Yay for me! I’m going on a Designer Long Weekend.
Sadly this does not mean an island getaway with bathsheets by Jonathan Adler, swinging chairs by Patricia Urquiola and cocktails on tap. It just means that I am desperate to catch up on my freelance illustration and design work and can only do this by switching off my email, closing my store and ignoring my phone.
I’ll be back on Monday. I definitely won’t have a tan.
At long last, my new tea towels are ready to roll, and as I’ve been wanting to start a Supermarket Store for a while, I thought I’d launch the store and this new range of tea towels at the same time. So, here they are, all available in my Supermarket online shop.
This one is called Shadow Glass, available in smoke and in bottle green.
I came up with the design after visiting the Cooper Hewitt museum in New York, where there was an amazing exhibition of glassware curated by Ted Muhling. Photos were not allowed, so I sketched a lot, them made a paper cutout afterwards. Also, I took photos of the shadows cast by Roman glass at the Metropolitan (see below), and both these ideas came together in Shadow Glass.
When Everyone Came to Tea is available in wedgewood grey and china blue.
I’d been dying to do a cutout of tea cups for ages, and had lots of fun doing this on one of my Making Fridays (see cutout below). It took me a while to work out exactly how to put the cutouts together as a design, but I had a brainwave when looking at all our teacups and mugs were piled high after Paul’s birthday tea.
My Leaves design is available in autumn gold and winter grey.
Leaves is such an old cutout of mine – I did it for an exhibition in 2006 (see below) – but I was glad to use it again, as I always liked it.
Visit my Supermarket shop to see more pics of all my new tea towels, as well as a couple of old favourites too.
And don’t worry, my Etsy shop still exists, and I’ll be selling yardage and limited runs of things from there.
I’m seriously regretting having put up that tea towel teaser on my blog last week. It was my typical style of rushing at things in the hopes that they’ll rush back at me joyfully, but this really was a bit mistimed, not to mention misjudged. I mean, I have three new tea towel designs in two colours each, as well as revised versions of Eep! and Borrowed Spoons, and how I thought I’d photograph all ten of these in my spare time (ha!), I can’t imagine.
Actually, the funny thing is, I did shoot them in a flash, but then was so unhappy with my shots that I asked my friend and serious foodie, Nikki Werner, for some styling advice. Nikki is the complete opposite of me. First, she can cook. Second, she considers things from all angles and plans exquisitely before launching into things. She’s also very generous with her time, so while her schedule this week was massively full, she insisted on finding a couple of free minutes to come to my studio and to help me think through how to style my shots. AND she brought a crate of most exquisite props, and cookies too!
So, while I’ve been feeling excruciatingly self-conscious this week about having left last week’s ‘teaser’ hanging with no follow-up, I feel that, having spent so much more time and thought on my product shots this time round, I have learned a great deal: First, I realised that one should plan the launch of a new range better, particularly if one’s time is somewhat stretched already. And secondly, I learned that styling a shot should not be a rushed job. On the contrary, the process should be savoured and enjoyed, especially (if possible) in the company of friends like Nikki.
But just to show I didn’t learn too much, how about ending this week with another couple of teasers!
We spent a most restorative weekend in Montagu, staying at a beautiful riverside B&B. It was all riding bikes, watching birds, reading books, climbing hills, and other non-city type pursuits. Sigh.I’ll have another, please.
I have a new fabric! Made up into cushions! In my shop! It’s called Leaves, and comes in autumn gold and winter grey.
The original idea for this design came from a papercut called Botanical, which I made and sold at the very first DrawingRoom illustration show, all those years ago in 2006. I wonder who bought it?
I think I’ve developed a bit of a girl crush on UK singer Gemma Ray since we saw her playing at a woefully ill-attended gig at the Purple Turtle on Saturday night.
I loved the way that the stage was decorated with flowers, and she wore the cutest vintage dress and shoes, but she didn’t act the least bit cute at all. She just did her thing with stylish reserve, apparently not requiring the approval of the audience at all. Refreshing stuff from a female performer, I have to say, and especially when MTV on the pub TV simultaneously played videos of gyrating near-naked female ‘artists’ throughout.
Evidence of my girl crush abundantly obvious in the fact that I’ve been drawing Gemma Ray instead of doing my taxes today.
Thanks so much to Sarah Johnston – the super-talented designer behind the Marram Studio handprinted textiles – for scanning and sending through this pic of Alan and Mari’s home that’s in the latest ELLE Decoration UK. I’m utterly enthralled by this magazine and it’s been a long-time dream of mine to see something of mine on those hallowed pages.
Sarah lives in the Orkney Islands, which is a really, really far northern Scottish archipelago, where she designs and prints exquisite nature-inspired textiles (like the ones below) under her Marram Studio label. Take a look at Sarah’s Silkscreen & Scribble blog to find out more about this super talented and very kind lady.
I share a studio with two painters, and have to pass through Medina’s space all the time. It may be that her space is so much clearer and plainer than mine, and it may be that her abstract paintings influence the way I look, but I always feel my eyes find so much to see in there. On Friday it was a drop cloth that she left to dry on a chair. So beautiful, and I couldn’t help framing bits of it with my camera.
Although I worked on Monday’s public holiday, it still made the weekend seem longer, so I took it easier than usual on Sunday and got some way closer to finishing my neverending stitching project.
Monkey helped a bit too.
