I’ve spent the past couple of days working on a new design…a botanical!

For the past several weeks, I head out in the morning, sit by the pond, and receive kisses from the dogs. Every morning, my eye is caught by a nearby asparagus fern…not so much the fern itself but by its flower buds. The flowers (and their buds) are completely unremarkable but, at the specific time of the morning I’m out sitting by the pond, the light catches them in such a way as to make them utterly fascinating to me.

I’m not particularly good at sketching but decided to try and capture the ferns and blossoms any way. Once that was done, it was off to the computer to fire up Illustrator and try to create something that at least approximated those ferns.

And this is what I came up with:

From there, I’ve developed a border pattern:

and a “toile” type repeat:

It’s interesting how the eye can fool the brain, isn’t it? The Spawn was sure the toile repeat was a dogwood flower (until I showed her the original).

Next week, I’ll be trying my hand at block printing this design onto fabric (probably tea towels printed with the border pattern to start). If they turn out, they’ll be available in the shop. If they don’t, they’ll be in my kitchen…

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 3:28 pm and is filed under my designs. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.