Why choose my fabrics?

The design above is called ‘What became of the Monkey?’ (available here) Like most of my fabric designs it began with watercolour paintings of the animals, trees and flowers. Many of my designs take the natural world as inspiration and I often draw from life first., for example when I created the Butterflies and Bluebells fabric seen below. The fabric is available here

(You can read about the painting of the bluebells below in the blog-post here.)

For the ‘Summer Butterflies on orange’ seen below, available here, I took photos of the butterflies landing on the lavender bush in my garden and then painted from the photograph – the butterflies don’t stay still for long enough to sketch them in colour!

The skirt I made from this fabric is one of my favourite summer garments:

This skirt was made with a woven cotton. Another skirt, which I can wear all year round, is in a heavier weight denim fabric. The design is called ‘The work of my hands’ and it was based on a drawing of what was lying on my worktable at the time.

This is the fabric design, available here

The ‘Bees and Bumblebees’ fabric shown in the top below was painted from photographs of the insects and observational drawings of flowers.

This is the fabric, available here

‘Midnight Ferns’ was drawn from ferns growing along the network of footpaths where I live, then coloured before being arranged into a design and placed in repeat. This is what it would look like on a duvet cover.

This is the fabric design, available here

There are over a hundred different hand-crafted designs available. You can see all the rest of them here. These are fabrics that you won’t see anywhere else.

Only two fabrics bases are mentioned above, but you can choose any of twenty plus bases including swimsuit lycra, velvet, chiffon, stretch cotton jersey and more.  You can also pick any design to be printed on wallpaper (traditional or peel-and-stick). The company I use, Spoonflower, also has a range of textile items (like the duvet cover shown above) which you can have printed with your choice of design.

However, one of the reasons you might choose my fabric is for environmental concerns. Typically, the textile industry has a pretty negative effect on the environment, for example the use of toxic inks and cheap synthetic materials. It also uses a lot of water in many of the production methods. Spoonflower has worked hard to address this issue: they use a very small amount of water in the process, employ non-toxic dyes and use good quality fabrics (most from natural fibres and some from organically-grown sources).

Finally, here is ‘Creeping Cinquefoil’, a wild-flower design, available here

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Quilt patterns are here, Fabrics are here, Classes are here.