Coastal Curiosities - The Story Behind the Collection

The Day That Started It All

It was late February, that in-between time when winter hasn't quite let go but you can feel something shifting. We drove to Bridlington on one of those cold, bright days that the East Yorkshire coast does so well, and walked along the beach with the sea roaring beside us.

We were looking for sea glass and interesting shells, the kind of slow, purposeful wandering that has become one of our favourite things about living here. Six months into life near the Humber Estuary, we were still pinching ourselves. Still catching each other's eye and thinking, this is actually our life now.

The beach was quiet. Just us, the sea, and whatever the tide had left behind.

My daughter has always had an eye for the beautiful and the small, the things most people walk past. That day she was crouching down, turning shells over in her hands, holding them up to the light. We started looking at the patterns on them properly. The ridges, the spirals, the way each one was completely different and completely perfect. And then we wandered into one of the little shell shops along the seafront, the kind that smell of salt and sun cream even in February, and she was completely enchanted.

I bought a few shells to take home. And somewhere on that drive back along the coast, Coastal Curiosities began.

From Beach to Sketchbook

The shells came home with us and went straight onto my desk.

I'd been rediscovering the joy of my sketchbook after almost a year of creative hiatus, that slow, gentle process of remembering that drawing is something I love, not something I have to perform. This felt like exactly the right subject to ease back into. No pressure, no brief, just shells and time.

I laid them out one by one and started with pencil, finding the shapes, getting a feel for each one before committing to ink. Then came the fineliners, working over the pencil, building up the detail that makes each shell so endlessly fascinating. The ridges, the whorls, the delicate patterning that nature somehow gets exactly right every time.

I played with different nib sizes to create depth, finer lines for the delicate details, slightly heavier ones for the outlines and shadows. I put on something calm to listen to. And then I just zoned out completely and into the drawing.

There's a particular kind of stillness that comes with that kind of work. When your hand is moving, and your mind is quiet, and you're not thinking about anything except the thing in front of you. It's one of the reasons I draw. It's one of the reasons I think creativity is healing.

Page by page, the shells filled my sketchbook. And I knew, even then, that something good was coming.

The Making of the Collection

The sketchbook pages went straight into the scanner.

Vectorising hand-drawn linework is one of my favourite parts of the process, watching those pencil and fineliner illustrations become crisp, scalable artwork that can go anywhere and do anything. Every intricate detail of those shells, every variation in line weight, preserved perfectly in vector form. That's the magic of working this way.

At the time, there was a Spoonflower challenge running called Beachy Boho, and something about the brief clicked immediately with what I had in front of me. Shells and a coastal boho palette felt like a natural fit. I wanted to play with texture and layering, building depth into the main repeat in a way that felt rich and considered rather than flat. The decision to keep the shells in deep navy against sandy, warm-toned backgrounds was deliberate; I wanted them to really sing, to have that contrast that makes you look twice.

The rest of the collection grew from playing. Stripes, because a beautiful stripe with a gentle wave to it never goes out of fashion. A tossed shell design, because a good tossed repeat is always a wardrobe staple of any collection. Each piece a little looser, a little more instinctive, a joyful way of waking myself back up after a year away from pattern design.

Coastal Curiosities wasn't planned from start to finish. It unfolded. And that felt exactly right.

What This Collection Means to Me

Coastal Curiosities is more than a collection of patterns. It's a marker.

It was created at a time when I was rediscovering who I was, waking up after a long winter, in a new home, with new inspirations and a real pull towards a new calling. I was journalling a lot during that season. Working out where I found inner peace. What being on the coast does to me. What I actually want to say with my work now that I finally have the space and the stillness to ask the question.

This collection is the start of acknowledging all of that. Of capturing it.

Looking back now, even just a few months on, I can see how much I've grown since those first shell sketches. How much I'm learning as I lean deeper into designing, into defining my style, into understanding who I want to be as I put myself out there as an artist. The growth is quiet, but it's real, and Coastal Curiosities sits at the root of it.

My purpose, the thing I come back to again and again, is to walk a creative path rooted in faith. To use beauty and stillness to quietly shine a light on the One who is the source of it all.

This collection is where that chapter begins.