Month: September 2019

Awhile ago, I started a personal thread-painting project to decorate our house. I shared it on my personal Facebook page, to show people what I was up to, and people liked it a lot, so I thought, ok, I will show my Copper Catkin audience, too. 

I thought people would say something nice, as people often do, and then get on with their day – but people started approaching me and saying that they wanted to make their own, so I thought, ok, why not? 

My personal thread-painting project was originally only going to be a simple kereru design, with the name of the house (Te Rerenga Manu) stitched around it – but of course, I decided to make it more complicated, and add a wreath. 
Now, I have realised that I want a partner piece to go with it – so I have designed it in advance, and I will be the first tester of this second design. I am going to print them on black backgrounds for me, but I know a lot of people prefer them on a white background, so I will offer that option, too.

I have also designed a few smaller pieces, for different levels of complexity (and different sizes). 

Keep an eye out for these, and maybe a few more, once they have gone through testing.

Quite some time ago now, we launched our first and second waves of colour-cut-and-sew cushion projects. They were very popular, but as we haven’t brought out new versions with the new designs, their popularity has ebbed, as you would expect, so we are refreshing the range for this year’s gift-giving season.
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I decided to match up my most popular bird picture, my kereru, with one of my newest designs, kawakawa, for the first design.

I mocked the concept up roughly for George. The first image shows a “feature” on one side, with blue lines representing the handles, then showed how the design would peep through onto the other side, and how the handles (green scribble) would hang down.

It took a bit of fiddling, and a few mock-ups, but we eventually found a layout, which duly arrived, printed on Spoonflower’s linen cotton canvas. 

The delightful Akemi of Blueberry Puppin made up an example bag, so that people can understand how the pattern can be turned into a bag. 

​We lined it with the same kakakawa design, but in colour, and on grey plaid. Click on the fabric image to order from Spoonflower.

• tÅ«Ä« and kowhai
• piwakawaka and mānuka
• korimako and harakeke
• kakÄ« and (swamp plant)
• toroa and sea creatures
• charcuterie
• fungi
• bee and lavender
• poppies
• succulents

I’ll tell you a secret – I actually kind of hate kohuhu, aka pittisporum tenuifolium. But like a lot of things that I don’t much like in and of themselves, I enjoy drawing it. 
If you look back at my portfolio, it seems to be filled with things that I don’t really like – I am not much of a fan of eating fish or mushrooms, and bugs aren’t really things I want to get too close to, but I really enjoy drawing them. 
Added to that, it’s a native plant that is growing on our land, and it’s not a predictable subject – and I haven’t drawn it yet. We also have akiraho (​Olearia paniculata), so I have included leaves from both in the design. I have not included their distinguishing flowers in this design, as neither had bloomed when I took my original working photos. I took these photos today to show the difference – and I may make a second version, with the trees flowering.

It was actually very pleasant to draw, and the design came together nicely from its parts. I felt that it quickly made a cohesive design repeat.
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I decided that I liked the flow of the design so much that I would expand it to include both flowering kohuhu and akiraho. 

Kawakawa (piper excelsum) is well-known in craft market circles, as it is one of the most important herbs in traditional herbal Māori medicine, used to treat cuts, wounds, and various pains.
When we bought our place, the previous owner had just planted a lot of it all along the edges of the driveway, so we now have an absolute profusion of gorgeous, heart-shaped leaves all along the edge of the driveway.

The idea of adding a pōhutukawa design to my portfolio is not a new one, but it is really difficult to align their kahika (flowers) with my drawing style – by the time I have drawn AROUND every filament, the flower will be more black line than flower. The alternative, stylising the flower outline and only picking out the anthers, just makes it look like a dandelion. Ugh. Annoying.

I decided to break from tradition and draw the kahika in red, and it seemed to work… So after a quick mock-up, I used the trees that I had already created for my kōwhai design (with the pōhutukawa in mind, of course), and dressed them to fit the pōhutukawa structure.

Then, I spent long hours gradually building up the blooms to follow the way that a real p​ōhutukawa tree looks (ours isn’t in bloom, as it’s the end of winter, so I can’t go and look).  This stage is just before the final stage of being turned into a tile repeat. 

At this stage, the design is still very much a work in progress, so it may or may not make it all the way to printing. without further tweaks.
When I started trialling the repeat, I noticed that the trees definitely needed a root system. My original intention had been to hide the lower parts of the trees entirely, but I decided to try this, instead. It only shows a tiny bit, but the details really matter to me!
Click on the image to shop for pōhutukawa and other native tree designs on Spoonflower.

I am definitely no expert in succulent cultivation, but I love their company. They are such weird and lovely plants! And, of course, I have been planning to draw them and their relatives for quite some time.

