If you've been following me on Instagram (and you should) you probably got glimpse and hints about my launching "The Maharani's summer garden" collection for over a month. The collection has been live on Spoonflower for a while now, and all that was left to do was to give it it's own collection page on my website, which I FINALLY did over the weekend after taking a much needed time out to recover from all the Diwali madness before we jump in the Christmas madness.
This whole collection started from the July illustration I offered to all of my Patreon and had those big pink chintz flowers. When I turned them into a pattern to match the Octopus silhouette wallpaper I knew I had a collection budding.
The stylised pink flowers immediately mad me think of the type of flowers you find on Indian block printed fabrics and so the idea for an Indian inspired collection started coming to life. I isolated the pink flower to make a simpler filler pattern to support my hero pattern and then added an Art Deco inspired scalloped pattern of pink and green arches with stylised palm leaf.
Just around that time, Spoonflower announced its Tea Towel calendar challenge and the idea for a peacock design came to me. I repurposed some VERY old paisley motif assets into a pattern and drew an Indian style peacock for it.
I then repurposed all those assets again to create a matching peacock pattern, and a matching plain pink on pink paisley pattern. The collection was starting to take life and quite frankly it could have been good enough as it was at that point, I had 5 cohesive pattern and a stand alone peacock calendar.
I didn't stop there though, because a little voice inside kept telling me I could do with another 2-3 filler patterns.
I repurposed the stylised palm leaf motif and created a filler pattern in 3 of the main colors : saffron yellow, powder pink and dark forest green. My Maharani's summer garden collection was in need of simpler, less busy patterns to bring it all together and these just hit the spot.
At this point I knew I had a winning collection, that too right on time for Diwali! I uploaded all my patterns to Spoonflower and several of them on Society6 and Redbubble so that they can be made available on finished home decor items like rugs and comforters as well as throw pillows.
I ended up liking the collection so much that I decided to enlist the help of a local printing service to have several of my collection patterns printed on throw pillow for my own sofa ahead of Diwali. As I type these words, they are still all on said sofa, inviting anyone to sink into a colorful plush cocoon to spend the weekend binge watching Netflix shows. They will be replaced soon by Christmas themed designs but until then, I'm all about the colorful vibe these bring to my colorful home. If I have to pick a favourite out of the whole collection, it's going to be the peacock and paisley one, though the pink and green scalloped arches is my close second favourite. When I worked with the cottage style bedroom mockup from Creasty and showed it to my husband, he asked me if that was what I was planning for our bedroom the day we buy our one home :
I mean it could be! Those are my kind of colors and the idea of a colorful bedroom with lots of plush pillows is very appealing, so is the doing away with boring rental white walls.
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