How nice, how fancy!

A lady, who knows my weakness for anything nice and fancy, (even more so if it involves paper) brought this little beauty into the posh gift shop to show to me. It was sent to her from California and that's about all we know. 

This gorgeous little desk calendar stands up on it's own and every month a new flower appears in the jar to remind you of the date. Beautiful, the idea, the design and the execution! 

After a bit of research on the net, guess what I found. This 2015 desk calendar is designed and produced by Good Morning inc there is a whole load of interesting stuff on their website. Just how nice and fancy can you get? 

Autumn colours!

It's that time of year again where nature explodes in one final crazed colour party before winter sets in. We enjoyed one last trip to the mountains on Sunday and we were expecting to see the first signs of snow on the highest peaks. However, much to our surprise, a warm day with lots of sun just extended our hope of a prolonged summer... not a trace of snow to be seen even over 2500 metres! 

Whilst someone cycled to Colle del Nivolet 2602 m I strolled through gorgeous woods and listened to the mountain river pounding down the valley, a constant background sound which omitted everything else... problems and all. 

These are just a few photographs of my walk in the woods, bright autumn colours and with a few patterns thrown in! 

Shocked and a bit saddened not to have seen one animal just hundreds and hundreds of mushrooms! Definitley the last I will see of the mountains without snow this year and a most enjoyable end to our summer trips.

The 2014 Designer Calendar + Planners - October

Just as last year I have designed a 'piece' of MaJo's lovely freebie designer calendar. I along with many other of her designer friends were invited to participate and each create a different month for 2014. I am happy to announce that my design for October is already available for download HERE.
Luckily I was asked to create a weekly planner which could be printed up and then pinned directly on a wall or used as a desk planner. My design started out as an experiment with cut-outs and a bit of collage. I had no theme but just decided to enjoy myself. 

Although the original brief requested I be inspired by the Spring and Summer 2014 Pantone colour palette I found that the design also looked great in black and white. So this means two versions were created for downloading. You can decide to doodle and colour my black and white design with your own personal colour scheme, or just download the original coloured version. So get colouring, and get planning, now!

I liked the finished design so much that I also changed my header to match :)

Pablo Picasso - a pleasant surprise!

If you visit a Picasso exhibition it is taken for granted that it will be exciting and inspirational in some way. On Wednesday I organised (quite nonchalantly I must say) to visit an exhibition called Pablo Picasso -  The Colour Etched showing 140 linocuts produced by the artist from 1939 onwards.
My first surprise was the location which deserves a blog post all of it's own. The Forte di Bard is a rock fortress positioned at the beginning of the narrow Aosta Valley an hour's drive away from Turin. In all these years I am almost embarrassed to say I had never visited this wonderful and dramatic setting, any visitors I may have in the future will definitely enjoy a trip to this medieval village and fort.

Forte di Bard - Valle d'Aosta

The second surprise was the exhibition itself. On entering I found that at least one third of the pieces featured Picasso's matador and bullfighting works, a theme close to my heart. Picasso began experimenting with linocuts in 1939, creating linocut posters for ceramic exhibitions and bullfighting events. So with the perfect subject matter there was no excuse not to have a fabulous time! 

Pablo Picasso Linocut Toros detail

Pablo Picasso Linocut Matador detail

The unique sets of etchings on show contained not only the finished works, but also the progressive proofs showing the sequence by which Picasso developed the final images. Picasso developed a new method for creating prints which saved huge amounts of time, but also presented tremendous challenges. The artist needed to be able to visualise the completed image at an early stage, and made it impossible to reverse any mistakes made during the cutting process. Picasso created over 2,500 prints in his lifetime which is a significant part of his total artistic output. 

Pablo Picasso Linocut detail

Pablo Picasso Linocut detail

The grand finale is a room full of wonderful photographs by David Douglas Duncan the photojournalist who became a close friend of Picasso. The photographs reflect this 'intimate relationship' and depict Picasso relaxed in his studio and at home with Jacqueline Rouge.

Pablo Picasso with ceramic plate - photograph David Douglas Duncan

I'm afraid my photographs may not do justice to the quality of the works but the subject matter makes me want to post them all here on my blog. I will also upload some of my favourites on my Pinterest board Toret.

