Last year I found a beautiful set of vintage tiger cowrie napkin rings, and was inspired to create a pattern collection for tableware that would suit the vibe of the napkin rings (and also hide any food stains!).

The first thing I love to do when working on a pattern collection is to create a moodboard. I pretty much use Pinterest to find images that fit the aesthetic and direction for the collection, in this case I was thinking ‘coastal, lush, moody, natural, and fresh’.

I used this moodboard to decide what motifs and colours to use for the designs. I really loved the idea of shibori and recreated a shibori-look using blue food colouring and a white candle and white crayon. I will do a tutorial about this in my next blog post!

I also played around with coffee (!!) and a candle, which was fine except I can’t stand the smell of coffee so I found it a bit much waiting for the coffee to dry ha ha.

I knew that lush green palm leaves would play a starring role, so I took photos of my indoor palm trees to use as a reference, and drew a set of palm leaves using watercolour pencils.

Finally I had a play on the iPad to create a blue marbled design which is to represent a swirling ocean.

So these are the initial designs I created based on the moodboard:

I’m really pleased with these designs and my family just has to agree on which ones we are going to get printed for napkins and a tablecloth!

Now as these designs were for a personal project and not my usual ‘put your sunnies on’ style, I decided to ramp things up a bit and create some more colourful variations:

These are my favourite bright patterns which I think would look fab as swimwear or resort wear:

These prints are now in my pattern library, just let me know if you’d like to see the library or are interested in licensing any of them. Hope you have a fabulous week!