You may wonder why some of my designs have names that aren’t immediately obvious (to say the least). Why not give a design a nice, clear, unambiguous name and be done with it?

Well, sometimes I do. The Faith Hope & Love bookmark has Faith, Hope and Love on it; St Francis quotes St Francis of Assisi. Autumn Wreath is a wreath made up of autumn leaves and nuts, Tudor looks like a Tudor rose.

Others are not quite so literal, but still fairly obvious. Very Berry has three berries, and Eek! echoes what would no doubt be many people’s reaction to a spider that size.

So far so good. But what to do when a design – as is often the case with Hardanger – is more abstract than pictorial? You could of course do as some modern artists do and just call them Composition 1, Composition 2 or similarly meaningless words. But where’s the fun in that? And even when a design is clearly pictorial (like the dragonfly in Resurrection), simply calling it what it is can be just a little bit dull, especially when there is a story behind it. So I think up names based on a variety of sources – the colours I use, the shapes, something that the design reminds me of, or whatever it was that sparked the idea for the design in the first place. Some of the names, like Sprinkles and Resurrection, are explained on the design’s detail page. The ones that aren’t I’ll be telling you about on Flights of Fancy.