I am still struggling with my blog, I don't have time to write and post all the news I would like to. However, I hope you will bear with me and visit every now and then just the same. My plan is that this trend will be reversed and my little blog will again become an interesting and jolly place to visit. 

No pattern, No party!

At this moment in time, due to a couple of unfortunate coincidences, my life has become a whirlwind, or as my mom says, like living in a washing machine and someone turned the cycle on to spin! Some things that are happening are enjoyable and others are a bit stressful, but all are things that I cannot control so I just have to sit them out. 

I would love to turn this trend around, however, the spin cycle may not ease off until Christmas and as usual the one thing that gets thrown by the wayside first is my pattern making! So no serious designing is going on at the moment, just a lot of doodling and jotting down of ideas, keeping things on the boil until I have more time to dedicate to patterns again. 

At first I thought 'No pattern, No party'... but I am now back to a bit of enjoyable cutting, sticking and doodling in front of the telly in the evenings, and it is not such a bad idea. This week I have been producing handcrafted envelopes known as 'Efuto' which I shall be posting off to some of my surface pattern friends. 

It is always enjoyable to create 'little' patterns and projects just to keep my creative juices flowing until better times. Here are a few close-ups of my designs without showing the whole of the envelope. I like them to be a surprise when they arrive in the post!

If you leave a comment after this post I will be drawing out one name to find a winner for an Efuto that needs a new owner! I hope to hear from you :)

A bit of Yellow therapy... my personality colour!

And what is your favourite colour? I want to tell you a bit about mine. For as long as I can remember my favourite colour has always been yellow. Most people who have a favourite colour wear that colour or have their houses full of it, like an orange dress, blue curtains or pink cushions or such. My love for Yellow is not like this for I own very few yellow things, it is a colour that I don't wear and I don't have objects, cushions or soft toys in this colour. So where does my love for this colour originate? I don't really know, but I think it shines from the inside, I must be yellow inside! I have discovered that yellow is what is called my 'personality colour'.

A few years ago I was ill for quite sometime and I felt the need to paint my studio yellow... a bright Primrose yellow, so that when I was sitting working at my desk I could feel the 'sun' on my back. This is the only time in my life that I have felt the need for my favourite colour and I am still happy with my choice and my yellow room!

I have had a stressful couple of weeks, lots of things have gone terribly wrong. I have lost almost all the files which contain all my designs and patterns. I have been working on for these for over two years. It made me really ill for a few days, I was incredulous and I also felt very stupid. I wondered if it was a sign for me to give up and go and do something else? 

Austria Center Vienna

However I am now picking up the pieces. I have decided to design new patterns. I think it is rather stupid to recreate the same designs (unless of course someone pays me a lot of money to do so). I am streamlining my production methods, before I left many designs unfinished, now I want to work everything through to the end and create a final collection or product with my designs so that nothing is wasted. In my depression I have been attracted to the colour yellow again maybe in the hope that it will give me the energy to carry on. 

Lucienne Day. Miscellany 1952

Luckily I have a Yellow board on Pinterest so that when I feel the need for a little yellow therapy I can just go and have a peek. The photographs featured in this post are just a few examples from my Yellow Pinterest board!

A fabulous yellow plate by Gemma Orkin

Below are a few interesting facts about the colour yellow.
Yellow Represents:
Mind and intellect: From a colour psychology perspective, yellow stimulates our mental faculties; it activates the left or analytical brain.
Happiness and fun: Yellow is uplifting to the spirits; yellow helps create enthusiasm for life and can awaken greater confidence and optimism.
Communication of New Ideas: Yellow is related to the expression and integration of new ideas and thoughts. 

Effects of Yellow:
Creative: The color of new ideas, yellow helps us find new ways of doing things.
Quick decisions: Yellow helps with clear thinking and quick decision-making but it can also be impulsive.
Anxiety producing: Yellow is fast moving so too much time in its presence can agitate and lead to nervousness and emotional instability.
Critical: Yellow makes people more mentally analytical and self critical of both themselves and others.
Non-emotional: Yellow relates to the head not the heart.
Choosing yellow as your favorite means you have a deep need for logical order in your everyday life and to be able to express your individuality by using your logical mind to inspire and create new ideas.

