Inspirations



I have always loved History, Literature and Art.........................................................................................................
beautiful things, the stuff of dreams..................................................

flowers, butterflies, fairy tales, embroidered fragments, Chinese blues, Botticelli angels, Blake's visions, Burne-Jones pictures............................................................................................

amongst many other hints and wisps of the past..........................

to catch in my net and weave into mydesigns..................

which I hope others might find as beautiful as their inspirations.

Tuesday, 7 December 2010

Madame Butterfly- the design process recorded for posterity!!!! ;-)




These pictures show the design process I went through to achieve my aim of producing ,what I think is, a beautiful design.  'Madam Butterfly' was inspired by the Victorian pre-picture drawings of garments by Burne Jones and my love of Chinese textiles. These were embellished with  flowers,butterflies bats etc. for their fragile, butterfly like Chinese lady owners ;who wore them, whilst suffering for their beauty, with tiny broken feet encased in minute silk ,embroidered, 'Splendid Slippers' (see the very interesting  book of this title for more about these shoes).

The end result.'Madam Butterfly ( unless I use her as part of another design.....)- is an amalgam of :-
  •  The coloured drawing of my vintage robe
  • The wings and antennae of a coloured drawing of a dead butterfly (which died of natural causes in Butterfly World Preston Park Stockton upon Tees!!)
  •  the head of a beautiful Chinese lady taken from a vintage pith painting
  •  Faded background made up from multiple, multi-direction photocopies of that head and shoulders

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