Here in the North-East of England, the weather has been chilly and there has been a flurry of snow today. However, this post is about a pattern I have been working on recently, which is dear to my heart. It’s all about sunny summer days. My husband is from Cornwall and our family used to spend summer holidays visiting his mother and grandmother in the village he grew up in. Just along the coast from the village is a wonderful long stretch of beach. If you can scramble down the cliff path, you can spend the whole day there with a picnic, building sandcastles, playing ball games and swimming or surfing in the sea. I painted a watercolour picture and then designed a fabric from it called ‘Cornish Sandcastles’ evoking those times. (You can find it here.)
At the top of the cliff, there was sometimes an ice-cream van selling Cornish ice-cream (vanilla flavour and completely delicious). I’ve imagined a wider range of flavours for this fabric design ‘Ice Cream, Please’ (you can find it here).
On a fine day, you can see the nearby lighthouse from the beach, and I drew lighthouses at night with their windows shedding light, as well as the big lighthouse light shining out. You can find this fabric here.
Some candy floss fabric and a few bouncing balls found their way in to the collection too. I’ve put these fabrics into a quilt, which was first shown at the Festival of Quilts 2016. It’s taken a long time to get the pattern written, but here it is at last:
The quilt pattern is in my Etsy shop here, and the fabrics are all available from Spoonflower. Click on the links in the website to find them.
There is a small nod to the North-East in these fabrics, though. Next to the deck-chair striped fabric is one called ‘Farne Islands’ (find it here), celebrating the small islands off the Northumberland coast, where you can see puffins and where there are lighthouses (as in Cornwall) to warn the ships away from the rocky shore.
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Thank you for reading my blog. Quilt patterns are here, Fabrics are here, Classes are here