Hampshire Open Studios: a date for your diary

This year I’m hosting a shared Hampshire Open Studios with landscape artist Ben Winter. I’m very exciting to be sharing the space with Ben’s work, his paintings are nature based as well, but very different from mine. They are bold, colourful and full of heat.

We’ll be opening the doors at The Old Post Office from Friday 22 August to bank holiday Monday, 25th August.

We’ll have paintings big and small for sale, some prints and we’ll also be selling online on my website if you can’t make it in person. To find more of Ben’s wonderful paintings visit his website here: https://www.benwinterart.com or his Instagram page @benwinterart.

At the show I’ll have new fabric designs, original paintings, as well as prints and of course lots of beautiful tea towels, bags and tablecloths. We may even have cake!

We’ll be hosting a private view on the evening of Thursday 21st so do put the date in your diary and tell us you’re coming. Otherwise, hopefully see you over the bank holiday weekend!

Royal Academy Summer Exhibition

The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is already open and offering it’s annual delights of paintings, sculpture, architecture and photography.

If you’re going up to London over the next couple of months, remember to pop in to the Royal Academy’s jam-packed Summer Exhibition.

This year the exhibition is been curated by architect Farshid Moussavi, who has woven architecture throughout the exhibition rather than consigning it to one room. I’m delighted that an artist I follow and love, Frances Featherstone has a couple of paintings in the show. Frances paints her subjects in bed from above. Her paintings are cosy intimate and colourful while also being hugely relatable. We all have times we’d like to dive under a clean fluffy duvet and retreat into a book.

The Summer Exhibition is on until 17 August with over 1,700 works on display (all for sale), from famous names to the artist next door.

https://www.francesfeatherstone.co.uk

What a week it was at RHS Chelsea 2025!

A wonderful week on the Horatio’s Garden RHS Chelsea stand for my botanical linen panels

Horatio’s Garden always have the same huge and well positioned stand at RHS Chelsea Flower Show and this year, instead of selling stock, the charity decide to use the space to meet and greet, to raise awareness and generate interest in this wonderful organisation.

As a result the stand had to be stunning and a lovely place to hang out and learn more about what this spinal unit garden charity actually does. I’ve been amiss in not telling you - in case you don’t know, Horatio’s Garden has been installing huge and amazing gardens with garden rooms onto the side of every spinal unit in the country. There are eleven spinal units across the UK, patients stay in them for up to 18 months and the charity has currently built these patients eight large gardens. One in Sheffield is about to be opened and there are only three more remaining gardens to being planned.

Behind the scenes, making of the floral linen panels for Horatio’s Garden and Country Living stand at RHS Chelsea 2025.

All in all, the complete effect of the wire arches, the flowers and the linen background was stunning. Everybody loved it and we enjoyed a week of broad smiles and queues to be photographed on the magic bench.

I loved working on this project. I believe strongly in the power of plants to improve our health and make us better, and love working in public art. The more people we can reach with images of flowers the more joy we share.

Horatio’s Garden stand at RHS Chelsea 2025

Katy Botanicals fabric panel for Horatio’s Garden, Chelsea 2025

Some guidance on repeat patterns and how to measure them

What is a repeat pattern?

Most of the fabrics and wallpapers you see with a pattern on them will have been designed as a repeat pattern.

Repeat patterns enable the manufacturer of the fabric or the wallpaper to print an even, duplicate design across the whole surface without showing any gaps or joins. Usually you won’t know the pattern comes from one tile or image that is then run again and again across the paper or fabric, it’s quite fun to try to find the repeat in design, it’s sometimes very hard.

How to measure a repeat pattern..

Often if you’re working with an interior designer, having curtains made up or a sofa re-upholstered, the curtain maker or upholsterer will ask you the measurements of the repeat pattern, so they can work out how much fabric to buy.

This is because they will want to match the pattern across the seams and need to know how much fabric or wallpaper they will have to sacrifice to match this pattern. If the pattern is a small repeating dot, then the fabric or paper will only need to be lined up by a few cm, but if the pattern is a large floral or botanical design, then they may have to sacrifice 50cm of the wallpaper or fabric to line the images up across the join until they matches. This will mean having to buy more fabric to accommodate the bits you cut off to line up the print.

Below are two different scales of the same Nettle design. The one with the stripe is a smaller repeat, so will need a bit less fabric when making up. Can you see the difference in the scale of the print?

Measuring a repeat

Most fabric or wallpaper suppliers will be able to tell you what the repeat pattern measurements are if you ask. However, if this is not the case, or if you’ve inherited a piece of fabric and you’d like to work it out yourself, it’s very easy if you follow these steps:

1. Lay the fabric or wallpaper out on flat surface like a table.

2. Look carefully at the design and try to find an image or detail that is easy to spot, like a bird or a flower.

3. When you’ve found an image that you can find again, look for the next exact duplicate of that detail above the one you’ve chosen. Not one that looks similar but exactly that detail, this bit is important.

4. When you’ve found exactly that detail again above or below, measure the distance between those two points vertically. That is your vertical repeat.

5. Then find a detail in the design that you can find again, and measure the distance horizontally between those two points or images. That is your horizontal repeat measurement.

6. Now write down the vertical and horizontal measurements, this is the size of your repeat pattern.

In the images below of my Wren design I’ve added a green square around the repeat pattern tile. Can you see the white and orange flower that’s turned away from us at the top and the bottom of the square? That’s what I’ve used as my guide for the vertical repeat. Then there’s a white flower with blue stamens, next to the bird, that’s what I’ve used to measure my horizontal repeat. Those two measurements, the vertical and the horizontal, give you the size and dimensions of your pattern repeat.

Here are some repeat patterns by the masters of fabric design, from the Arts and Crafts Movement at the turn of the last century, William Morris and Charles F A Voysey. Can you spot the repeat pattern in their designs?

William Morris, Honeysuckle design

C F A Voysey, Apothecary’s Garden