Having sown the seeds for purple sprouting last summer it has been the usual long wait until harvest time, but we have been picking it for the last few weeks. It always feels good to pick the brassica because the new season of crops are a while off harvesting.
The purple of the sprouting inspired my colour palette for the Plot to Plate tea towels.
I can’t resist colour matching, so here we are again …
As I’ve had to move my studio I’ve put some products up for sale via social media in time for Christmas. Most of these products have been screen printed and made by me, and were the very first products I launched in the Plot to Plate collection. You can buy 3 items for £20, with free postage to UK addresses. All you need to do is decide which products in the picture you would like, head to https://www.paypal.me/KateFarley to pay the £20 or multiples of, list the letters relating to the items and add your postal address. I’ll notify you if any of the products are out of stock and suggest a replacement as appropriate.
Please note: if you would like to have the items before Christmas please order before midnight on Tuesday 18th December.
As this is the start of National Gardening Week it seems appropriate that I reflect on how important gardening is to me. Growing up in a gardening family, with a self-sufficient attitude to growing vegetables I suppose it was inevitable that one day I’d have a garden of my own to tend. For years I’d visit mum and be walked around the garden having updates on the state of things, nodding but never knowing the names of things, but seeing the pleasure the process of gardening gives to her. Now I understand.
Here in Birmingham we have an allotment to grow the vegetables and fruit in, and we grow flowers in our garden. We have spent over a decade digging and harvesting plot 8; learning to respect weeds for their various ways of making their presence known – I still want to try weaving couch grass. The feeling of success when we pick the first strawberries of the year, or fill the rucksack with runner beans that can be filling the freezer for wintertime is certainly worth the hours of graft. Last weekend I picked over a kilo of purple sprouting, and we commented that the harvest would probably cost well over £10 in the shops, as organic produce – but with no plastic wrapping or air miles included. Of course our food tastes so much better too! Gardening spells out the seasons as we check for frosts, or pick the first fruits, and enjoy the harvest and flowers of each changing month. The beds of wallflowers make me so happy this time each year, signalling the excitement of the growing year getting underway.
It was at the allotment plot that I first developed my pattern collection ‘Plot to Plate‘, launched in 2012. I had been drawing the allotment beds on the site, as well as National Trust kitchen gardens for a while, and a language of graphic pattern made from lino cuts evolved, firstly as limited edition prints, and secondly as motifs to explore repeat pattern with (for example: Plot to Plate VVV textile design – final image with the Auricula). The title design is slightly different in the fact that it was hand drawn, and is an over-sized dog tooth check featuring tools of growing, cooking and eating, such as garden rakes, spades, whisks, wooden spoons and cutlery as a visual narrative up the tea towel, celebrating the journey from plot to plate – available in Brassica green or Brassica purple. 
This collection has evolved to incorporate more formal pattern compositions such as Parterre (below) and Hanbury, inspired by National Trust’s Hanbury Hall and Gardens in Worcestershire, featured on hand screen printed cushions and wallpaper, where I make links between pattern design for textiles and formal garden design.
These days my design practice has moved away from the inspiration of the formal gardens but I continue to dig. Our potatoes are in the ground for this year and the greenhouse is working some magic. Gardening provides me with not only creative inspiration but also head-space – a highly valuable asset in today’s world. As a designer and an academic, juggling a young family too, things can be frantic and I’m often running for trains. Faced with two hours of hard clay to dig I’m actually very happy. I can focus on the job in hand while chatting to the friendly robins, making myself physically tired, seeing the result of the work, and at the same time having time to think and mull over some of the other stuff of life. There’s also the sense of community with other allotmenteers; we share the same weather and battles but also share the excess harvests. Every time we get to the point of questioning ourselves about the allotment and if we have time, I remember all that it does for me, how my hard work there actually keeps me well; gives me a sense of well-being I can’t imagine getting from anything else. I shall keep digging, and knowing, for so many reasons, why I do! Happy National Gardening Week!
Two years ago I produced a bespoke pattern design for David Mellor Design celebrating the ‘Chelsea‘ salad servers that Creative Director Corin Mellor, (David’s son) had designed. The pattern was screen printed on to tea towels, being a highly appropriate product for the cutlery, and they continue to sell very well through the David Mellor shops and their online store. I took inspiration from the Hathersage factory and the production methods used for the making of the cutlery pieces. I like the fact that Corin sees and appreciates the relevance of the design to his company. Although I can create pattern for pattern’s sake, I am really interested in pattern that belongs to particular brands, to communicate a belonging, of distinctiveness.
This summer I was delighted to be contacted again by Corin as the buying team were keen to add a new pattern. Starting any new commission is exciting as the conversations about the intentions of the artwork, the concepts that need building on, the production methods, colour and material choices, expectations and of course… deadlines!
With all of that taken care of I received a beautiful box of cutlery to draw from. Corin had decided he wanted to celebrate his father’s first cutlery, Pride, designed in 1953. It is so elegant, beautiful to hold, and a joy to draw from let alone to eat from! I worked the same way I had done before, developing sketches and informal compositions, working up motifs and rhythms in a sketchbook first before generating final drawings and paper cut outs to scan to digital artwork.
I work across a number of software packages depending on what is required, and always bearing in mind the final artwork requirements for production. It matters right from the beginning whether the production method is traditional printing or digital as I will design accordingly, limiting numbers of colours in the design if required, and using colour in the most appropriate way. This summer with several design projects on the go I’ve worked with Pantone references, RAL, NCS, pigment ink swatches and CMYK values. For this project we used British Standard colour relating it to other products that are stocked by David Mellor Design but I had to convert it to modern day language!
Having completed a few different designs I sent them through to Corin and his buying team and was of course really pleased when they got back to me with the same choice as me. I’ve learned never to send anything I’m not quite happy with or proud of, as that will be the one the buyer picks! Sampling and production were the next steps as well as designing the new swing tag to suit both the “Chelsea’ and the Pride tea towels. I screen print these in my studio on to beautiful G.F. Smith paper.
I’ve worked with the same fabulous British company to screen print textile products several times before and it’s always a delight to take a further project to production with them. They understand that it’s not that I’m fussy, but rather ‘particular’ about details, and we work together well. Signing off proofs, forwarding woven designer logo tags to be sewn in and waiting for the order delivery sees the weeks go past, and very soon there will be two patterns of cutlery.
I’m a cutlery fan any day of the week, and this really has been a fabulous commission to work on. To create a pattern for a client where the design relates to the product it is destined for, and its job is to visually communicate the heritage, culture and ethos of the company is a very fine challenge to take on. Proud of Pride!
Keep an eye out for ‘Pride’ in the David Mellor shops next month…
Kate Farley - drawn to design 