Primroses and Violets for a February Birthday

Finding a different birthday card for a friend or relative, year after year, can be a challenge, especially if we're looking for something that will be special to that person.

I've just been ordering birthday cards for my friends and trying to remember which ones I sent them last year! 

Of course it helps that so many of the cards we can buy online can be personalized. It's not difficult to do and yet it can make a big difference because the recipient will know that we didn't just rush out to the nearest store and pick up the first card we found!

A 'photo card' is another option - slightly more complicated to create but not too daunting, especially once you've done it a few times.

And here's another idea - take advantage of the 'Birth Month Flowers'! Each month has at least one well-known flower designated to it. You can read about them on this website. Some of the suggested flowers seem completely out of season for me, here in the UK.

But both of the February Birth Month Flowers, the Violet and the Primrose, are very familiar to me and relate to the right time of year - more or less!

I have plenty of wild violets in my front garden! When I first moved into my house, I tried to get rid of them to make room for the flowers I wanted to plant. But because a quite rapidly growing Magnolia Tree spreads its roots throughout the garden, it was a losing battle. So I gave up and allowed my front garden to become a 'woodland' area with the only plants that enjoy the shade and the poor soil - mainly bulbs, lilies of the valley and the violets! The lilies of the valley are gradually spreading from one side and the violets from the other and they almost meet in the middle and I'm wondering which will win when they eventually meet!

Here's a webpage about 'How to Grow Wild Violets'  - not that mine have needed any help from me; they manage pretty well all by themselves. But I didn't know that they are edible until I read this article.

 

As I wrote in this earlier blog post, these little Wild Violets don't add a lot of colour to a garden, especially where they are often almost hidden amongst the fallen leaves. It was only on closer inspection for the purposes of painting them, that I 'got to know them' and began to appreciate them. They certainly live up to their description of 'Shrinking Violets', another of my earlier blog posts!

A Birthday Card or Gift with a 'Sweet Violets' pattern would certainly be special, especially as many of the cards and gifts in my 'Sweet Violets' collection are ready for you to personalize! So go ahead and choose from dozens of 'Sweet Violets' gifts and make it even more personal with your own customization. There's even a choice of 'Sweet Violets' wrapping papers, tissue giftwrap and gift bags to add the finishing touch - and don't forget that if you see a design you'd like on a different product, you can contact me through my store and I'll create what you need, at no extra charge, usually well within a couple of days.

Just click on the image below to see the full collection -

Sweet Violets February Birthday&tc=bl  

February does seem a little early to be seeing the other February Birth Month Flower - the Primrose. I associate them with springtime, but here in the UK they are usually at their best around Easter Time.

Here's my earlier blogpost about how I used to enjoy going out to the woods to pick them as a child. There is some confusion about whether we are allowed to pick wild flowers - understandably because some are becoming rare in the wild now. But this article from the Wild Flower Society - Wild Flowers and the Law - clarifies the situation and, although the wholesale digging up of wild flower plants certainly doesn't help our countryside to flourish, it's fine to pick a posy of primroses, just as it was when I was a child.

The 'Primroses' image I've used to make the repeating pattern below began as a print I made in a screenprinting class almost 30 years ago! I was living in the centre of Norwich at the time, with not many opportunities to get out into the woodland to see the little pale yellow primroses growing in the wild. But I did - and still do! - often buy the larger cultivated primroses in a variety of bold colours to brighten up my front porch in winter. I've even grown them from seed in the past, which works out a lot cheaper! Sometimes you can plant these cultivated primroses out in the garden once they've finished flowering and if they thrive there, they provide a bright spot when there's very little colour around in the gardens.

And it was from a group like these that I drew my 'Primroses' motifs for the screen print and luckily I kept the original drawing so I was able to paint them in gouache to make the repeating patterns that have become popular!

Here are just a few ideas to make someone with a February Birthday feel really special! The primrose is one of the earliest flowers to bloom but you may not know that it happens to be one of the February Birth Month Flowers. So why not celebrate a February Birthday with a special 'Primroses' Birthday Card and a gift with this pretty Primrose pattern? There's also a range of 'Primroses' gift-wrapping papers, gift bags and even matching gift tags! And you'll find an even greater selection of 'Primroses' cards and gifts if you visit the 'Painterly Florals' section of my Posh & Painterly Zazzle store.

