Fritillary

I just had a spent a lovely fifteen minutes on Twitter and have just 'met' an illustrator called Victoria Archer (@bella_lovebird if your on Twitter) and I skipped over to her blog and discovered her beautiful paintings and illustrations. We agreed we both have an obsession for flowers. Amongst them was this fritillary picture...

and she reminded how much I love these flowers. I tried to do a fritillary design once but the beautiful chequered leaves, which really do sum up their 'fritillaryness' 'proved too tricky to cut by hand. I am now inspired to revisit this flower now I have the super duper laser technology. Thought I'd check out the brilliant BioLib for illustrations and found there to be a particularly lovely one. All inspired again...

Inspiration

A lovely lady from Boston, Gail Williams (she happens to be an amazing flute engraver) emailed me yesterday with a link to a site that she thought I might like. And like it I did! Bio Lib is an incredible library of botanical and biological studies put together by Kurt Stueber from Germany designed to be used as a resource for learning and research. Some of the illustrations date back tp 1545. It is incredible and I know I am going to spend hours getting lost in there. Just ten minutes has got me all fired up and full of ideas!!! Thanks Gail for thinking of me!

House Lamp

I have just added this House Lamp to my Etsy shop. This design is a bit of a departure from my usual botanical designs and I have lots of ideas to develop this range! The design is printed on and then I cut the windows out so it looks like there are people in their cosy houses. It's inspired by the houses of Hebden Bridge.

Happy New Year

Hello everyone. Happy New Year. Theres a bit of a 'oh no it's the last day of the holidays' feeling in the air today...the last Sunday before school starts again. It's been such a lovely holiday. I've had a lovely cosy Christmas and a fab New Year in beautiful but freezing Holland. I'm quite fired up about getting back into work but I'm FULL of cold and need to stay in the warm to get better...

Did anyone get anything nice for Christmas? Amongst many lovely things my daughter got me a gorgeous memory game. I used to have the Galt Toys 'Remember Remember' when i was little and it was one of my favourite games. We found this very similar set in Magma with beautiful illustrations by Charley Harper. I'd never even heard of him before and have just discoved via Wikipedia that he died in 2007! Anyway we've had fun testing our memory and looking at all his lovely pictures!

Hey if you got one of my lamps for Christmas I would love to see a photo of it in it's new home. I'll put it on the blog. Go on send me a picture...it doesn't have to be a great one or anything. It would make me very happy. What do you think????