Friday 24 July 2009

#1 Foxgloves

First of all I would like to thank Helen Suzanne for setting up this blog and allowing me to join!
I am a bit intimidated by this, seeing only one other person has posted so far and it's my first time participating in a group blog. I have however had a lot of fun playing around with this first inspiration, so I want to share it.
I started out looking at images on the web as we don't have any Foxgloves growing near where I live and I don't have any photographs either.
I then made a list of words that I associate with Foxgloves. When I was a kid, we called them Thimbleflowers. We had some them growing up a wall in hardly any soil, self seeded from a garden further up the road, and when they flowered, I used to put my finger into them to see which one fitted me best. We also used the flowers as bonnets on our fingers and played with them like that. The thimble got me thinking of sewing, very obvious, seeing I am a seamstress, and the thimble shape made me think of a straight skirt.
When I joined this group blog, I intended to make a card for every "challenge" hoping this would encourage me to try out various techniques and expand my knowledge base a bit.
I've stuck to the purple variety of Foxgloves because that's what we had in the garden. Here is the card:

Looking at the card it's very obvious I still had the thimble/skirt idea in my head.
I just had to do something about this, and I started drawing, first on a piece of scrap paper, then on the computer (no good at drawing ruffles I'm afraid, but I hope you can see what I'm trying to convey):

I'm a bit over the hill to wear a skirt with a ruffle and on a skirt like this the ruffle should be very flamboyant but for somebody young I think it could be quite fun.
I've ended up with 2 for the price of 1; not bad, the way things are at the moment, and I've really enjoyed myself. Thank you again, Helen Suzanne, for providing the inspiration.
BTW I do know Foxglove is a very poisonous plant but when I was a kid things like that wasn't taken as serious as it is today and so it should be of course.
Marianne