Om

Life has been good at Onneke HQ, busy but happy. I celebrated my 40th birthday a couple of weeks ago and my son's 9th. I am not sure which number shocks me more. Time flies when you are having fun...

I also had a busy few weeks, prepping files for clients in the States (via A Fresh Bunch) and working on collections for Surtex. It's been fun, I have learned so much over the last months and I am enjoying every little step.

The last week I took a bit of time off, after all the busy days and late nights in the studio, I needed a bit of peace and quiet. So I have met up with some friends, sat in the sun, had another coffee, pottered around in my garden a bit. It was good, I have a talent for procrastinating. I even thought I might skip a month of Lilla Roger's Bootcamp, but it was such a lovely assignment and I recently bought a huge amount of photoshop and illustrator brushes that needed checking out and so I made this yesterday. It's an illustration to go with this article about meditation (it can make you thin!) I loved working on it, so that snapped me out of my lazy bubble, back to work it is...

Strawberry love...

I have been working on a lot of pattern collections lately and I have LOVED it so much. The more I make, the more I understand about the tile, the colours & the repeat. Today I have been working on my second assignment for Lilla Roger's Bootcamp. We were asked to design a repeat pattern for the bolt fabric market, with the theme Jell-O. Or as the English say: Jelly. 

We have a song in our house that we sing often. It goes like this: Jelly-belly, jelly-belly, come and have a swim... Yes by golly when the tide comes in... I think it dates back to the days of Adam's granddad, but I am not entirely sure... 

I can't stand jelly. I think it's one of those truly disgusting things, something I wouldn't ever eat. I don't like wobbly things (except for my own tummy, which is wobbly and lovely...) and I am not too fond of sugar. But I still loved this theme. I have a little girl who loves jelly. She can't get enough of it and there are many stories in our family that involve jelly. 

That's what this post is about. How my designs always have a hidden story... Something that is not really important to anyone but me. My portfolio to me reads like a diary...

 

Jelly makes me think about my children's great grandmother, who we used to call Oneis. I remember Olive sitting on her lap in her wheelchair and how we went to a café in a garden centre and Olive had the biggest portion of jelly known to man. She was only about one and a half, and it must have been the equivalent of a weekly dose of sugar. 

It also takes me back a couple of years, when my little girl broke her nose in a horrendous accident (running full speed into a barrier over a sand track). For nearly a week she was on the sofa, motionless. She didn't speak and she refused to eat anything, except for the tiny pots of jelly that I spooned into her mouth four or five times a day... 

And then there are the strawberries...

I'm allergic to strawberries. It was a mild and innocent allergy when I was a kid. I would eat strawberries and get a rash. I went for years without eating any strawberries, I last had some when I was in my twenties and had a bad reaction so I never ate them again. But recently I have had anaphylactic shocks after digesting only the tiniest amount of strawberry. A couple of seeds, some strawberry infusion & a bit of jam. It was scary and I am now avoiding any sweets, jams, drinks that are red. Strawberries are banned in our house...

So there you have it... a strawberry & jelly pattern. I started off with some motifs and then worked on the tile. I added the dark background later on. I have a thing for dark brown fabric. Not sure what the story is there...

And then I did a couple of coordinates... I like the simple strawberry pattern... And a version with a lighter background, which would look great on a lunchbox or a kids apron...

About Making Art That Sells...

It's been a while since I last stepped into blog land and that is because I have been so very busy with work & life... Everything I do is always about finding balance and from all the things I juggle I sometimes have to drop a whole lot of them to focus on the two that are most important: My beautiful family & my work. Over the years I have learned that doing my work, spending time with my sketchbook and behind my computer, is vital to the well being of my family. But after my busiest ever run up to Christmas I had to take some time to re-evaluate. What is it that I want to do? And at what cost?

I love working on my line of products that I sell in my Not On The High Street Shop. I love getting prints ready and packing up orders. I have been so blessed to be part of that platform and I have been able to grow my prints into a proper little brand. Hooray! But how do you go from there? To infinity and beyond? Nope, sorry. I need to be back in the school playground at 3.15 to pick up little Miss Mouse and her handsome big brother. I need to listen to their stories, their bickering and their chatter, I need to help with homework and cook their supper.

So I decided to take a different direction, whilst still selling my work (which has calmed down a bit after Christmas.. phew..), and so I joined the wonderful people at A Fresh Bunch (an agency where you can buy & license art from a global bunch of designers) in the States. So I can just make things, and send them off, and leave the selling to someone else all together. I have loved it so far. I have made a lot of new work (that I can't share) and I have learned so much in the last few weeks. And come next Christmas I will have to get myself an assistant to help in the studio with all the orders, but until then I will hopefully be able to stay on top of it all myself.

I also joined Lilla Rogers who knows like nobody else about Making Art That Sells, in her Bootcamp course which gives you a different assignment every month, with little golden nuggets of information here and there, to build portfolio pieces. I just finished the first assignment which was to make a phone cover with the Cuckoo's clock as a theme. I saw so many cuckoo's clocks passing by in our little facebook community that I had to push it into a bit of a different direction. And so I started with sketching gingerbread clocks, and then just went for the little gingerbread man. (Whenever I need to get the kids up the hill to school in the morning, which sometimes makes me feel like I am a shepherd, I still use the gingerbread man... Run! Run! As fast as you can! You can't catch me... I'm the gingerbread man!!)

And then there are some new bits in the shop. I won't bore you with it.. Just pop over and have a look. This one is a new favorite on our table...

Tropical Fusion Blog Hop

Ola! And Welcome. If you are blog hopping this weekend you must have arrived here after visiting Anneline Sophia's beautiful blog. You can also hop back all the way to the beginning to Mary Tanana's blog (she organised this brilliant designer get together) and start from there. 

I have been working on my own version of Tropical Fusion and it's brightened up these miserable and grey winter days a bit. I started of with some tropical fruit, made a cocktail recipe print as I got in the mood and finished of with some confetti. Who said January was for detoxing?

Hope you liked your little visit. Pop back any time, but hurry over to Rebecca Stoner's blog now for more inspirational patterns and prints.

You are a STAR

A few weeks ago I made my little girl a reward chart for good sleeping. Since breaking her elbow she had been up most nights, and though I am used to a bit of sleep deprivation, I wanted to try and break the cycle. I have never been a fan of reward charts, not the kind that you can buy in the shops. They have long lists of things that you need to achieve and different stickers for each task. It's all a bit too military for me. They make me feel like children are something that needs to be sorted out. But still, my kids love stickers. What is it with stickers?? Olive comes running out of school every day showing me the little stickers on her school jumper. 'That one is for good tidying up', 'that one is for being a hard worker', 'that one is for the first thank you of the day'. (That last one always makes me giggle, so British...) So I thought about making my own sticker charts and they shouldn't be so rigid and strict, but more fun...

The Good Sleeping chart has been a great success. Not only in our house. Surprisingly I have sold a lot of them, via Not On The High Street, Etsy (for a downloadable chart) and to people around me. It's a very simple reward chart. You can make your own rules, set a reward together. Our reward for two whole weeks of good sleeping is a staying up late night with a midnight feast around 8pm. It works!

Today I added another chart that we used to have in our bathroom when the kids were still learning to brush their teeth properly. It wasn't nicely designed like this one, but stuck together with bits of paper. We used it until it completely fell apart. A sticker in the morning after brushing teeth, and a sticker after brushing in the evening. The kids loved it, it worked. I am hoping for a large order from Santa, because really these should be in the stockings this year, together with the new tooth brush that he always brings... Pop over to the shop if you would like to get one. The charts are laminated and they come with two sheets of golden star stickers.