My first seamless repeat, that I’m planning to enter in Spoonflower’s artistic vision contest. (It’s a little last-minute, because I have to enter by 3 p.m. EDT today, but if you have any suggested edits before then, please let me know!)
I wasn’t sure what to do for such an open-ended topic, and I’m still such a novice artist that I’m not sure what my overall artistic vision is. But this design is pretty personal to me, so I think it works.
During the year I was being treated for breast cancer (I’m fine now), I ended up thinking a lot about my garden, and about how cancer cells grow, and how unbridled growth can sometimes be a bad thing.
I wrote a romance, Perennial, about a woman who’s just received a breast cancer diagnosis, and meets a handsome man in a flower shop; their relationship evolves over the course of her treatment, and while I was undergoing chemo, I worked on that book and made little sketches to go with it — some botanical, some cancer-related.
In this fabric design, I’ve included scilla for early spring, that moment after a long winter when the ground is suddenly a carpet of blue. Spiderwort, because while some people think it’s a weed, it’s also sold in garden stores, and I find this prairie native beautiful — it’s always finding its way through the cracks in my paths. And anemone, because after three years of failing, I seem to have finally gotten an anemone to live through the winter.
So overall, this fabric is a meditation on cancer and spring. And as a bonus, the structures of the breast are included as well; they look like an joyous dahlia to me, flowers that bloom for a long autumnal season, after you might have thought the garden was done.
(Kavi helped me translate my scilla and spiderwort sketches to Procreate, along with one of the cancer cells, and then I took over from there. I’m getting better at the tech, though I still make TONS of mistakes, which slows me down. Ah well.)
((I do wonder whether anyone other than me would actually WANT a fabric with flowers and cancer cells on it, but hey, it’s supposed to be my artistic vision, so I suppose it’s fine if it’s just me.))
