Laura Ashley and Pretty Floral Home Accessories

I've just finished reading 'A Life by Design', a biography of Laura Ashley, written soon after her tragic fall, from which she never regained consciousness, at the age of 60. 

I read the book when it was first published in 1990 but at that time, I read it from the point of view of a Laura Ashley Home Furnishings customer, having used gallons of Laura Ashley Navy paint in the refurbishment of my Edwardian home in Norwich. I even painted the outside of the re-sprayed, genuine ball-and-claw-footed bath that we found in an outhouse when we bought the house. 

And here's the 'Laura Ashley Navy' front door of my next (Victorian) home!

But this time around, I read it as a designer, more specifically a surface pattern designer with a strong interest in designing textiles for fashion and home furnishings.

And it was as if I was reading it for the first time. So many things jumped out at me that hadn't really interested me back in 1990.

First and foremost, I was quite shocked to read that Laura Ashley wasn't exactly a designer! Neither she nor her husband, Bernard, could draw and of course, they started their business well before the days of computers!

The legendary little 'sweater scarves', table mats and tea-towels that they printed on the kitchen table of their Pimlico flat in the 1950s, ('fixing' the colour by baking in the oven, where some fell down and burnt!), these small items had bold geometric shapes a patterns, which was all that their rather primitive printing equipment could cope with.

But they sold well, because Audrey Hepburn had popularised the 'sweater scarf' in the popular film, 'Roman Holiday'.

However, Laura was already intensely interested in tiny floral printed and striped fabrics. She had worked as a secretary at the National Federation of Women's Institutes and when she visited one of their handicraft exhibitions at the Victoria & Albert museum, she realised that women were capable of working at home to produce textiles that were of museum standard. She was particularly struck by the patchwork and scoured the shops to find suitable fabrics so that she could make her own while awaiting the birth of her first child.

As we moved through the 1960s, fashion trends changed dramatically. Out went the full skirts with hooped petticoats and in came the mini-skirt and sharply cut dresses and coats with geometric patterns. In case that was before your time, you can get a flavour of the era HERE 

And it was in 1968 that Laura Ashley - or rather, Bernard, her husband, opened their first dress shop, selling dresses that were almost shockingly different! Bernard oversaw the printing, dealt with the marketing and business side of things - so, given that she was not a designer, in the usual sense of the word, what part did Laura play?

Well, she did supervise the making up of the garments in Wales and researched patterns to use, spending a great deal of time in libraries and museums, pouring over antique pattern books and so on. 

But Laura's essential contribution to what was becoming a successful business venture, was her 'unique idea'!

Coming from a Welsh non-conformist background, Laura Ashley had her 'puritanical' side. But she was also a romantic, she loved the countryside and nature and she was more drawn to the fashions of bye-gone ages than to the current trends. She may have had some rather naive ideas about how a working farmer's wife would have dressed in days of yore, but her dresses were based on earlier styles and the fabric patterns were, at least to begin with, mainly historical.

She firmly believed that women were more interested in dressing to look beautiful than in following the latest fashions. And she also took the view that the more you cover up - long skirts, long sleeves etc - the more alluring you will be! 

Put those two beliefs together and you have the classic Laura Ashley dress of the late-Sixties and Seventies. 

'Pretty but Prim' would be how I would describe those early dresses that turned the Laura Ashley brand into household name. 

I remember my first visit to a Laura Ashley dress shop, when I was staying with my sister-in-law in Oxford - to me it was heaven on earth! In fact I never bought a Laura Ashley dress because I loved dressmaking and made my own in similar styles. But I do still have a full-length Laura Ashley nightdress, complete with pin tucks, tiny, concealed, pearl buttons, and lace-trimmed high collar and long sleeves. It's somewhat the worse for wear now but somehow I don't want to turn it into a cleaning cloth so it stays at the bottom of my drawer!

Looking back, it seems strange now that the only fashion choices at that time were limited to 'bold geometric' or 'romantic with frills'! Today's fashion trends are far more eclectic so that you could almost believe that 'anything goes'. 

But even so, I think those two main, sharply contrasting, trends are still around.

