Helpful Inspirations

 

In my last post, I mentioned how I planned to focus on flowers and butterflies for my next designs.

At the time, I had a really nifty idea in mind for a candle mat which was inspired by all the new flowers popping up outside and also by

this….

This is a set of Mary Engelbrit paper placements that I purchased a few years ago. We don’t use paper placements, ever, but I bought them anyway simply because the design was so festive and pretty.

I’ve always loved Mary Engelbrit’s art and quite often she has provided me with inspirations.

That set of placements inspired me to draw this:

I love all the bright colors in the set of placemats so I drew up the initial design and started coloring it in to get a sense of color placement.

I knew that I wanted some butterflies and dragonflies so I fit them both into the design.

I didn’t really want a black background though.  I’ve used blacks and whites and greens waaaay too many times in my design background.

I wanted something different.

So I dyed up some pretty pale yellow and along with all the rest of the dyed colors, I started stitching ….

    I liked  loved how the white flowers looked against the pale yellow, but I wasn’t happy at all with the reds and yellows of these flowers.

So my choice was to either go back to the dye pots to dye up some paler colors or ….

just make the entire candle mat with white flowers!

Which I did!

I love this look.

But….

I still wanted the dragonflies and butterflies …

I tried, I really did try!

But I just couldn’t get the little guys’ colors right so that it would blend in but yet stand out from the flowers.

So the idea for butterflies and dragonflies was scrapped for now.

I’ll use these guys in some other design but thanks to Mary Engelbrit and my wrong/bad dyeing adventures, I was led into creating this……

 

Which I’m very very happy with!

I hope to have the pattern for this available to purchase by the end of the week!

 

Happy Day everyone!