Lucy Patterson HANDS-ON » Seasons

Autumn Matryoshka

Lucy Patterson — Tue, 15 May 2012 03:42:37 +0000

We’re in the middle of a fierce, Autumn storm on top of our little hill here. It got me thinking about my ‘Autumn’ Matryoshka Russian dolls. She was inspired by purple thunder clouds, fallen leaves, wet bamboo and watery golden sunlight. Here’s a bit about how I created her.

My Autumn Matryoshka focuses on four vintage kimono fabrics. Each of these pieces of fabric came into my collection as one-off scraps, no bigger than a postcard. Sometimes I try to image what the original kimonos might have looked like. I wonder what other details were contained in the full fabric designs. Aren’t they beautiful?

The faces for my matryoshkas were created using a combination of hand drawing and Photoshop. I think of the ‘Autumn’ face as being Japanese, with her deep brown eyes, warm skin tone, soft cherry lips, and salmon cheeks.

For the print on the back, I selected four colours and two little swatches from the kimono fabrics and combined them into a diamond print with my logo across the lower centre.

I’ve made her (and her ‘Summer’ and ‘Winter’ friends) into cushions, keyrings, postcards, magnets and bead strand kits. You can see them all in my Etsy shop. You can also see more photos of my Matryoshka’s here, in my flickr photos. Enjoy!

Autumn mornings

Lucy Patterson — Fri, 04 May 2012 05:33:52 +0000

We’re having the most gorgeous golden, fine Autumn days at the moment. Perfect blue skies and crisp chilly mornings. This morning I went for a regular walk that I do with a neighbour. I forgot to take my camera but I just realised that I’d taken some photos on the same walk last year that I never posted on my blog. I just had a look at them and discovered that they are from exactly a year ago tomorrow!

With this kind of weather there’s often a thick carpet of white mist lying across the wetlands in the bottom of the valley first thing in the morning that burns off once the sun gets on it.

Our walk takes us across all sorts of terrain – black sand dunes, native bush, along the side of a stream, and through a pine forest with lots of different fungi.

Can you see the millipede in the last photo?

Wishing you all a happy weekend.
Lucy x

Easter egg hunt

Lucy Patterson — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 07:42:58 +0000

I hope you’ve all had a lovely Easter. We’ve had a long weekend of perfect, golden Autumn weather.

We don’t have any kids in our household, so my partner and I were surprised (and delighted!) when we got up on Sunday morning to discover that Mum had done an Easter egg hunt for us! You’re never too old….

Mum had had great fun colour-matching the eggs so they were extra hard to spot! It wasn’t about big eggs or lots of chocolate, just about the thrill of the hunt!

As soon as we started looking for eggs I got all the same feelings that I used to get each Easter as a child when my brother would set off at a run and I’d get all panicky that I was missing out on finding all the eggs. That was until I realised that he was going so fast he was missing half of them! Our two different approaches turned out to be perfectly complementary.

Mum found all sorts of hidings places included cracks in an old saw horse, and an empty nest that she’d found in the garden the day before.

At the end of the hunt we had a lovely basket of little metallic eggs. Our husky, Silver, wished that dogs were allowed chocolate eggs too…

Here’s another egg hunt that we did one Spring Equinox.

2010: My year in blogging

Lucy Patterson — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 04:05:32 +0000

I started this blog back in April. Over the past months there have been many times when I haven’t managed to blog as often as I wanted (or, let’s face it, at all!), but looking back over all the posts I’ve done since I started, I have to say there are many things that I’m really proud of. So I thought I’d put together three little photo albums of “post thumbnails” for you to look at (with numbered clickable links below). Enjoy! And here’s to an even better year of blogging!

1. Matryoshka Kimono Dolls, 2. Colour palette: Green, 3. Tamarillo chutney, 4. Cutest of cute hats!, 5. West Coast adventure, 6. Hands-on dog food!, 7. Pirates treasure bag PART TWO, 8. Autumn, 9. My new crafting space, 10. Friendly cat toys, 11. Birthday pancakes, 12. Magical toadstools, 13. Bush bath bliss, 14. Coral, shell and bone, 15. Autumn Blues, 16. Big skies, 17. Garden meditation, 18. The joy of wood, 19. Gratitude, 20. Birthday bunny

