowering in my garden, there's no sign of the snowdrops from previous years and I read somewhere that they don't like heavy clay soil - which is precisely what ours is!

So, on Friday afternoon, I scanned the tracing, enlarged it, printed it out and traced it again, ready for the lightbox. I was undecided about the best way to go about painting the blue background, which I could see would be interminably fiddly with all those stalks and petals to paint round - especially as I'm not a person who enjoys working meticulously, especially in paint!

One option would be to make a collage, but again, those stems would mean a lot of tricky cutting! Another way would be to use masking fluid, but I only use that when nothing else will do because it ruins brushes and is sometime difficult to get accurate enough. Then I happened upon a solution in Alison Kolesar's blog:  Jumping in Puddles, where she suggests painting the whole background wash in transparent watercolours and then using gouache to paint the light colours - in my case the flowers.

So that's what I did and I was very happy with my beautiful, sunshiny sky-blue background - until I scanned it and 'Technology' let me down again! As I found with some of my seaside collages, my scanner seems to be unhappy with light blues and greens in close proximity and makes as real mess of them. 

No amount of adjusting helped to put this right:

So I'll leave you to wonder if and how I'll manage to retrieve this dismal attempt at a birthday card for my daughter . . . watch this space!

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