September Work in Progress

September Anemones and Montbretia in my garden

August was wet and decidedly chilly and most of September has been wet and even chillier! But finally, we have the warm, sunny days we expect in September and no sign of rain all week - though the nights have become decidedly autumnal.

At last my little tomatoes are ripening and the flavour is worth the wait!

And finally, too, Zazzle have agreed to refund the tax that they withheld incorrectly, so life is gradually returning to something approaching normal. 

However, in the meantime, Zazzle have completely reorganised their website and this has involved us all in mountains of extra work, getting our online Zazzle stores up to scratch and simply finding our way around the site, when I really wanted to get back to some designing.

But I have managed to get my new 'Little Mice' Christmas Card finished and uploaded to Greeting Card Universe and Zazzle. 

Here's the custom front version -

(It's also available with the greeting in Non-English languages)

What with the Rugby World Cup and spring bulbs and home-grown wallflowers urgently needing planting, time has been at a premium. 

So I decided to use the Periwinkle design I made a while back to create a new collection on Zazzle. I still need to find time to work on a border pattern and phone case templates for personalization, but here are the fifteen coordinating patterns I've worked with so far - on the new all-over print Tank Tops that Zazzle have recently introduced.

Click on the image to see them all -

Periwinkles Tank Tops
by helikettle

But what about the new pattern I wanted to make from the photos of the pretty little Phlox plants in the photo I shared last month? 

I have actually made a start!

I find it really helpful to make a lot of little drawings of plants and flowers I'm going to use for a pattern - I need to draw them over and over to get to know them. It feels almost like getting to know a new friend! And I almost always find that drawing throws up some surprises. At first glance, the petals of all these pretty little flowers appear to be the same shape.

But once I start to draw them, I realise there are several different petal shapes.

As the plants have matured, more of them have started to 'trail'. And the curve of their stems has made me wonder whether they would be a suitable candidate for an 'ogee' pattern, like the periwinkle pattern that I used to illustrate how to make an Ogee Repeat pattern. Not sure yet and I'll probably try out several arrangements before I decide.

Planting out the 160+ seedlings in the spring was a bit of a chore but they've been worth it. They've flowered for months and they are still going strong when most of the other flowers in my garden are well past their best. 

And now the Marigolds and Godetias I sowed in pots are really coming into their own now and brightening up the shadowy corners of the garden.

Pot Marigold and Godetias

Not a very good photo - a quick snap with my phone camera - but perfectly adequate as inspiration for a future pattern. I love the combination of pink and orange and I made a pattern of Pot Marigolds and bright pink Busy Lizzies a couple of years ago.

The humble Marigold is one of the birth month flowers for October so I've put together a collection of October Birthday Cards and Gifts -

October Birthday Marigolds
by helikettle

With so much going on these past few months, a lot of things have had to be put on hold! 

My decorating ground to a halt in July, I'm having to tie my hair back because I haven't had time to get it cut and as for cleaning the house, it's had to be reduced to the bare essentials! But it's a question of priorities and if there has to be a choice, housework will always give way to making patterns!

And anyway, I don't know whether this is true or not but I choose to believe it is!

Fun Dry Erase Board with Quote: 'Dull Women . . .' by helikettle

(Also available as a Fridge Magnet and a T-Shirt)

Late Summer - a Pattern of Pink Anemones

Here I am in the middle of Week 2 of the ‘Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design’ online course.  

And I'm pleased to say that, even though the course, so far, has mostly covered what is, for me, ‘old ground’, I am managing to learn some very useful things from it!

Last week’s theme was ‘Finding Inspiration’ and for me ‘finding inspiration’ has never been a problem - quite the opposite. This week’s theme is ‘Sketchbooks’ and, putting the two together, I have sketchbooks full of inspiration and ideas going right back to my schooldays – ie more than half a century!

What I’m really looking for is the technical knowledge to make these ideas into surface pattern designs without needing to resort to the rather cumbersome, and often inaccurate, tracing paper and scissors method that I’ve been using so far.

And towards the end of last week, I found that a couple of the exercises we were set were really useful and they have already begun to provide me with some answers!

We were asked to take a pattern we liked and break it down into its component parts or motifs. I took a William Morris design of which I’m very fond and was surprised to find how many different motifs it contained! In particular, I hadn’t noticed the little squiggly grey leaves in the background (No.1) and ever since, I've been noticing less obtrusive, background patterns all over the place, where I’d never have noticed them before! 


Putting that together with some instructions on how to use Photoshop to ‘layer’ a design and, helped to take that one step further with a YouTube tutorial I hunted down, I was able to use sketches from some photos I’d taken in Week 1 to create this ‘layered’ pattern.

Here's the background 'leaves' layer:

 The page of sketches -

And here it is all put together -

I coloured it digitally to save time as I wasn’t at all sure that my experiment would work. So the colours have come out far brighter than I would have liked. (But then I don't know how it looks on anyone else's screen - to me it looks garish!)

When, this week, we were asked to use all sorts of alternative painting tools – such as sticks – to help us ‘loosen up’, I opted for crumpled up newspaper, a piece of old towelling and the rough side of a synthetic sponge to create some paint effects.

 

These, believe it or not, may well be good, useful material for pattern backgrounds of the future. 

In fact I've already used the blue one to create a new version of the Anemone pattern. I also toned the colour down a bit in Photoshop and used it to create a new Messenger Bag on Zazzle –

Dark Blue Messenger Bag with Pink Anemones by helikettle

By the way, I don’t much like Anemones. They don’t have a fragrance and I think they can look a bit mournful, maybe because they flower as summer draws to a close. So I’m really looking forward to moving on to create a pattern from a sketch or photo that I’m really enthusiastic about! 

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