Alongside the 'funky', 'quirky', sometimes bordering on 'outrageous' fashions, you only need to delve into Pinterest or visit an online store such as Etsy to see that nostalgic, romantic and downright 'pretty' is still as popular as ever.

Of the two design strands, the nostalgic, vintage 'look' is easier to live with in the long-term. Eventually, in the 1980s, Laura Ashley branched out into Home Furnishings. I'm only surprised she left it so long. 

I used Laura Ashley Brick Red wallpaper on the staircase, above the dado rail, in my Victorian home in Hereford. 

And the colour was the perfect backdrop for the pictures I hung on that wall. 

I also still use a Laura Ashley tea-cosy! Like all of her products, the quality is head and shoulders above most others.

Sadly, I've never found a good replacement for my Laura Ashley heavy cotton lace curtains, that looked fabulous, hung over slimline, navy blue Venetian Blinds, in three different homes, from 1987 - 2013, when they finally started to fall apart, as you can see by the hole down near the hem!

Bright, bold and minimalist is exciting, but perhaps more suitable for clothing than for home furnishings, which we expect to last somewhat longer than a dress, bought and worn today, possibly discarded a few months later! That is not to say that the more 'modern' style doesn't look great in an office building or a city apartment.

But for a home, especially a period home, the vintage, 'shabby chic' is much more comfortable to live with, day in day out, for a number of years.

I'm far from suggesting that we decorate and furnish our homes as faithful replicas of times gone by. But our surroundings do affect our mood and some of the more outlandish patterns currently available seem to have an almost 'aggressive' feel to them. Whereas a few 'pretty things' can soften the edges of our daily existence.

So here are a couple of my Home Furnishings Collections - not exactly 'Laura Ashley' but also based on floral designs and patterns -

100+ Floral Coffee Mugs - some ready to personalize:

Click on the image below to see the full Coffee Mug collection -

Floral Coffee Mugs

100+ Floral Pillows or Cushions - arranged by colour:

Click on the image below to see the full Pillow collection -

One Hundred Floral Pillows

And just by the way, a floral mug or throw pillow or cushion, would make a wonderful Mother's Day gift or a birthday present for your mother!

Patchwork - Pretty and Practical!

These remind me of the fabrics I used for my daughter's dresses when she was a toddler!

I’ve just finished making ‘Presentation Boards’ from all the design motifs that arose from the first Module of the Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design course.

I hoped that by putting them all together on a Pinterest Board, some sort of ‘Signature Style’ would immediately jump out at me. Alas, it didn’t – but I can identify two main styles in the patterns I’ve created so far and they're just about as equal in number as they are different from one another!

There’s my bold, bright, colourful style, often based some collage I’ve made.

Another one based on the 'postcard' stripes I made in Week 1!

And then there’s what I’d describe as my ‘Granny Print’ style – pretty mini-prints, ditsy florals, reminiscent of the fabrics I used to make my daughter’s dresses in the late Sixties, obviously unintentionally influenced by Laura Ashley.

At the opposite extreme in terms of boldness, brightness and colourfulness!

Laura Ashley swatches - from the archive

Of course, there were a lot of scraps left over from these sewing sprees. I don’t remember where I got the idea – maybe from a BBC programme about quilting and its power to relieve stress - but I used my leftover snippets to make patchwork in the Seventies.

I made cushions and tea-cosies and an outsizzed pocket on a plain apron. But most of all I made little pram quilts for friends who were just getting around to having their second and third babies!I have some photos of them somewhere, but at the moment they are eluding me. They were not unlike these New Baby Congratulations Cards, except that they had a frill of white broderie anglaise all around the edges and the hexagons were tiny!

         

Later, in the Nineties, when the grandchildren started to arrive, I again got out my patchwork! But this time I made larger cot-quilts that could also double as a play-mat. And I based most of my designs on Islamic patterns and used bright, full chroma colours!

            

These are photos of two of the quilts

Since I started sketching/doodling in the evenings I haven’t had time to make patchwork by hand. The last quilt I made was in the winter of 1997-98, when I had just moved to Hereford. The Victorian terraced house I bought needed a huge amount of drastic ‘refurbishment’ and until the builders had finished, I couldn’t unpack much. So, although the house did have a functioning heating system, it had skirting board radiators and they were behind all my boxes so it wasn’t worth turning the heating on just to heat my boxes!