1. My shop is now open!, 2. Cosy Friday evening, 3. Kimono paper tape PREVIEW!, 4. Happy weekend papercut, 5. Colour palette: Red, 6. Tin can lanterns, 7. Shop update: Tom Cats, 8. Spring love: magnolia blossoms, 9. Poultry PS, 10. …and the winner is…, 11. Display jars for treasures, 12. Pin board inspiration, 13. Monday’s inspiration: Honour, 14. Happy Equinox!, 15. Fresh start and a GIVEAWAY!, 16. Paper Fan Inspiration Cards, 17. Morocco on my mind, 18. Midwinter mandarin lanterns, 19. Rainbow eggs and a basket of flowers, 20. Vintage kimono palette

1. London by night, 2. Travelling feet, 3. Poultry Show, 4. Kimono paper tape PREVIEW!, 5. New things, 6. A new season…, 7. Hand carved stamps: lanterns and blossoms, 8. Monday’s Inspiration: Creativity, 9. Rob Ryan’s shop on Columbia Road, 10. Happy Christmas!, 11. Happy New Year!, 12. Plant skeletons, 13. Header artwork, 14. Paper Fan Inspiration Cards, 15. Earth Hour 2010, 16. Contact me, 17. Monday’s inspiration: Communication, 18. Pirate’s treasure bag, 19. More gratitude, 20. Olive Harvesting

Travelling feet

Lucy Patterson — Thu, 16 Dec 2010 02:32:52 +0000

As I said in yesterday’s post, I’m going to be blogging about my recent travels to Morocco, the UK and Germany over the next few weeks, but today, I’m just giving you a little preview taster to whet your appetites! Below is a whole series of photos I took of my feet during my travels…

This series is from Morocco. So many different kinds of tiles – in the patios, stairways and rooftops of traditional riads and dars where we stayed; in the great courtyard of an Islamic school in Fez; on the street of a town’s cobbled medina; and the pastel-bricked step of a pottery factory. Oh, and a monkey in the cedar forests of the Middle Atlas, sizing up my bag of peanuts!

These photos are all taken in the Black Forest in Germany where my half-sister and I stayed in a fairy tale 400 year-old traditional farmhouse. We spent the weekend walking through misty forests filled with Autumn leaves, mossy rocks, mushrooms, twisted roots, wild blueberries and chattering streams. Pure magic! Just wait till you see the farmhouse itself…

…And these photos are in the UK. The many different floors of the Victoria and Albert Museum, great ammonite fossils and sea-worn pebbles on the beaches of Exmoor, an ancient stone bridge and fallen berries on moss (also in Exmoor), and the floors of the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich (opposite where my brother lives and, more excitingly, where the most recent Pirates of the Caribbean film had just been shot!).

I’m slightly alarmed by how many of the photos feature the same pair of jeans and shoes… I’m ashamed to say, for a fairly seasoned traveller, I actually don’t travel lightly at all, and practically had my whole wardrobe with me, but you certainly wouldn’t know it! These photos must have all been taken on days when I was wearing my most comfortable, practical, walking clothes… : )

In Sofia Coppola’s film Lost in Translation, Charolotte remarks “…every girl goes through a photography phase, like horses, you know dumb pictures of your feet…” Well, it seems I’m still going through that phase! Somehow, photographing my feet in different locations has an irresistible immediacy that I still can’t quite get past.

A new season…

Lucy Patterson — Thu, 14 Oct 2010 14:33:54 +0000

Goodbye New Zealand Spring blossoms….

And hello Autumn in London, England!

Sorry I haven’t blogged for a while, I’ve been so busy getting ready for my trip. I’m going to be away for 6 weeks and will try and touch base with my blog whenever I can. I’m sure I’m going to have lots of wonderful things to share. A week in Morocco for starters! And a long weekend in a beautiful old farmhouse in the Black Forest in Germany… And of course London experiences too.

Before I set off on my trip I picked one of my Paper Fan Inspiration Cards. Here is what I got:

That seems pretty appropriate, doesn’t it? The card’s even got Autumn leaves on it, which wouldn’t seem like the obviously choice for ‘new beginnings’ (I’m surprised I didn’t illustrate the card with new Spring blossom, now I think about it!), but it works perfectly for me right now!

This trip feels like a really special time for me and somehow a new step or turning point in my life… Everything has just fallen into place so beautifully for it too. I can’t quite believe it!

I’m going to be running 5 Reiki workshops while I’m in the UK which I’m so happy about. I feel utterly lucky to be combining a wonderful holiday with doing the work that I love, and catching up with friends and family who I haven’t seen since I left London and moved back to New Zealand more than three years ago.

