For the second part of my review looking at a decade of selling my work online I thought I would take a look at a few favourites that are currently available.
Long and square silk twill scarves.
To begin with let’s look at two of the first five scarves I painted for my online boutique. I painted the same design in five different colours. One sold within the first month of my shop going live. That was the yellow version. Then during the next six months the green one sold. And, at some point, and I can’t remember when, the pale honey coloured version went, but the pink and lilac versions are still on the shop some ten years later.
Early work, but still available!
As is the case with the early pink and lilac long scarves above, you can’t tell what’s going to be popular and what isn’t. Below, in this selection of five 90 x90 cm squares, the three on the left are recent pieces, but the two on the right are a couple of my personal all time favourites and they too have been on the shop for nearly nine years.
Five favourites all 90 x 90 cm square silk scarves.
It has surprised me how many of the sold scarves along the way that I have entirely forgotten, but I do remember those that were favourites as I painted them.
Two of the latest pieces added to my shop either side of the surprisingly cheerful model wearing an old favourite.
When I think about the body of my work and what has sold quickly and what hasn’t I have come to the conclusion that it is probably the photographs that make the difference, especially if they are interesting good pictures and particularly if they feature a model.
Anybody who knows me in real life knows that I am not big on marking so-called milestone events or celebrating significant dates, birthdays, Christmas, etc, but I am going to make an exception for once.
I am not having a party or anything like that, but I thought I’d just blog a couple of posts remembering some of my favourite scarves to mark my business being in existence for a * * * DECADE * * *.
If anybody had told when I launched ‘Agnes Ashe Silks’ I would still be in business 10 years down the road I would have fallen about laughing.
Back at the beginning I attended a week’s course ‘Starting a business and being self-employed’. One attendee, a helpful chap, told me and I quote “Nobody will fork out 95 quid for a scarf”.
Well, I have sold scarves for £95 and sold others too ranging from £45 to £125.
But back to my favourites. During the process of remembering and choosing my personal standouts I was pleased that I had kept each scarf’s product photo file in my ‘Sold’ folder. It turns out I had completely forgotten some. Perhaps not such standouts after all then, but on re-acquaintance I have been pleasantly surprised and included some of the forgotten.
Of course, much of my work is memorable to me particularly when the original inspiration is associated with specific places or specific works. For example there have been scarves inspired by medieval rood screens (Ranworth and Southwold), painted panels (Lady Drury’s Hawstead Panels) stained glass windows (Long Melford and Bury St Edmunds) and even golden coins (The Wickham Market Hoard at Ipswich Museum).
I have even taken inspiration from 20th century artists. This scarf, below, was inspired by an oil and pigmented wax picture painted by Paul Klee in 1940.
But I mustn’t neglect the floral scarves. There have been quite a few to choose from featuring my go-to motifs for flowers, leaves, curls and bows in various colour combinations using pinks, blues, turquoise, black and old gold.
It’s March and whatever the weather outside, it’s spring (well meteorological spring at least). There are daffodils and eventually there will be sun. I am wistfully thinking that I do not live in a version of a 1950’s Hollywood musical starring Doris Day, but am definitely in Suffolk . . . in 2023 . . . although I do believe I spy a few green shoots of creativity pushing through the layers of murk accumulated over winter.
For me these lengthening days bring an optimistic outlook and I find myself instinctively reaching for pots of dye containing brighter and stronger shades.
Adding colour to a muted background.
And, fuchsia pink is back in the mix. There’s also orange, splashes of lime green and even highlights of yellow.
A hot selection featuring fuchsia, orange, red and yellow.
Once I’ve selected the hot colours it is a case of working from one end of the scarf to the other transforming a muted background into a scarf with plenty of zing.
Oddly although it doesn’t look like it, in real life this scarf has quite an orange feel to it.
The final part of the silk-painting process is steaming and even with bright shades the fixing of the dye intensifies the colour.
With the beginning of spring comes Mother’s Day and there are daffodils aplenty to presented in bunches to lucky mums, but what of the so-called Mother’s Day traditional flower, the pink carnation?
If you have ever paused your busy life to consider the environmental impact of commercially grown cut flowers then you probably already know it’s not great. I decided to have a look at the growing of pink carnations that are coaxed into flower over two months early to be available for Mother’s Day.
Pinks (small and hardy) – a member of the carnation family flowering in my garden in May.
Apparently, pink carnations were the choice of the wealthy Victorians with greenhouses and gardeners able to nurture carnations to bloom as early as March. That is they could afford a heated greenhouse that keeps the temperature at seven degrees celsius or above for the entire winter. I think you can see where I am going with this. The wealthy Victorian had access to both cheap labour and cheap fuel and was more concerned with ‘progress’ than social and environmental concerns. Fast-forward 150 years and the idea of heating greenhouses for out-of-season food let alone cut flowers has become contentious.
