Tropical Fusion Bloghop

Today I am taking part in a bloghop with more than 40 designers from around the world. We have each created mini collections featuring Pantone Colour of the Year, Radiant Orchid, based on the theme 'tropical fusion'.

If you're following the chain you will have joined us from the wonderful blog of Virginia Njeri Kamau, I hope you are enjoying your hop so far! If you have landed here you can follow the link at the bottom of the post onto MaJo BV's post to continue looking at everyone's Tropical Fusion designs!

For those who aren't familiar with me and my work I'll give you a little run down! I'm Rosie, a graphic and surface designer with a passion for colour and pattern. If you want to see a bit more of my work please feel free to take a look around or pop over to my website for more!

Last year in our bloghop I set myself a big goal, to achieve my first licensing deal, which I achieved and more! This year I am pushing myself even further and attending Surtex in New York in May! You can read all about my announcement here. I will be in booth #250 if you're attending, I'd love to meet you!

Thanks for visiting, I'll now pass you on to the fabulous MaJo BV, enjoy the rest of the hop!

Big thanks to Mary from Groovity designs for organising this hop! If you want to do the whole hop from the beginning, you can head to Mary's post here.

P.S Apologies for the image quality, Blogger has made every file I uploaded blurry and I can't work out why! Hope to get it fixed soon.

Images copyright Rosie Simons 2014

A-Z Flowers - A is for..

I FINALLY started on A-Z of Flowers!

A is for Agapanthus!

And because I can't just create one design.. here's some more of the collection! I still feel like I haven't finished to you might see more pieces from this collection popping up soon!

Images copyright Rosie Simons 2013

The A-Z of Flowers project

If you know my work or take a quick look around it will be pretty obvious that I love flowers, and LOVE making floral designs and patterns, so I was over the moon when I heard about 'The A-Z of flowers' project. 

The idea is simple, you create a design for each letter of the alphabet from A to Z each featuring a flower beginning with the letter you are working on. I can't wait to take part.. the tricky part is going to be deciding which flower to choose for each letter!

The founder Pattern & Co shared this great resource to help inspire. Find out more from Pattern & Co here.

Image credit: Pattern & Co

Remember that colour palette..

Remember that colour palette and mini mood board I posted yesterday? Well I was so inspired by it I started creating a new collection! Today I am giving you a little sneak peek of one of the designs I have been working on, I will reveal more next week, hope you like it!

Don't forget to come back tomorrow, we have an awesome post scheduled Feature Friday!

Images copyright Rosie Simons 2013

New designs on Society6

I've been adding new designs to my Society6 shop. Below are some of the new patterns available.

Images copyright Rosie Simons 2013

Feature Friday - Kate Marsden

Today I bring you the fourth 'Feature Friday'

Today our featured designer is..

Kate Marsden

Kate talks us through her story, passions and plans for the future..

"I studied fashion and textiles at Lincoln College of Art & Design in the mid 1990s, then followed my now husband to London and ended up working for a law firm!  I'm still there 14 years later, but I realised a few years ago that I needed an outlet for my creativity.  I kickstarted this with a short course at Chelsea College of Art, and I've now taken a number of short courses there in textiles, painting and ceramics." 

"My real passion is surface pattern design, but I also like to knit and took up crochet earlier this year.  I use my paintings and sketches to create pattern designs and translate these into designs for ceramics, cross stitch and all sorts of different things.  I've recently opened a shop on Folksy."  

"At the moment I'm working on some new fabric designs which I hope to launch in the new year, and I'm also preparing to launch my website." 

"I'm constantly inspired by things I see around me.  I particularly like the styles of the 1950s in fashion, textile and print design as well as architecture.  Sometimes I'll spot something on the street, or it'll be an exhibition or something in a magazine that gets me started on something new."

"With regard to my creative process, I generally start with my photographs and make sketches based on them before creating paintings (usually acrylics, occasionally watercolour).  I will then turn my painting into a repeat pattern on the computer.  My 50s City design was just drawn, photocopied and pieced together (although I still worked from my earlier paintings initially). 50s City was screen printed, whereas Park Hill was digitally printed."

Twitter: @kdmarsden
Blog: http://www.kate-7ws.blogspot.co.uk
Folksy: http://www.folksy.com/shops/MadeByMrsM

Images copyright Kate Marsden

Featured on Tigerprint

Yesterday I was featured on the wonderful Tigerprint blog! It was such an honour to have my work up on such a fantastic companies blog, with such lovely comments and hopefully seen by many!

If you haven't seen the feature you can see it here!

P.S If you like the look of my wonderful brightly coloured floral Chrome, it's the Caroline Gardner Chrome Theme which you can download here!

Images copyright Rosie Simons, Blog content copyright Tigerprint

Feature Friday - Chloe Wood

Today I bring you the third 'Feature Friday'

I hope you're getting into a routine now knowing you can visit the blog on Friday's for wonderful showcases of very talented designers work!

Today our featured designer is..

Chloe Wood

Chloe talks us through her passions, inspirations and plans for the future..

"I  love to draw Flora and Fauna. The majority of my designs are inspired by this subject, however I have a whole range of designs I am yet to create all based on my travels around the world (so many ideas never enough time!)."

