Thursday 10 February 2011

Snowdrop Season


The past few weeks the snowdrops have been slowly coming out here in Shropshire. They are a little late this year because of the cold weather earlier in the year. Snowdrops are one of the most beautiful flowers; the flower heads seem to defy logic as they appear too heavy for the stalk that holds them.

I have hand screenprinted printed my original 'Snowdrops' design onto this Moleskine notebook which can be seen above and it is now for sale in my Etsy shop here.
I have been out and about in Shropshire the last few weeks eagerly awaiting the snowdrops so I can photo them. I was lucky enough to take these few photos in my garden:







For some reason I felt reluctant to cut some of these lovely flowers and bring them inside, although I wanted to use them to photograph closer and also with my printed notebook. I only cut a couple and was amazed at how they started to open when I brought them inside. They revealed little striped 'hearts':



As I was taking photographs in my garden my neighbour's son-in-law came to ask what I was doing and then offered some of his mother-in-laws snowdrops for me to photograph too. These are different again and he told me about some with pink in the middle so I will have to look into these. (I can see a new hobby starting up in searching out different snowdrop varieties!). Here are the ones from their garden:



On Tuesday I was lucky enough to be able to photograph some snowdrops at Wightwick Manor where I am involved in an art project - will post more on this later. There were a few near the bases of trees:


More snowdrops at Wightwick Manor, I am also loving the long shadows at this time of the year:



Thursday 3 February 2011

New printing projects!




I have been meaning to print my Florentine Lilies design onto fabric ever since I took this textile screenprinting course last year. My idea was to print it onto fabric and then make it up into an eco- friendly shopping bag. However, for some reason I have been procrastinating on this little project - maybe because I wasn't sure how the printing onto fabric would turn out, also other projects took precedent. Last week I finally took the plunge and I am really pleased with how it looks above.
Another project that I have been wanting to explore for a while is printing my designs onto notebooks. Again I went ahead last week and printed my Snowdrop design onto this small notebook:





I think the colours work well on the brown background (which I have explored before here) and am going to print up more little notebooks and wrapping paper with some designs that I already have and also some new ones that are in the pipeline.