Mother’s Day from a few years ago with forced tulips from the Netherlands and seasonal English grown daffodils.
Naturally, research and new ideas and new technology are being busily discussed by the UK government and associated farming and horticulture key bodies with a target to reach zero carbon emissions by 2050. Whereas the Dutch horticultural industry aims to be CO2 neutral by 2040. Since 2020 they’ve had an experimental, emission-free greenhouse up and running. They have been researching all aspects of growing food and flowers under glass with greenhouses constructed from smart materials using heating from ground source heat pumps or air source heat pumps and drawing electricity from solar panels. The are also experimenting with the use and conservation of water, the cultivating of new varieties of plants to better suit ‘new’ conditions and finally to managing pests and diseases in a manner to minimise horticulture’s environmental impact.
But is isn’t all only talk here back in the UK as you can already buy British grown tulips in bloom during March from Smith and Munson who are a family run business producing premium quality flowers. They are well on the way down the road in reducing those negative environmental impacts associated with commercial horticulture. They grow their full range of tulips hydroponically, their glasshouses are heated with biomass boilers and their coldstores are powered by electricity from solar panels. Sadly, they do not grow the pink carnations that would have been the favourite for a Victorian mother as these days carnations are not the most fashionable choice for a mum’s bouquet.
Not pink flowers, but a pink scarf. Is the model pondering environmental issues, probably not – it was a very cold and windy photoshoot in March on the Suffolk coast and not a flower in sight.
Last month I carried out a colour check on my stock. I guess it was because it was the beginning of another year and seemed a natural time to review the colours situation.
Over the years I have found that my creative choices often result in some colours turning up more frequently than others. Blues, pinks, greens, purples, gold and turquoise make regular appearances, but less so yellows and red.
Della Red – long, silk twill, hand painted silk scarf.
And, the result of my little survey was I noticed there was no predominately red or even a partially red silk scarf for sale on my shop.
That situation has now been rectified with not an entirely red scarf, but one featuring an array of beautiful tones of crimson and burgundy with a touch of scarlet. And, when I was painting it last week I wondered why I didn’t use these darker reds more often.
It is almost 10 years since I opened my online shop selling hand painted silk scarves. And, it is nearly 30 years since I first learnt to paint silk. You might think that when somebody spends hours designing and painting creative pieces they would remember them all, but that isn’t so. Even the creative process when practiced routinely over many years does not see every design endeavour being slotted into the memory bank.
Three scarves; one predominately turquoise, one with turquoise accents and the third with a wide turquoise border.
I realised this the other day when sorting and clearing packets of old photographs. I spotted a long-forgotten colleague wearing . . . , and I looked again closely, yes, wearing one of my scarves. I had utterly forgotten I’d ever painted it. It was definitely made before my move to Germany and the subsequent purchase of my large stainless steel steamer on a visit to Cologne. I have no recall of painting the silk, let alone steaming it although that must have been done in mother’s old pressure cooker.
Another couple of scarves; one from nearly ten years ago and the other from about seven years ago.
So much happens to humans on a daily basis, that much trivia is automatically dumped, but it has genuinely surprised me that I have painted and entirely forgotten some of my early work. Mind you that’s all changed. Since the invention of and the easy access to digital photography, together with the requirement for my shop to have images of my scarves, there now exists a visual record of every scarf and other pieces of silk I’ve painted over the last decade.
And, as you may have noticed from these photos, that although the expression has changed, there has been a favourite colour which has often featured over the years. Interestingly, despite it being an awkward colour to accurately photograph, I have found myself returning to a palette featuring turquoise over and over again. And, I expect there will be more to come in the future.
You may be here as a regular reader of my wittering, but on the other hand you may be here as you’ve recently tried to access my online shop AgnesAshe.co.uk and found nothing. Or, perhaps you’ve seen some version of ‘sorry, can’t find this site’ that your web browser displays when a website has gone MISSING.
And gone missing is exactly what happened for over 10 days. It’s not only my shop that went missing from the Internet, but the ‘support’ people at the hosting platform went AWOL and the domain registration company were initially less than helpful too.
The very good news is that now it’s all back and running as normal. And, incidentally, within a few hours I received an order.
Painting a scarf in the afternoons after each morning’s computer skirmish.
It has been a strange experience as this was the first major, significant problem I’ve had in nearly 10 years of selling my scarves on the Internet through my own designated shop. And, finding the shop, a daily part of my life, to be absent, offline, disappeared, has been a strange, stressful and somewhat unnerving experience.
Obviously, as soon as I realised there was a serious problem I checked my settings, the stuff I had access to and the stuff I understood. At one point I even found my site had been blocked and may even have been squatted! Reading this made me feel queasy, although fortunately it turns out that was not the case. However, worst of all was the realisation I did not have the skills or knowledge to fix the problem myself.
