The Artist UnSEWn Featuring English Garden by Snow Leopard Designs

"The English Garden Collection" from Snow Leopard designs is inspired by my deep love for English gardens and English garden plants. For the inspiration for the collection I drew on a number of sources including 19th century botanical illustrations from my archive, as well as antique seed packets and catalogues and antique floral fabrics also from my archives.

The design: "Vegetable Garden" was directly inspired by antique and vintage seed packets. I have always found the style of these designs so visually pleasing and I wanted to try to convey this rich fullness of form, texture and colour directly to fabric.

"Strawberry Fields" was inspired by an illustration of strawberries in an antique volume in my collection called "The Floral World". I had bought a whole set of these books in the late 1980s and had often thought how wonderfully the strawberry print would transfer to fabric to make a simple and striking design.

"Begonias" was developed from an antique English textile document in my archive that was first printed in the 1890s. I loved the crisp sharpness of the drawing and the outline so reminiscent of late Victorian England.

 

Pelargonium was also developed from a late 19th century textile document in my archive. I have always had a passion for Pelargoniums and geraniums with their amazingly patterned leaves and jump at any chance to include them in my designs. I also developed an all over pelargonium leaf pattern to lie under the different blooms as a background texture. This pattern was then also produced as a separate semi plain fabric: "Pelargonium Leaves" where it works as solid colour to co-ordinate with the other designs in the collection.

"Garden Peonies" was inspired by a selection of antique woodblock prints in my archive that I put together to create a dense and lush all over texture of exuberance. I just love painting up this type of design and the satisfaction I get as each new colour is added from my paintbrush to the paper is hard to describe.

"Rose Bower" is a lovely little classic English rose print that I found in the late 1980s in a large old leather bound volume of English fabrics from the 1850s. It`s the sort of "filler" design that works so well with the larger patterns in quilts and on it`s own for multiple other uses such as bags and clothing etc.

Finally to round the collection off I included "Cherry Tomatoes". It is based on a lovely little woodblock print from the 1920s that I found recently. I thought that it would work so well in quilts as another texture to both frame and complement the larger prints.

For the colourways. I wanted fresh and vibrant colours that were also naturalistic and where every design and colour would work well with every pattern in the collection. I see the collection being used for a number of craft and furnishing projects including full blown flamboyant quilts that are literally full of the perfume of English gardens, to clothing, bags and all manner of household furnishings including curtains, cushions and bedding. I just hope that you have as much fun working with them as I did painting them.