Working from the actual plants, and from many photos, I built up a collection of sketches to start my repeat, then coloured them, combined them into a bouquet, and drew in additional plants to fill out the composition.

I initially started sketching kōwhai flowers and leaves for my personal embroidery project – which I am also developing for sale, after so much positive feedback – but I have also had a fabric design knocking at the back of my mind for a while. Of course, I wanted to finish this project first, but sometimes, you just have to let the stronger inspiration take over.

I don’t usually just draw elements in isolation, and then leave them that way, and more and more, I have been weaving the separate elements into a cohesive and realistic whole – so I knew that I would have to start by observing and drawing the structure of the actual kōwhai trees first, then start looking at how the flowers, seed pods, and leaves connect to the tree. I am really lucky that we have more than ten kōwhai trees on our land, so I was able to just pop outside and check them out for details whenever I needed to do so. What a privilege!

Our kōwhai trees have been full of dogfighting birds as the blooms open. It’s a noisy place to be! 
I walked around the property and took plenty of reference photos of the trees and the ​kōwhai blooms themselves.

From these photos, I developed a basic, stylised tree structure.

Once I had developed the basic tree, I knew how I wanted the flowers and seed pods to fit into the design, and started drawing them. I like to draw several different flowers, and then add them throughout the design, rather than draw the whole picture with every single flower drawn individually, because it ensures a consistency across the design, and it saves a great deal of time in some ways (although it still takes a very long time to build up the design, one flower at a time!).

Once I had spent many hours gradually assembling my tree, I created an initial repeat, which will become a repeating tile, then a fabric design. 

As this is quite subtle, and the flowers take a backseat to the overall tree structure, I also re-drew the ​kōwhai flowers and seed pods, as well as some leafy branches, and created some larger motifs, which will become a range of complementary designs in the ​kōwhai range, as well as being used in my embroidery patterns.

You can shop for these designs on Spoonflower now – here are a couple of examples:

It’s been AGES since I have had time to design some new stuff, and I have been jonesing for some creative time. 
Our major renovations finally finished a couple of weeks ago, so we finally have our house back. We are gradually sorting through all our possessions, decluttering, and putting finishing touches on the house, but the sudden lack of pressure is huge, so I have filled the gap with a whole lot of Copper Catkin tasks – new designs, updating the blog (hi!), getting our stock online as we aren’t doing markets anymore, and doing a massive craft and market supply destash. We started last weekend, with Fabric-a-brac in Palmerston North, which was awesome. 

One of our big remaining tasks for the house is the garden, and as we make small inroads, I have been taking photos in the hope that I would have some time soon to draw them.. and now, I have the time! So, first of all, let’s look at the herbs (from our garden) that I have drawn.

Basil is an absolute STAPLE in our household. We love it fresh in salads and sandwiches, cooked on pizza, made into pesto, or cooked into pasta sauces. Last summer, our basil plant went NUTS, but of course, the first frost killed it, so we have been using the little supermarket plants while we wait for basil weather again.

Marjoram is one of the basic herbs that I have used in pretty much everything I cooked for a lot of my life. My cuisine style, growing up, was strongly influenced by French and Italian cooking traditions (given that I grew up in Europe).

Oregano and marjoram are remarkably similar, visually, so I have made sure that I leave the labels in with all of the herbs in our vertical planter. I can almost smell the fresh, sunny herb smell through the screen. 

Parsley is one of the herbs I have struggled to draw – our Italian parsley is not in the most draw-able state, so I had a shot at curly parsley, but I am not happy with it, so it’s literally back to the drawing board on that one. 

To draw rosemary, rather than concentrating on the leaf shape, I looked at the leaf distribution. They look a little bit like fireworks when you just sketch the layout.

I love the look of sage, even our somewhat straggly little bush. I like to tuck it inside stuffed chicken breast, as well as the traditional sage and onion stuffing for chicken or turkey. It’s very pleasing to draw, too.

Tarragon has recently entered our cooking lexicon, and we are enjoying exploring new options with it. Like basil, when dried, it looks (and tastes) very different from the fresh leaves. 
I drew a lot of extra leaves in while I was creating the final tile repeats.

Thyme has the tiniest leaves, so it’s hard to get the detail and the scale correct. I really want to plant it as ground cover, I love the scent of thyme when it fills the air. 

It has been a busy couple of weeks, getting these all drawn, coloured, and building the repeats. It usually takes me AT LEAST two days to make a single design, so fourteen designs in a fortnight is actually epic work. We have covered the herbs, the first 8, in this post, and we will cover the others in other posts:
– Kōwhai (trees and flowers)
– Pōhutukawa
– Succulents
– Pittisporum
– Kawakawa

I thought about making a second post for these two additional herb designs, but they make more sense here, so I have added them onto the end of this post. I think it was definitely worth taking a second shot at that parsley, how much better does that look?