Just click on the image below to see the full collection -

Primroses for a February Birthday  

So, whether you choose Violets or Primroses you can be sure that the Birthday Girl, whatever her age, will appreciate your Birthday Card and Gift choice!

Primroses Colour Palette for Springtime

What colour comes to mind when you hear the word 'primrose'?

I'm sure most of us associate primroses with the colour yellow - the particularly delicate, pale yellow of the wild primroses of springtime. I remember, as a child, travelling on the old steam trains in the Isle of Wight, you could look out of the window and see a 'carpet' of pale yellow! 

The wild primroses almost completely covered the grassy banks of the cuttings we passed through just before we went into a tunnel. Anywhere else, they would have been picked or even dug up for someone's garden. But it was probably too dangerous for anyone to venture down the steep slopes of the railway cuttings to pick them. So they were left in peace, to grow and multiply - a lovely sight in spring!

But cultivated primroses come in a wide range of colours!

Years ago I grew them from seed. But nowadays my lack of wide enough window sills for the seedlings, sends me off to the supermarket to buy the plants. (That's my excuse, anyway!)

I particularly like the pink-ish orange ones  - 

Sometimes I can't get enough of them all the same colour for the shelf in my front porch, so then I go for as many different colours as I can:

To me the different coloured flowers look fine - splendidly bright and cheerful! 

But when you look at all the colours together, I can't help feeling that there are too many colours, that some need to be eliminated to make a cohesive colour scheme.

So from this group of eight colours, we could pick out lots of different schemes.

I have chosen 2, 3, 4 and 6 for this traditional Islamic pattern:

But there are lots of other possibilities!

Which four would you choose?

You can save this pattern tile and experiment with it if you wish -

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).

Surfacing Pattern Designers 'Spring' Showcase -

This month my fellow graduates of the Art & Business of Surface Pattern Design course have worked on patterns for spring.

Once again, I'm struck by the variety of interpretations, though the pastels we associate with the springtime do seem to link them. Here they are in alphabetical order of first name:

Andrea Rincon

Anchobee Designs

www.anchobee.com

Papalote

Carol Robinson

Daisies

Chloe Wood

www.chloe-wood.co.uk

Bunnies

Daniela Butonoi

http://ohsocreative.blogspot.com/

Spring is here!

Jan Shepherd

https://www.facebook.com/thepatternlab 

Spring

Judy Adamson

http://www.zazzle.com/helikettle*

White Rabbits and Primroses

Julie Ansbro

Sky Blue Spring

Laura Escalante Diseno

https://www.facebook.com/lauraescalantediseno

Paper Flower Garland

Lisa Deighan

Spring Chicken

Liz Minton

http://www.lizminton.com

Spring

Mel Pope

Spring has Sprung

Mi Jung Lee

http://www.mijungdesign.com/

Tulips

Natacha Devaud

www.theLazyGiraffe.com

Big Spring Flower

Trina Esquivelzeta

http://surfacehug.com/

Spring

A big 
THANK YOU
 to all the artists who have contributed to this post!

Next month's themes are 'Vikings' and/or 'Pantone's Poppy Red'
(Low Res images to me by Sunday, May 5th, if possible,
but I'll do my best to accommodate any 'stragglers')

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?

Old-Fashioned Florals and Digital Designs

 I've been happily switching from one to the other - and back again! - this week!

The primroses design from last week turned out to be very versatile and I used it to create about 60 products, which you can see here – and more to come later.

Here are just a couple to show how different the design looks when expanded to different sizes. I really enjoy the 'playing around' aspect to creating patterns and using them on different products!

Spring Primroses Customizable Gardening Notebook

Spring Flowers Pitcher or Jug, Primroses

But in between times, I’ve been doing something entirely different, abandoning my paintbrushes and paper for the ‘effects’ button in my photo-editing program! I've been having great fun playing with some of my previously handpainted or screenprinted designs to make new abstract patterns.
 
It felt a bit like ‘cheating’ but in fact it wasn’t particularly quick or easy; some designs worked better than others and they all took a fair amount of 'trial and error'.

