Progress

Good morning!

I generally use Friday on my blog to talk about my own work and progress but this week it's on a Monday! I do have a new feature in the pipeline for Monday posts which is coming soon but in the meantime I hope you will enjoy reading this post. It's a little bit of a ramble but I hope that other new designers might find it helpful/interesting.

I had some lovely news at the end of the week - I'm starting a course to help me make my blog look prettier! I'm so pleased. I love to blog but I don't know a thing about templates, layouts etc. The course is called Your Darling Blog and you can find out more about here. I will let you know how I get on with it... And of course, if you're a regular reader, you will see the results at some point!

It's been an incredibly productive week - I finally finished my Rubiya collection and I am so pleased with it. I think it is my favourite collection I've made so far. The idea for it was sparked by entering the January Tigerprint competition for Everyday Surface Pattern. One of the suggested motifs for the competition was butterflies. Here's the original print that I designed for the competition.  

Since then, feeling it was a bit too pink, I played with the palette and I also made into a multi directional print - you can see it here, top left in the collection, below. I felt the one directional layout was too formal looking and limited its use. Studying this pattern and the palette I felt I wanted to take the collection in an Indian textile inspired direction and that led me to think about one of my favourite shops... Monsoon. So I set about creating a collection with their 3-13 girls' range of clothing in mind. I thought about how the patterns could be applied as trims as well as all over patterns. I named the collection Rubiya - a Hindi girl's name meaning Spring.

I'm still working on my Midsummer collection - I've made some changes to the main print and finally done my teatime pattern justice by giving it some details. 

I was really pleased with my original outline drawings but as it stood in all its minimalist glory, it just didn't fit the collection and looked a bit too bare. I'm so happy with it now.  As with Rubiya, I thought about where I envisaged seeing these patterns and I thought about outdoor dining - melamine crockery. tablecloths, picnic hampers etc and it helped me to move beyond simply creating a main pattern and a couple of co-ordinates. I learned this strategy from Steven Pressfield's book Do The Work where he emphasises the importance of the theme in a body of work. Whenever I'm working on a collection in progress I take a moment to remind myself what the theme is. With this is mind, the work just feels better... if that makes sense!

In other news I was really pleased to be shortlisted for the February Tigerprint competition, The Colour of Love.  I submitted five patterns and had two shortlisted which I am so pleased about. 

I'm aiming to enter every Tigerprint competition this year - obviously it would be great to win but it's just a great way of generating new work and I'd recommend it. It's helped me create two collections so far this year.

So, that's all for now. This week, I am looking forward to heading home which is always a thrill. I'm planning on getting out and about with my camera to collect some images for creating my own set of brushes, but more about that soon! 

Have a lovely week,
Frankie x