Earlier in the year I was lucky enough to find some John Lewis curtains in a charity shop in St Austell – lovely bright cacti design, good quality cotton and great price for such a large quantity of fabric (£7). I thought that I would be able to use the material in some way, maybe for aprons or cloth bags or something similar. Decided upon tablemats which I have just made up for Christmas gifts to accompany a little cactus plant.
I have taken one cacti image from each mat and free machined in some more detail, added a name and then quilted the rest of the mat. Would be great to embellish each individual cacti but I did want to give the tablemats as presents for this Christmas, not 2020!!!
I then decided to make some gift tags to go with this present using the simple designs from the tablemats for my print block. You can see them below in different colour schemes, ahead of me cutting around them and turning them into tags.
These are on watercolour paper but I also printed onto some rag paper and added some machine stitching. I think this has got the potential for a fun workshop and I will be trying to develop these cacti design ideas with a view to running a new class in the Spring of next year.
As additional inspiration I remembered that I used some genuine 1950s barkcloth fabric I have for some work I did on the Page A Day Sketchbook Challenge in February. This could generate even more ideas.
I used these images but changed the colour scheme. This page is from my sketchbook but you can see how the plant pots could easily be translated into a simple print block.
Apologies that the pictures are quite dark but it is a gloomy day – not great for outdoor jobs but splendid for stitching!
JOLLIETEXTILES 