Sunday hiking is my reboot for the week that lies ahead. I discovered the Modderfontein reserve in Johannesburg, South Africa, in December 2018, whilst scrolling on Facebook, and oh my word, what a find! It’s the old AECI explosives testing site, which now comprises 700 hectares of the most pristine and beautiful hiking, cycling and running trails.
My health has been an issue for many years, but in 2018, I decided to take it back. I got off all the meds that I’d been put on, because nobody knew what was really wrong with me. All I knew was that I was in pain from my brain to my toes. 13 months later and I hiked 10km’s today!
I stopped eating inflammatory, synthetic foods and I slowly started exercising. In the beginning I exercised through the pain, but as I lost each kilo, the pain diminished on it’s own, with no pain killers needed. I’ve lost 12 kilos and many more inches, and I feel human again. It’s a very special feeling to feel human after feeling like an alien in your own body, for so long.
Of course I could never do it without the support of my patient beautiful life partner Mr. C. Without him I know I would never get up at 5am on a Sunday, to go hiking at 6am.
I’m an iPhone photographer, with a passion for turning my iPhone photos, into art.
I’m blessed to live in a city, where the weather is beautiful. I’m extremely blessed to have a beautiful garden, that affords me so many beautiful opportunities, to photograph nature at her very best.
I recently bought two exotic Hibiscus plants, that inspire me daily. Their flowers are exquisite and they flower profusely. I feel as though I get a new gift everyday. Some days the flowers are more perfect than others, this day was one of those.
Besides the joys from my garden, the other amazing joy that I’ve been given, is the joy of app editing. I have been introduced to a world that enables me to go on creative journeys that take me to places I never thought I could go to.
From the phone that I hold in my hand, to the incredibly powerful apps like iColorama, my world is filled with never ending editing joy.
I took this Hibiscus on an inspired journey, starting off with the ability to blur the actual image. Imagine that with one tap, I was able to create a perfect blur background, on which to build multiple creations.
My go to app for creating and designing my prints, is iColorama. I am continually blown away by what is possible. It is app editing on steroids, and I have so much admiration for the creators. It affords me the opportunity to go on the craziest design journeys, that enable me to take this blurred image, and create the beginning of a future print.
Within iColorama there are endless opportunities and for me it’s about pressing buttons. My hubby knows that when I start frenetically pressing on my iPhone or iPad screen, I am lost to the real world. And so the build begins.
My aim is to build this into a step and repeat pattern which I can then use for my clothing creations. The repeat pattern starts out very simply as a tile effect.
I love playing around in the Superimpose app where you can go completely crazy with masking. Confession…I spend hours there.
I took the blur background and superimposed the tiles on top of it.
This will make a perfect step and repeat pattern, but there are so many amazing options in iColorama. I’m on holiday, so I can play, with no time constraints. It’s a wonderful place to be – we take time so for granted – I’m spending hours binge watching iColorama tutorials, and then going on these amazing design journeys.
I see the one below as a greeting card and also the cover of a journal.
This is a perfect example, of the patience that I’ve learnt, on my iPhone photo to fabric design journey.
Lilac Roses
Patience is something that eludes me in most areas of my life, because my mind races continuously with pattern, print and of course colour, and I want to see them all, now! The introduction to Photoshop for the final stage of the building of the fabric prints, has humbled me, and I now know that what I see in my design brain, requires many hours of patience, to achieve the final result. This rose print, that I created from a photo that I took with my iPhone, of a beautiful pink rose in my garden, and then put through some very interesting apps on my iPad, is an example of the patience that I’ve learnt on my photo to fabric design journey.
Rose photo edited in iPhone and iPad apps
I built this rose print from scratch, and out of interest I’m logging the hours for these prints. This one took 15 hours. It was intense because it’s the first time I’ve gone down this print road, but the result has been so incredibly rewarding. I’ve seen the samples on, and they do exactly what the plan is, fit and flatter, and offer the colour that my market so desperately want to wear.
Hayley Joy, Miracle Shape top, in Lilac Roses
I design for a hugely diverse market, and my objective when planning the prints, is to always take into account how much cover I can achieve, whilst still offering the maximum amount of colour. The lighter colours are a challenge because they tend to show every lump and bump, but when you choose a crazy colour like this vibrant lilac, and you cover it with roses, which just happen to be one of my favourite flowers, you fool the eyes of the beholder, because between the colour and the print, there is so much going on, that lumps and bumps don’t have a chance to feature.
Not sure how many of these marathon prints I can do, but I’ve dreamt of a print like this for so long, and knowing that I can create it myself, makes me a very happy fabric and fashion designer.
I took a very ordinary photo of a not so ordinary flower. It should have been trashed…but…there’s always app editing to save a bad photo.
My day today was crazy, beautiful and so incredibly rewarding. We’re printing new fabric designs for Hayley Joy for Summer ’18, and today was one of those days where everything that came off the heat press, lived up to my design dream. I’m doing lots of florals and of course lots of colour.
