Bless your beautiful hide.

I always knew that when I reached the point of photographing my animal hide prints - for my 365 patterns project - that I'd be taking on a mammoth task and I wasn't too far wrong! I've uploaded 19 to my Chasing Patterns Flickr set so far:

... and I've just found a leopard and a zebra lurking in the back of a drawer un-photographed.

It was inevitable that I'd go on safari at some point in the year but I decided to do so this particular week after seeing this in the Victoria & Albert museum last Saturday:

Fortunately the V&A allow you to take photos of most of their exhibits so I managed to add this very early example of animal pelt design to my ever burgeoning pattern menagerie! It's a fragment of silk velvet from Turkey from around 1450 - 1550 and, according to the museum description, the "pairs of wavy lines and groups of three large dots represent the pelts of the striped tiger and spotted leopard". So you see, far from being a gaudy and brash penchant...my love of all things animal-print is part of a long and cultured tradition ... so there!

As some of you already know I've often allowed the wild-life to escape from my clothing and on to my scrapbook pages ....

Exhibit A: I outed myself with this, my first ever design team project for Banana Frog: [Jan 09]

Exhibit B: I matched my stripey blonde highlights with a touch of zebra on a page I made for a feature in Scrapbook Inspirations Magazine [Issue 45 2008]:

Exhibit C: I added a strip of snakeskin belting and a leopard print organza ribbon to this page [also published in SI - Issue 54 2009]. Both trimmings had been sent to me by friends who know my particular pelt-based propensity:

I could go on sharing pages which feature animal print somewhere on them, but we'd be here all day, and I think you've got the general idea by now!

A few months back I read a snippet in a magazine which made me laugh. It reported that a leopard print wall paper from B&Q had been most popular with shoppers in the North East of England! I refuse to be drawn on the accusation that I've single-handedly been stockpiling it! ;)

Right then, I'm off out for lunch, so I'll leave you with this:

After last month's 'Everything's Coming Up Roses' post and now today's 'Bless Your Beautiful Hide' I seemed to have, purely by coincidence, named a second pattern post after a song from a musical! And while I may have set myself a bizarre precedent for naming my future posts, what the heck ... I'll take any excuse for a show tune!

J x