My First Pattern Collection

I’ve been hard at work behind the scenes on my first collection of repeating patterns, and it’s finally ready to share. I’ve poured so much of myself into this project over the last 9 months, sneaking away to my studio before my family was up on weekend mornings, and after my son was in bed during the week. It’s really exciting to see it finally come together!

This collection is titled Prairie Life and it’s inspired by the charm of small towns and the simplicity of prairie life. Every pattern is connected to my memories of growing up on the prairies and I thought long and hard about the things that made prairie life special.

The hero pattern of this collection is Small Town. Because I love making maps and drawing buildings, a pattern based on rural architecture seemed like a natural starting point. Each of these buildings existed at one time or another in the town that I am from, Zenon Park, Saskatchewan. I was really pleased with the way my graphite lines turned out when I converted my drawings to vectors for this pattern.

Grid Roads is a small and delicate blender print inspired by an arial view of the straight, intersecting lines of country roads.

Big Sky is inspired by one of my favourite things about the prairies: a perfectly straight horizon line and a great big sky. I took many photos and drew lots of different styles of clouds before landing on this version. I like the effect of having some of the clouds outlined while others are only shapes.

There are quite a lot of honey farms where I’m from, and the white, creamy honey they produce is unlike anything else I’ve had. Because I have several directional prints in this collection, I wanted to be sure to include a few that were more scattered and multi directional. A pattern of bees milling about felt like a perfect fit and so Busy Bees was born. I really like the pop of blue in this one.

I knew I wanted to include some sort of delicate polkadot as a blender print for this collection. This one is inspired by berry picking. Although we occasionally picked strawberries and raspberries, saskatoon berries that grew in wild bushes along the edges of fields are what I remember harvesting as a child.

Although as a gardener I don’t love having a yard full of dandelions, I do have a bit of an affinity for them. I really enjoy how they look so different from one stage to the next throughout their lives. So much fun to draw! They’re also just so common and prolific in my childhood memories. I remember picking bouquets of them from empty lots in town, and hunting for perfectly intact spheres of their seeds that I could blow away and make wishes on. This pattern is simply called Dandelions:

When I think of stripes in the context of prairie life, my mind immediately conjures a picture of swaths in a field after harvesting.

One of my favourite times of the year happens in late July and August, when all the crops are in bloom and there is colour and flowers everywhere. One of prettiest is alfalfa, which produces fields of little purple flowers. It holds a special place in my heart because my parents grew alfalfa and also raised leaf cutter bees to pollinate it.

When I was home last summer, I spent an afternoon driving around on back roads with my brother, collecting flowers to draw. I ended up with tons of reference material for this pattern. I knew I wanted it to be a multidirectional print and everything came together when I combined drawings of flowers that were filled and coloured with others that were just line work.

A collection about the prairies wouldn’t be complete without a pattern inspired by golden wheat fields. This is Bearded Wheat:

I designed each of these patterns in 2 different colourways, but I’ll save those for another post as this one has gotten quite long. Thanks for reading to the end!