The heat press runs at 200 degrees, and our space is small, so little mini breaks are a necessity. This flower has been incubating in my design head since I edited it yesterday. I couldn’t wait to play with it, so on my little mini break, I went on a crazy editing journey. We joked and said that at the rate I was going, I could be designing “a print a minute”.
This is the edited version that I took on the design journey.
Once I’d cleaned the image up and created something that I could work with, I started playing.
The first edit was a simple one so that I had a base to work from.
From there it was into my most favourite app called Frax, which creates incredible Fractals. There were so many amazing results, here are a few of my favourites.
This will definitely illustrate why I’m so inspired by app editing. After all, this was a very pretty flower, captured badly, that should have been trashed.
These remind me of very glammed up seashells.
I see this design on silk scarves (my big dream is to have my own Fractal prints, printed on pure silk.)
From here I started to build actual prints for my clothing collections.
I can’t wait to print these on Chiffon.
I often get asked for fabric prints with yellow. It’s not a colour I ever really work with, but I’ve decided to honour the requests this season, and really liked this combination.
I’m not sure what I would do with this, but I love it, so I’ve added it to my think tank.
And last but not least, my absolute favourite – a labour of love to isolate it onto the black background, but so worth the effort. This one I’d print on a huge canvas.
Being able to design exclusive fabric prints for my Hayley Joy ladies clothing collections is a true dream come true, but the bigger dream is now starting to become a reality, and that’s the dream of being able to take a photo with a specific end goal in mind. The end goal in this case is to create a print in specific colours, to compliment a jacket that I’ve designed, so that it creates a complimentary mix and match. I wanted to use something that is fashion related so settled on the thread that we use in the factory all the time.
Thread photo ready to be manipulated.
The colours are the four colours that I want in the print, so let me take you on the journey to the final print. I took the photo into an iPhone app that creates old fashioned kaleidoscope type images. This would enable me to have a good spread of the colours.
iPhone App edit to create a kaleidoscope effect.
I then went into my favourite fractal app, took the kaleidoscope image and converted it to a fractal image. I created two fractals to see which one would convert to the final print. Creating fractals has become a real passion of mine. I love the results, and I especially love how many different versions are achievable.
Fabulous Fractals.Feathery Fractal with end design becoming obvious.
The end result of this feather design is exactly what I set out to achieve, and I cannot wait to print it to see the final result. The best part about my chosen journey is that I get to design it and print it, so I can plan the whole process from start to finish, and achieve instant results. That is the ultimate dream come true!
In conversation with a very dear client this week, she told me that I absolutely have to share my experiences so far in 2017, because there are so many people going through so much, and sometimes it takes somebody else’s experiences to put your own into perspective…so here goes…whew, and it’s only the middle of March!
2016 was a year of immense challenges both personally and as an entrepeneur. The world as we knew it shifted once again, and new challenges presented themselves. Personally I was dealing with watching my beloved father dying a very slow death in front of me. Watching the slow degradation really took its toll on me towards the end of 2016, and it was only my faith in focusing on the light, that enabled me to keep the darkness at bay.
My words.
But then as life does, it always offers up two choices. I had embarked on a journey to realising my dream of designing and printing my own exclusive fashion fabrics, that would allow me to take my Plus size fashion collections to a whole new level, and that was my welcome diversion. I completely immersed myself in my great love which is all things fabric related. And so 2016 came to an end, and I was able to go away for 4 days and indulge my love for iPhone photography. I discovered a love for bugs and macro photography, and captured nature at it’s really ‘up close’ best.
Totally in love with capturing the Bug World with my iPhone.
And into 2017 I came with an excitement I hadn’t felt in a long time. I went full steam into converting my iPhone photos into fabric prints, and on the 10th of February we printed our first samples of my exclusive designs. Realising my 25 year dream was a defining moment, and I came alive with a feeling that made me really excited. I rushed home after work to share my excitement, only to find that my Dad had taken a really bad turn. An hour later he died in front of us, and even though I never got to share my news with him, I knew that he had moved on, to release me to be able to go forth and give this new venture my all. It is a venture that will prove many things, because I’ve gone into it knowing very little, but am determined to take full advantage of the amazingly smart world we live in.
A Rose captured, edited and transformed into an exclusive Hayley Joy fabric print.
On the 11th of February, 24 hours after my Dad passed on, my beloved mother tripped over a shoe and fractured her hip. At this stage you’re probably reading this going “what!!”, well I felt the same way as I stood looking at her lying on the floor. It is 5 weeks since her fall and I have been ‘nursing’ her, never having taken care of anybody on this level before. I’ve been asked so many times how I do it, and it’s a crazy thing, but there’s a side of you that kicks in and you just do it. As negative as the actual experience was, there are many positives that have come out of it, the most important one being reconnection. We had all become so disconnected whilst dealing with my Dad’s illness, and in a crazy twist, my Mom’s fall forced us all to reconnect.
Reflections, reactions, reconnections.
They say that things happen in 3’s and I so hoped that it wouldn’t be true, but unfortunately we’ve been dealt another devastating blow. Three weeks ago my father in law was diagnosed with incurable lung cancer, and has been given four to six months to live. I’ve had to go from being supported to being the supporter.