Danielle Kroll

To finish on a high note, I just did this 'quiz' I found on Facebook to define which colour best describes your personality and guess which colour came out... YELLOW, told you so!

 

PapeLove BlogHop - inspiration from my studio!

In my quest for paper inspiration for the PaperLove project and after scouring Pinterest for a couple of days I decided to spend some time in my studio and go through the wealth of 'papery' things that I hoard there. First of all I looked in the most obvious places like my set of drawers already organised to contain scraps of paper of every different type and colour imaginable. I chose some pieces that I particularly like, transparent tissue papers, lots of chocolate and sweet wrappers, envelopes and coloured paper bags. 

I then got out my fruit papers... you mean you don't collect fruit papers? well you better get started then. I have been saving them for years, I love the 'poor' graphics and patterns that you find on them and of course the crinkly fragile tissue paper. I also collect the graphics and illustrations found on fruit boxes, but that's yet another story and forces me to hoard bits of wood as well as paper :)

Just looking around my studio I found lots of evidence of paper experiments, paper rosettes, folded paper (I wouldn't call it real Origami) and cutouts, 60's wallpaper boarders which I keep for no particular reason, and cut and sew projects which incorporate magazine and newspaper cuttings.

I own many old books which I buy from car boots and second hand shops, often only bought for the cover design or the feel of the paper it is made from. Many foreign books are in this collection in languages that I will never understand.

I have an 'out of control' number of magazines of every different kind, literally piles of them and I have a feeling I will never throw them away. The only problem is this collection continues to grow. Some of my old magazines include numerous issues of the famous U&LC which was a large format magazine printed on newspaper. Many of the copies are now yellowed but they are fabulous just the same.

Finally I got out my sketchbooks which have many cut and paste paper patterns which I then elaborate by filling in with line work. I usually use this technique when I am designing Efuto envelopes to send off around the world to my surface pattern friends.

Basically I was amazed to find that my studio is jam packed full of paper in every size, form and condition. This proves to me my love and attraction for this humble material. I am pleased to say that whilst nosing around in my studio I came up with the idea for what will be my PaperLove project. So much for Pinterest… I had all the inspiration I needed at home in my study!
The PaperLove Blog Hop organised by Paperphilia will be going live on March 10th. Time to get down to creating some paperlove work for my blog post, see you then :)

PaperLove Blog Hop and the 'Spirit of Paper'

Paperphilia is organising a PaperLove competition and blog hop and as you can imagine I can't resist taking part. The PaperLove Blog Hop will be a celebration of all things paper, read more about it here.
So to begin to get in the PaperLove mood yesterday I visited an exhibition called 'The Spirit of Paper' at the Palazzo Barolo in Turin. It showed over 300 pieces of origami with additional short films, workshops and fun interactive exercises to accompany the works of art. It could'nt have come at a better time and below you will find some of the photos I took. 

 

Very traditional animal forms but wonderful just the same!

I quite fell in love with this pineapple!

Fabulous fox!

There were many traditional origami pieces featuring animals and insects, I particularly loved the little mouse and his pineapple, and this fabulous fox. 

 

Colourful and fun.

Complex!

I was very surprised to see so much colour and use of patterned paper. Modern origami uses both, a lot of the forms were created by folding up to 5 sheets of coloured paper at the same time, just mind boggling! 

Pattern

... more pattern

... and more pattern!

The exhibition is housed in the dark brick cellars of the fabulous Barolo Palace in the centre of Turin, a spectacular and suggestive place to admire these wonderful paper creations! The photograph below is taken at the entrace to the palace where a gigantic version of the classic origami Crane takes pride of place among the historical elegance.

Gigantic origami Crane

I already have a PAPER board on Pinterest but I think it will be getting a big boost from now on as I am looking for paper inspiration everywhere. I hope that these photographs may inspire you too, especially if you are taking part in the PaperLove project, see you soon with more paper loveliness!