Speaking of that time in my life… When I first moved back to New Zealand, for almost a year, every single time I picked an Inspiration Card, I would get New Beginnings!

What ‘new beginnings’ are you welcoming into your life right now? I’d love to hear about them.

Happy Equinox!

Lucy Patterson — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 11:28:08 +0000

It’s the Spring Equinox here today and we’ve been having crazy stormy weather every day for the past week. Up on top of our hill it’s felt a little battering at times, with the wind roaring straight in off the Tasman Sea (often bringing lashing, horizontal rain or hail with it). Here are some photos I took on the Spring Equinox a couple of years ago when the weather was a little different….

We’d had some friends come to visit and decided to have a sort of “Easter egg hunt” for the kids to celebrate Spring. It’s funny living in the Southern Hemisphere where lots of seasonal celebrations have come from Northern Hemisphere traditions and so are out of synch with the seasons in our part of the world: Eggs and baby chicks at Easter when it’s actually harvest time…. Fake snow, reindeer and holly in the middle of Summer….

Here we were celebrating all the beautiful Spring flowers in our garden at this time of year, plus we’d just acquired 10 new baby chickens as I remember. We’d decided to do a Spring Treat Hunt at the last minute and had picked up whatever goodies we could from our local shop. I had great fun hiding them around the garden, matching them with different coloured flowers or appropriate locations. Hence the goldfish in the pond!

A bumble bee in the hollyhocks and an elephant in the allysum!

These might just be cheap, artificial sweets, but they colour-matched the irises perfectly!

Happy Equinox wherever you are – Spring or Autumn/Fall. Fingers crossed that the storm blows itself out for our weekend…

…and the winner is…

Lucy Patterson — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 00:57:38 +0000

CONGRATULATIONS to April Yedinak who has won the giveaway!

Here’s what April had to say about where she lives and what she’s loving about this time of year: “I live in Hodgenville, KY. Birthplace of U.S. President Abraham Lincoln. It is a small town with great people. We have finally had a break in the scorching heat and now it is sunny, breezy and beautiful. We have a long weekend for Labor Day and I intend to enjoy it as much as possible.”

Email me with your address, April, and your prize will be winging its way to you shortly.

Thank you so much to all of you who entered my very first giveaway. It was such a joy to read your comments each day. I felt really touched by how many of you stopped by – from all over the world – and shared a little bit of what you’re loving about this time of year. I wish each and every one of you could have won! : )

I hope you’re having a happy day wherever you are.
Lucy x

Rainbow eggs and a basket of flowers

Lucy Patterson — Sun, 05 Sep 2010 09:12:01 +0000

If you haven’t already entered the giveaway, don’t miss out! I’m picking the winner on Tuesday (New Zealand time). I can’t tell you how much I’m enjoying reading all your comments for the giveaway! Most of you are in the Northern Hemisphere and are loving the beginning of Autumn/Fall. It seems that for so many of you it’s the beginning of your favourite season.

Here are two more things I’m loving about Spring right now:

Rainbow eggs again! Once the Winter solstice has passed, our chooks steadily come back on the lay (having taken their annual holiday to moult and generally spruce up for the year ahead). We have a variety of different kinds of chickens (many of them rare breeds) and get a wonderful, pastel array of eggs, from palest blue and green (laid by our araucanas), to china white, and subtle shades of fawn and terracotta.

A basket of flowers from our garden. Daffodils, freesias and iris, magnolia, camellia, manuka and breath of heaven. I love the blending of pinks, yellows, purples and pale greens, with bold strokes of deep crimson…the perfect Spring palette!

These flowers are for the people of Christchurch and the Canterbury region of New Zealand which was hit by a big earthquake yesterday. You are in our thoughts.

Cosy Friday evening

Lucy Patterson — Fri, 03 Sep 2010 11:11:42 +0000

It’s Friday night and there’s a Spring storm shuddering against the house outside but inside we’re all snug and cosy. The fire is cranking in our wood stove…

…and there’s nothing like a cute, cuddly friend to make you feel happy! This is Keisha our shar pei cross. She’s a rescue dog and didn’t have a clue about being loved when we first got her. She seems to have figured it out along the way though… : )

Have a happy weekend, and don’t forget to enter the giveaway for your chance to win those vintage kimono goodies!