Why choose my fabrics?

The design above is called ‘What became of the Monkey?’ 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. (You can read about the painting of the bluebells below in the blog-post here.)

For the ‘Summer Butterflies on orange’, 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.

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

‘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.

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

Only two fabrics 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). Although this is an American company, they have a base in Berlin, so if you live in UK or on the continent of Europe, your order is posted from Germany – thereby saving air-miles. Since climate-change is such a key issue in the world today, these are important considerations.

Thank you for reading my blog. If you would like to see a post each week in your inbox hit the ‘Follow this blog’ button. Next week, I will be writing my monthly newsletter, complete with colour and design inspiration, tips, news and a project – if you would like one you need to fill in the popup form!

For anything else, do get in touch. I would love to hear from you!

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