Nevertheless…

As you might know, I designed a line of tea towels (you can find them on my Etsy page), last fall. It was a lot of fun thinking about the designs, working them out and then selling them… A lot of them!

A few months ago, I was poking around an antiques store with a friend and spotted a box of old engravings, some hand-coloured, and some not. Probably late 1800’s or early 1900’s. I love looking at these old prints and thinking about what I can do with them. I leafed through the pages until I found this adorable little girl. I knew she would become something fun! She’s a tiny little thing, about 3x4 inches. But she needed a little work before she achieved greatness.

I scanned her in at high resolution, so that I could play with the dimensions and make her bigger without losing a lot of detail. I added an old print of a globe that she could stand on instead of just a simple ball, and photoshopped it so that it would look like she was standing on top of the world.

But the print still needed something. I played around with some different sayings in different fonts, but nothing struck me. I had one towel made up, but it wasn’t just quite right. Then I was listening to the news, and heard Senator Mitch McConnell chastising Senator Elizabeth Warren, and in recounting it, he said, “Nevertheless, she persisted.” I knew that’s what I needed to add to the design to make it work.

I amped up the colour a little, cleaned up a few spots on the background, added a border, and came up with this:

Funnily, when it’s printed out on cotton/linen, the background looks like an old parchment-coloured linen fabric, complete with the small imperfections. It’s really amazing what we can do with digital printing!

The tea-towels are 50/50 cotton/linen and are printed with water-based, non-toxic inks. They are fully washable and can be thrown in the dryer, but I like to hang them on the clothesline. The towels measure about 18x24 inches. A few people I know are buying them to frame for their daughters and grand-daughters. Over this past weekend, I received more than 25 orders for this tea towel, and if you’d like to order one, click here.