 

I managed to get at a box containing fabric remnants and I started a full-sized quilt for my bed. As the evenings grew colder, the gradually growing quilt kept me warm as I sewed, and I didn’t need much heating, proving that the art and craft of patchwork and quilting is truly a way to save money, in more ways than one!

This door curtain that I made with the sewing machine more recently, didn’t save me money, apart from hopefully saving on the fuel bills by keeping out some of the draughts!

I bought most of the fabrics rather than using up scraps because I couldn’t find one fabric that had all the colours I wanted for my curtain. It took me much longer to make than I expected and it didn’t keep me warm in the evenings. As for being a stress-reliever, I think it was the opposite – trying to get all the corners to lie flat, using the sewing machine wasn’t easy!

But I’m pleased with the way it solved the problem of combining all the colours I wanted!

Patchwork to the rescue again!

 

Help! I can't find my Signature Style!

It’s hard to believe it’s nearly the end of the first module of the ‘Art and Business of Surface Pattern Design' course!

The five weeks have flown by and soon we'll have a five-week break in which to catch up with things we didn’t have time for, before we start the second module in November.

This week has been all about making new designs and their coordinating patterns and learning how to present them (as above), all with a view to identifying our 'Signature Style' - that 'certain something' that makes our work recognisable as ours and ours alone.

And this is where I feel stuck, in fact very stuck indeed!

I should, by now, be designing my business stationery, all based around my unique Signature Style, but I’m not even beginning to think about doing that while I feel so unclear about how to define my style.

I've had the same problem with my greeting cards, designing in various different styles for different occasions. But one thing I can say is that looking at a lot of patterns in the course of this work, both from other students and from elsewhere on the web, I am a lot more clear than I was about the kind of style that I don’t identify with! Maybe it’s my age, which means that I remember them first time around and didn’t much like them, but I’m not at all enthusiastic about a lot of the ‘Retro’ style that is currently so popular. It simply ‘isn’t me’.

To me a lot of ‘50s patterns seem drab in their colouring and I find the ‘70s geometric shapes quite overpowering. And I’m wondering why ‘Retro’ doesn’t appear to include Laura Ashley’s wonderful late ‘60s/,70s prints - which I really do like and am probably influenced by!.

Found this patchwork of Laura Ashley's '70s  prints on a blog -
 http://ginaferrari.blogspot.co.uk/2010/10/connecting-threads.html

In fact, I’m surprised that, so far, there has been no mention of Laura Ashley on the course. She and William Morris are surely two British ‘giants’ when it comes to ‘pattern’ and I would have thought they would have been worth a mention!

Looking at my home decor, as was suggested as a pointer towards finding our 'signature style', there are plenty of patterns on wallpapers, on fabrics and on china and ornaments that are reminiscent of William Morris and Laura Ashley, even if they weren’t actually designed by them.

So maybe that’s a clue to finding my style.

The design exercises we were given on the course were all demonstrated by Rachael Taylor, the tutor, using a black pen. But, knowing how easy it is to pick up someone else’s style if you use the same medium, I decided early on to carry out the exercises in collage or to use my old watercolour designs. So at least I've avoided that pitfall in the search for 'my style'!

Here's another common thread in my patterns - maybe another clue? - flowers seem to feature in my home decorations as well as in most of the patterns I create. But my collage ones are in a very different style from the watercolours. So that isn't a lot of help!

But I noticed that the patterns on my ‘Presentation Boards’ have some colours in common – the warm, bright orang-y reds, contrasting with the blues and greens.

Another clue, maybe, in the hunt for my elusive 'Signature Style'?

But then I muddied the waters by doing this one!

I quite like it – though I probably wouldn’t want to live with it as part of my decorating scheme!
Wrapping paper, perhaps?

Maybe it’s too soon to know which way my designing will go.

Maybe a clear trend will emerge as I design more and more patterns. But I think seeing someone else’s ‘Signature Style’ may be easier than identifying one’s own.  

So if you can think of any words that seem to you to describe my ‘style’, it would be a big help if you would leave them in the comments - thank you!