I hadn’t meant there to be so much blue, but guess that was the mood. Surprised I didn’t cover the whole design in red!
In the end, ten days after having eventually received both the wrong guidance and the wrong solution and feeling completely at a loss, my site was fixed last Saturday, and not by me. It turns out I could have managed if the support instructions had not been out of date or if the domain company hadn’t assumed I was a total idiot. I am not a computer person and certainly have no idea what’s going on ‘under the bonnet’ as they say, but I can follow clearly set out instructions.
I will never know what happened to trigger the disappearance of my shop, but the resetting/configurationing were not in themselves complicated, but you did need to know the ‘new’ information. Anyway, with fingers crossed, let’s hope the matter is now closed. Reflecting on the episode as a whole, I think it has been the issue of autonomy that has been most unnerving, but I will just have to get used to that.
In conclusion, and more broadly speaking, the overwhelming prevalence of and dependance on information technology in our lives is not an entirely benign situation when even simple faults are difficult to locate and awkward to rectify. And, that is all a minor concern compared to the threat of cybercriminals when you consider the Royal Mail has very recently been unable to send packages abroad due to an extortionate ransomware cyber-attack.
This coming weekend, the first weekend in December, the folk at Make It British have organised an online Pop-Up event.
Working with the platform ‘Tresstle’, this event will be similar to a virtual market featuring goods made in the UK with many of those products handmade too.
Yes, I shall be showing at this Christmas Virtual Market.
The Pop-Up opens on Friday, 2nd December and closes on Sunday, 4th December 2022. Some of the business ‘stalls’ will have special offers whilst others are offering free postage or a percentage discount.
Message from the organisers at Make It British.
To access the virtual market shoppers need to register (simply enter your email via the link below) to receive further information and the event’s Discount Code.
You may remember that in recent months I have posted about painting a couple of scarves with a tree-like design. Here’s another silk scarf in this, my ‘Jiann’, series. Reviewing the photos of my working process, I can see I was unconsciously inspired by a bunch of flowers gently fading away in the studio at the time of painting.
This is a mildly surprising revelation as I’d thought I’d pulled this deep and rich palette of burgundy, claret and port wine colours solely from my imagination. Silly me.
Drawn out and beginning to add colour.
The style and design is the same as Jiann Burnt Orange that you can just see in the photo below. It’s the orange textile hanging behind the pot of paint brushes. It was so hung in a prominent place to remind me what I was supposed to be aiming for.
Photo tucked behind on the left shows the first layer finished. Main photo shows the difference with the splodges of orange and red added.
You can sort of see it is the same design, but as is often the way by the time I get to painting the fourth or fifth in a series it’s all becoming bigger and looser and, dare I say it, more splodgy.
Anyway this muted red version is finally finished, steamed and on the shop.
The beginning of autumn often brings a change in the general feel of everyday life. I am always surprised as although the days have been gradually shortening for the last couple of months, it seems as all of a sudden the mornings and evenings are darker.
With these seasonal changes I usually update my shop taking stock of the different colours available and adjust my homepage to reflect the new season. And, this time, I have also added my latest small, blue scarf – Jiann Ink.
Jiann Ink on the frame before steaming.
It is one of a series that I have recently finished. I guess this blue feels more like winter than autumn, but we won’t go down that route yet despite the fact that some of us have already been reminded by craft fairs etc. about C. Sorry I can’t bring myself to mention that festive occasion quite this early.
Well, this has been a week I wouldn’t want to repeat.
C O M P U T E R problems.
It’s now Friday and September and I feel I’ve been out of the loop for months not just a week. The problems started with my computer after I did the system ’emergency’ update. You might even have heard about it in the news. Apple issued a warning that required people to update their computers and their phones.
My updates went fine until I switched on the computer the next day and my security software starting informing me my computer was vulnerable and now unprotected. Oh the stress. And, it was particularly irritating as each time I thought I had followed the instructions to solve the problem and it had succeeded, 10-15 minutes later, it all kicked off again. To cut a long saga short, and with fingers crossed, I think it’s finally working properly again.
Now I know you’re all thinking these days we can post to our blogs from our phones and folks like me can also similarly access our online businesses too, BUT last weekend I dropped my phone. Now it isn’t working properly, and that’s an understatement! Along with a damaged screen half the functions have disappeared and you need the patience of a saint coaxing it into life.
Rather annoyingly it is going to mean buying a replacement, but the good news is I’ve written this post on my computer and all is operating normally. I am relieved as I have also been able to check the status of my online shop – looks okay, hooray.
In the end, all I can say is that the current hot orange of my shop’s homepage somewhat reflects how I have felt about modern technology this past week. Of course, I’ve been more hot and bothered than hot and orange although the security warnings did light up my screen with orange text.
Agnes Ashe 