Tea Towels by Jo Brown

I have a new range of products in my shop - tea towels.
So, maybe you don’t know this about me, but I trained as a textile designer, and I specialised in print. I learned how to do patterns in repeat, the old fashioned way, with tracing paper and cutting up designs. Yes folks, it was pre computer days….. Now you can do it fairly easily with photoshop, which is great for block repeats. (where the pattern repeats directly below and beside itself in a regular pattern)

BUT the thing is, I never did like patterns in repeat. I always wanted them to look as if they weren’t in repeat. so i would either do a huge design so that it wasn’t obvious where the repeat was, or make it a brick or half drop repeat so it wasn’t quite as obvious.

So I sold textile designs for a while, and then became an illustrator. Now I am also making products for my shop, and I recently made these tea towels. When you are printing tea towels you can do a Panel Print. Just a unit to fit the shape, with allowances for hems. It doesn’t have to repeat, as long as you have enough artwork to fill the space. Yippee!

Pictured above are the first of my tea towel designs, currently available in my Folksy shop, for £12, link to shop here, but I have a very small amount of each as I am a small batch producer.

I have made a set of 5 designs, I say set but they don’t relate to each other only in that they are things I like. 
The 5 designs are:

Happy Pandas.
I used one repeat that I had made from my popular panda cards. Actually it was a painting that looked like a textile, made into a card, now an actual textile.
This one is a repeat. Thanks Photoshop, no tracing required. Please forgive the repeat-ness of it, but i thought it was pretty.

Happy Tomato. this one has individual tomatoes scattered or splattered over the design. Each one is different with its own personality. You can see the scratchy brush marks. And yes that is how I wanted to arrange them. Not neatly. Also there is one green tomato, for the Whistlestop cafe.

 Blue Pigeons is the same ish as my popular blue pigeons print, quirky blue birds with lots of character - but Big. This is what I mean by Panel print, there is no suggestion of it repeating, it is like a picture. Note the side-eye.

Love Cats! This design is a little different.
This design comes from a gouache and watercolour painting I made of lots of cats and I wanted to keep it as much like the original as possible, it is landscape in format.
You can see the original on my desk. I like that the quality of the digital printing is so good you can see the different brushstrokes and little bits of pattern that I added in to the background.

Happy Hens 
Based on my Happy Hens digital print, this is lots of different hens or the same hens looking a different way. You decide. You can look at it for a long time, while you’re doing the drying up.
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Tea towels are digitally printed on 309gsm half Panama Cotton,- half panama is the weave pattern, very densely woven and sturdy.
Size 68cm x 45cm. approx with hanging tag and washing instructions label. Designed and printed in the UK.
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I hope you like them, I'm looking forward to designing the next range.

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