Each month we get a glimpse behind the scenes of our Scrap Girls Club designers, and this month’s designer is Elisha Barnett!
1. How did you come up with the name of your club?
When I design, a name is one of the first things I start out with. I have an idea in mind, and I give it a name. I have to name it something in order to save my work, right? My first thought for the club was to design a collection around a set of my great-grandmother’s dishes, which I have inherited. The name of the pattern is “Wayside.” The name evoked thoughts of wandering wooded paths, out-of the way places, and finding the unexpected. However, as I was gathering pieces for my inspiration board, I was led in a different direction, and the name just wasn’t working for me, but I stuck with it just to keep it consistent. About halfway into the design process, I knew I needed to change it. I did a little freewriting exercise in my notebook, which ended with a string of word associations: spring, summer, vacation, theme park, carnival, fair. As soon as I wrote the word “fair,” I knew I had my new name, Mayfair.
Image sources:
Flower cone – http://www.marthastewart.com/266074/flower-cones
Murray bike ad – http://carlahoag.wordpress.com/2010/10/15/murray-bicycle-ad/
Sunny Day Windmill by Yover – http://painting.about.com/u/sty/submissiongallery/painting-photos-challenge2/Sunny-Day-Windmill-by-Yover.htm
May Day flowers – FTD.com
May Day illustration by Mary Blair – http://jennywrendesigns.blogspot.com/2010/05/first-day-of-may.html
Hummel Figurine – Replacements.com
Oil Painting THE AURA OF AUTUMN 3 By Leonid Afremov – http://afremov.com
2. What inspired the colors in your club?
Since this Club was coming out in May, I wanted to celebrate the month of May. I thought I’d start with May Day, and I did a Google image search with that term. I found the “Happy May Day” illustration done by renowned Disney artist Mary Blair, which instantly attracted me. I pulled my color palette from this image.
3. Where did you find the inspiration for this club?
The images in the inspiration board above, as well as other illustrations by Mary Blair, inspired the patterns and embellishments in the collection. I found inspiring images on peko-chan’s Flikr site and at Magic of Mary Blair. You can see in the images below how Mary Blair’s wonderful patterns influenced the patterns in my papers, and how the elements in my inspiration board translated into embellishments.
4. The club includes several products. Did you start and complete each one before moving on to the next?
The collection was pretty much completed first. The Mayfair Clusters Embellishment Mini came out of the frames and cluster work from layouts I made while working on the collection.
As I continued to make layouts, I created more embellishments, word art and papers. For example, when I made the layout below, it originally had in it the windmill embellishment. But I felt that it needed a castle, so I the pink one you see there, and a blue one to go with it! As I added more embellishments, paper and word art, the collection started bulging at the seams. I pulled some out and built the additional products around them.
5. What was your favorite thing to design?
It has to be the word art mini! The first pieces I designed were “bluebird on my shoulder” and “what a wonderful day,” and they were part of the collection. I liked them a whole lot, and knew that I could build an individual product from them. I enjoyed arranging the text and embellishments into little whimsical clusters.
6. If you could pick only one word to describe your club, what would that word be?
Here’s how I describe the collection on the product pages: The Mayfair collection of products is inspired by the freshest spring air, the sunniest summer days, and the happiest places on earth!
If I were to narrow it down to just one word, I’d have to choose HAPPY.
I hope you enjoy this club. I enjoyed creating it for you!
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