The addictive nature of playing with images and not having to worry about making mistakes, or wasting expensive paper, meant that I actually spent much longer than I intended.  But it wasn't time wasted - I won a Today’s Best Award on Zazzle for this iPhone case:

 

Flame, Midnight, Green, Abstract iPhone 4/4S

I haven’t abandoned my traditional tools of the trade, though, and I made a start on a Lilies-of-the-Valley May Birthday Card, part of my series of Birth Month Flower  Birthday Cards. But it wasn't all plain sailing!

One of my favourite decorating styles is Art Nouveau and I also love painting flowers. And since the Art Nouveau style has its roots in plant and flower forms, you would think that I could easily paint my lilies in that style, inspired by my lovely book of Verneuil’s Art Nouveau Floral Designs. But strangely, I found it quite challenging. I found the very formal, heavily stylised approach to flowers decidedly stiff and unnatural to me. (And, if I'm honest, probably the need to draw and paint neatly went against the grain!) But I pressed on and this is where I've got to so far –

I still need to tidy up the leaves, add the caption and choose a background colour, for which I will use the paint bucket in my photo-editing program to ensure that it’s completely even, in case I can use this design as a repeating pattern as well as a greeting card. On my laptop, this background looks like beige, quite an authentic colour for Edwardian decorations. But I emailed it to a friend and she thought it was ‘mustard’ – one of the difficulties of viewing images online!

I hope to have made some progress by my next post . . . if I haven’t completely succumbed to the addiction of generating designs digitally!

.

Nurses, Nests and more Spring Flowers

This is the collage greeting card I made for the hospital staff at Ysbyty Ystrad Fawr, where everyone seemed to go out of their way to make me feel comfortable in what could hardly be called the most comfortable of situations!

And - spot the difference! -  I made a customizable version to upload so that customers can write the appropriate text on the ‘clipboard’ at the foot of the bed.

Customizable Thank You Card for Hospital Staff by helikettle

Once the card was winging its way to The Valleys – the brand new hospital is a replacement for the old Miners’ Hospital – I made a start on a new repeating pattern to use for creating products on Zazzle.

I had really intended to make a start on some less flowery, more masculine designs. But with blue skies, very warm sunshine and temperatures in the upper teens, it seemed as if -

'The Spring is sprung

The grass is riz

I wonder where the boidies is . . .'

Well, I know where one of the ‘boidies’ is! It’s nesting on top of the little plastic greenhouse just outside the French doors of my dining room where I work!

I’ve noticed birds, sparrows and blackbirds mostly, getting in under the honeysuckle, finding some sort of food in amongst the leaves that drop onto the roof and stay there, making it sag a little, unless I get around to clearing it out.

But one morning, as I was working as usual, I heard a tremendous flapping of wings against the plastic. I went out to investigate, thinking that a bird must be trapped and unable to take off from the slippery, plastic surface.

And there was Mother Blackbird, peeping out at me and not looking particularly 'stuck'. But I thought maybe her apparently composed demeanour was a cover for sheer terror; so I went off in search of something to lift the roof gently from inside, to help her on her way. But as I did so, out she flew, no problem at all!

But then I've been hearing more flapping, at intervals throughout the days – as my bedroom is directly above the dining room, the beating of wings against the plastic woke me up a couple of mornings. Sometimes it sounds like a helicopter! And I took this photo through my kitchen window. Other birds fly away as soon as I get anywhere near a window with my camera but the blackbirds here seem to be remarkably tame - as well as singing more beautifully than in England, Wales being known as The Land of Song, of course!

When she had flown away, I was able to see the beginnings of a nest! I have no idea what all the flapping is about. It appears to be part of the nest-building process. Maybe somebody who knows about birds can tell me?

Last time I was able to take a peek, the nest had grown considerably and seemed to be dripping with mud – not very inviting, I should think!

So this long diversion has been by way of explaining why I just had to embark upon yet another floral design! 

This time it is Spring Flowers, primroses, prompted by another scruffy scrap of tracing paper I found in the treasure trove that is my Screenprinting Designs Folder from more than 20 years ago and the signs of spring that are 'bursting out all over' in my garden!

Here are four 'blocks' of the handpainted design, put together on my computer and then 'tidied up' so that the 'join' isn't too apparent -

Watch out for these primroses as they gradually appear on everything from cushions (pillows) and tea pots to phonecases and iPad sleeves, during the course of this week!

.