"I usually start off by just doodling and scan my drawings into Photoshop I then like to play around with scale and formats until I am happy with the design and then recolour them. I have recently started the ABSPD course as I want to develop my skills and design brand further"

"My style is a little naive but I love using my own handwriting it is what makes my designs unique to me."

"I am currently open for commissioned work so if anyone is interested please feel free to contact me via my website."

You can get in touch or view more of Chloe's work via:

Website: www.chloe-wood.co.uk

Blog: www.chloewooddesigns.blogspot.co.uk

Twitter: @ChloeWoodDesign

Facebook: Chloe Wood Designs

All images copyright Chloe Wood 2012

Pattern Inspiration - John Lewis Girl

I spotted this cute little dress whilst browsing the John Lewis website.. I was instantly drawn to the wonderful colour palette and the brushstroke style floral pattern.

It's just full of inspiration and really gets my creative juices flowing so I thought I would share it with you all!

You can view the dress online on the John Lewis website here

Images source: John Lewis

Spoonflower

This week I entered Spoonflower's Holiday Napkin Contest..

I wanted to create something fun and festive, so I chose bright versions of classic 'holiday' colours and combined them with contemporary Illustrations of classic holiday icons and 'happy holidays' caption in a playful typeface. 

You can vote HERE!

The only instructions for the competition were 'Using a fat quarter (21" x 18") of fabric as your canvas, create a set of holiday-themed cocktail napkins. We suggest setting them up sized at 4.5" x 4.5" inches, with an additional quarter inch on each side to be used as a seam allowance (making each square 5" x 5")' so you were free to play with different ideas and layouts of the design.. I chose to go patterned!

All images copyright Rosie Simons 2012

Website Update

Last week I spent 3 solid days updating my website.. the site needed a bit of freshen up with new work, new pages and a better user experience. I am really pleased with how it looks and hope you all like it too!

You can visit the site yourself at rosiesimons.co.uk

All images copyright Rosie Simons 2012

Feature Friday - Lauren Cherice Designs

Today I bring you the second instalment of our new feature.. Feature Friday.

Today our featured designer is..

Lauren Cherice Designs

Lauren Cherice is a Surface Designer currently based in the East Riding of Yorkshire. Graduating from Cleveland College of Art and Design in 2011 with First Class Honors in a BA(Hons) Textiles and Surface Design, Lauren specialises in producing furnishing fabrics and accessories by traditionally screen printing her designs from home.

Inspired by natural flora and fauna, she uses her own photography to help her produce beautiful contemporary detailed drawings. The use of pen, ink and other mix media allow her to create several layers within her artwork to give her pieces subtle depth that develops through into her prints.

Since graduating Lauren has completed a two month internship at Christopher Farr, London and in 2010 completed a two month internship with Timorous Beasties, Glasgow. Both experiences have driven her to pursue her career in design by providing her with the vital knowledge of the design industry.

Lauren says: "After finishing university I was unsure what direction to take but knew I didn't want to end my love of screen printing and drawing. After returning from my internship in London it made me feel inspired and motivated to start my own business as Lauren Cherice Designs."

Lauren's work is currently exhibiting in her home town of Bridlington at The Alex May Gallery, Old Town through to December.

Stockists of her hand printed tote bags are available in Behind The Times, Bridlington and The Folio, Hartlepool. She will also be a stall holder at Designers Marketplace at Middlesbrough Town Hall on the 15th December.

You can follow Lauren's work on:

Blog: www.Laurenchericedesigns.blogspot.com

Facebook: www.Facebook.com/Laurenchericedesign

Twitter: @LaurenCherice

Email: Laurenchericedesigns@hotmail.com

All Images Copyright to Lauren Cherice Designs

Spoonflower Custom Gift Wrap

Spoonflower have been at it again! Adding yet more dream-worthy and exciting new features to their site! Now on top of custom fabric, wallpaper and wall decal printing, you can order custom printed rolls of Gift Wrap!

It looks like the gift wrap feature is a holiday special, so if you want some get in there quickly! Although I imagine that if sales go well they will continue to provide the feature.

I've always wanted to produce and sell my designs as gift wrap, and yet again Spoonflower has provided the opportunity!

If you would be interested in buying some Rosie Simons Design gift wrap please comment below or let me know via Twitter! (@rosie_simons)

How CUTE are their on site mock ups! It's great for imagining how the designs will look as gift wrap!

Images copyright Rosie Simons 2012

Paperchase inspiration

Paperchase are not only a dream client but also a great inspiration to me as a designer. They always have great designs and patterns on their products and I can spend forever (and way too much money) in their stores browsing lovely patterned products.

I recently visited Paperchase and thought I would share some of my favourites from their current collections.

First up is a design that really caught my eye, mono floral uses lines to create different shades in different areas. The texture of this piece of wonderful, and looks fantastic printed on uncoated paper giftwrap as well as on ceramics and other surfaces.

Next up is linear floral. Unfortunately these products seem to be hard to find on the website, but this pattern is over many different surfaces throughout the store. You can see a recent post from Print & Pattern to see some more photos. (Apologies for the dingy photos these are just photos I have taken with my phone of the products I have!)

And last but not least, the Hinterland collection. A lovely A/W pattern with birds and trees.

There are even more wonderful products online or pop into your local Paperchase store!

All images copyright Paperchase