Yellow

I've wanted to work with some curves in English paper piecing for so long now, and last month, I finally launched into designing something where I could use them and I'm finding these flowers so incredibly joyful to make! They were inspired by some new bed linen.

A few months ago, after over a decade of having completely plain white bed linen, I suddenly craved some colour, quite unexpectedly, triggered by walking past some cushions and throws in John Lewis (which makes me think it is probably not safe for my bank balance to walk past things in future). I've never owned any of these curious bolster cushions before and chose them purely for the colour and then was delighted to find that there's a practical reason for their existence - they are so comfy and supportive to rest against when reading or sewing!

I've read so many research studies over the years saying that changing things - whether it's the route you take to work or the order that you get dressed in - is good for the synapses in the brain and I now feel convinced that a complete change of bed linen colour every decade is the same. Every time I walk into the room I feel surprised and delighted by the splashes of egg-yolky yellowness*, doubly so on realising that my book cover matched the bed linen!

Our bedroom is very plain, even with the newly acquired spatterings of egg yolk and I decided that I wanted to create something in a similar palette to hang on the wall. The duvet cover has a few panels of interlocking flowers embroidered onto it, which you can see below - so I decided to base my design on this.

It hasn't really ended up being the same, but it's definitely a nod to the original inspiration.

I'm planning on releasing this as a pattern, just as soon as I've finished sewing it together myself (which is proving to be very slow, not because the piecing is overly time consuming, but just because I've been working really long hours over the last month), but the Easter holidays have already offered up some time for sociable hand-sewing while watching this wonderful film (no knowledge/love of golf required - it's just wonderful in its own right) with our children and then catching up on the televised election questions and debates in the evening.

Finally,  I feel curiously compelled to talk about emoticons as there are 300 new emoji soon to be released with iOS 8.3 (that's the iPhone operating system, but I'm guessing similar are available on other devices?) and I feel bizarrely excited by this! I was very late in embracing emoticons, mainly for slightly snooty reasons of feeling that they didn't look pleasingly designed and also because whenever I saw those garish yellow faces (pictured below - alarmingly similar in colour to my current sewing project!), it just made me think of the 1980s acid house smiley face and I couldn't quite work out what its relevance was in 2014. And then there's the whole thing of why use a picture when there are so many wonderful words. But regular exposure therapy and stuffing yourself into 140 characters on Twitter on a regular basis changes that slightly. I now love how much a simple picture can convey and there's a whole new satisfaction to be gained in trying to communicate an entire message solely through the use of pictures in a text - it's like a game of Pictionary being thrown into your day at random times.

I would say that I am now a relatively enthusiastic user of them when texting, most especially with my daughter, husband and sister (I have also found that sending my husband a picture of a single smiling poo with no accompanying words after a disagreement is actually far more effective than an apology for quickly restoring equilibrium - pictured above). However, I do have all sorts of inexplicable self-imposed rules for appropriate usage of emoticons stored in my head. I read yesterday that they're likely to become more widely used by businesses in the coming years, which feels like an odd thing. What do you think of emoticons? (nb. I've found that calling them 'emoticons' rather than 'emoji' in front of a young person may elicit much snorted laughter and scoffing. There is nothing like having a teenager in your life to make you feel very, very old). I think they're possibly very much like Marmite (emoticons, not teenagers).

And if you're wondering why a smiling poo exists in the emoji keyboard, I read yesterday that a pile of poo is considered good luck in Japan and that at the time that Apple created the first set of emojis they were trying to break into the Asian marketplace.

Florence x

* Colour link memory: when I was about ten, my aunt bought me an umbrella in exactly this colour and I always remember her saying that she enjoyed the thought of people watching an egg yolk scuttling along the road from an upstairs window. As an adult, I am on the QV** for a sighting of a moving egg yolk out in the street, but am yet to see one. I'd quite like to.

**I know shamefully little French beyond GCSE level, but being 'on the QV' is one of my favourite family expressions for being hyper vigilant at all times, taken from the French words 'qui vive' which translates literally as 'who lives', but which essentially means to be on the lookout and question 'Who goes there?', I think it may be a relatively common term in English language now, but I personally hadn't heard it until my sister jokingly said it in conversation several years ago when posing for a photo where she was peering out at something suspiciously and announced to me that she was on the QV.