Sugar crystals
To make things a little bit more organised and predictable , I have decided that every other newsletter will be open for everyone to read. And the other ones will be for paid subscribers only. If you’re a paid subscriber, I’d love to know your thought. Would you prefer reading more personal stuff ( things I wouldn’t share with the rest of the world…or, more work stuff , wip, behind the scenes aso?
Food is quite hard to draw. Last year around this time I was discussing with Freespirit Fabrics last year what to draw for the next fabric collection. My thoughts were either to go Caribbean ( inspired by the colourful houses in and around Montego Bay, where we spent time at last summer), or to go full on diabetic coma with a dessert based collection. I wanted to make something sewable, something where every square inch was pretty.
I said- food is hard to draw but then it’s just like drawing a bear or a barstool really. Simplify yet exaggerate. Observe and study, copy minutely but also make things up completely. Then-throw it all together. Don’t analyse the process. It’s quite good to have a mind that veers between hyper focus, pathological avoidance, rabbit holes and zero focus( when doing 345 things at once).
If you are familiar with my patterns I often draw road like vines but cakes, you can’t connect them together like that, so had to try to work out how to make satisfactory repeats in other ways. I don’t sketch out patterns in advance . I have a vague idea in my head ( but I don’t know what things will look like). I draw lots of components and then set about piecing them together.
In Sweden there’s a Fika culture. You meet in cafes, drink coffee and eat cake. At home ones freezer is full of sweet treats. In our freezer here in the UK, there’s none so for research I found a lot of 1970’s cakes on Pinterest.