I’m not one to question, so I’ve accepted that this is our journey in 2017, and our lives at the moment are filled with many juxtapositions. We live with tremendous sadness, and we live with tremendous excitement. The diversion that the excitement provides from the sadness, is one we will only truly understand in the months to come.
Floral photography – my necessary diversions.
You’re probably asking how I’ve stayed upbeat and focused. My only advice is to find something that you can immerse yourself in when the going gets tough. I hope that your going is not as tough as mine has been, but my iPhone photography and iPhone editing, has been my absolute ‘sanity saver’.
A Hayley Joy original fabric print inspired by all things floral.
Life as I knew it, is going to be forever changed in 2017, but I have a little toolbox in my head, filled with ‘life tools’ and I think I’m going to be calling on them a lot. Feel free to reach out if you need support.
❤ Hayley
A year ago I entered the world of online studying, and it proved to be life changing on so many levels. This week I entered that world again, and into day three I’m reflecting on how much my life has changed in a year.
I chose to do an Online Digital Marketing course with Getsmarter, and I became enlightened as to how smart the world is, that we live in. One of the things that really stood out for me was the constant reference to ‘images are king’. It made perfect sense, that in a world where so much information is coming at us every second, the only thing that would stop us in our scrolling tracks, would be an amazing image.
With that knowledge in hand, I decided to sign up to a random online iPhone photography course, that completely changed my life. If like me you believe in the law of attraction, then this course epitomises all that I believe. One month into the course, I started designing potential future fabric prints, with all the new apps I’d been introduced to, and the incredibly generous advice that I was given by the members in the Facebook group. A whole new world opened up, and that very distant fabric design dream, started to not look so distant. In November last year I was introduced to the world of sublimation printing, and I saw my iPhone photos, that I’ve manipulated into fabric print designs, come to life.
This course proves how smart technology really is.
Just over a year later I’ve signed up to study again. I’m now going to learn how to put the photos that I’ve taken, and edited, into proper print ready designs, so that I can produce exclusive fashion fabrics for Hayley Joy. I’ve seen the samples, and I feel like a kid whose been gifted a new toy, that is very, very clever. This world we live in is exceptional, we should all focus a little more on that, you will be blown away by what is at your fingertips.
Future fabric prints designed by Hayley Joy.
I dream about filling Hayley Joy Shop, and Hayley Joy online, with the most sensational prints. By designing and manufacturing my own exclusive prints, I offer my loyal clientele the next level in Plus Size fashion, and that is exclusivity. Wherever you go in your Hayley Joy designs, you will stand out, because I’m going to now design the prints that we’ve all been dreaming about. No more lamenting about what we can’t have, now we can have anything and everything we dream about. If you want pink and purple with a touch of grey, I can create that. If you want a marble print (which is one print I’ve been dreaming about, and have never seen in South Africa), I can design it. The world of design is now my playground, and I am going to prove that there really are no limits to dream.
Signing up to a random iPhone photography course has opened me up to a whole new world, one that enables me to combine my love for natures beauty, with my love for fashion design.
Peace in Reflections.
I have a really beautiful garden that I used to spend very little time in, it was never a priority…and then I started taking photos of everything and anything, and now I spend every available moment, zooming in on all this incredible beauty that surrounds me.
Peace Rose Perfection.
My mom-in-law, who is a landscaper, has planted some very special roses for me. My most favourite is a rose called Peace. It reminds me of a marshmallow. The colours are so soft and the scent is beautiful.
Peace up close.
I had a reward of two beautiful flowers at the same time, and have had the most inspiring time editing them for all different uses.
Peace Reflected.
In light of the craziness that has happened in the world this last week I share with you my magnificent Peace rose.
Hayley Joy up close with our real food provider, who provided me with the most wonderful details.
I signed up to do an iPhone photography course, to learn how to get the maximum benefit out of my iPhone 6S+. To say I’m blown away by what what I’ve learnt in the last two months, would really be an understatement, but more importantly I wanted to share the incredible outlet it’s given me.
Overseeing the running of Hayley Joy production where we manufacture all the various collections for Hayley Joy retail, and overseeing the running of Hayley Joy retail is extremely demanding. I’m the Boss, so you all know what that means, long hours and loads of pressure.
Since I started taking photos of anything that moves and everything that is pretty, I cannot believe the difference it’s made to my temperament. I have discovered macro photography which requires me to zoom in on a subject and really, really concentrate.
Emergence.
My big problem is, that whatever I do, my mind finds a way to go back to work, as there is always such exciting stuff going on, but I also know that I have to have a break, and discovering the wonders of photography on my phone, has given me a diversion that is inspiring me on new levels, and that is in turn, calming me down and unleashing wonderful new creativity. It’s also getting me outside more, and away from all my devices, besides my phone of course, but that is now being used primarily for taking beautiful photos.
I’m always on the hunt for great subject matter for my mood and style boards. I’m spending lots of time in my own garden and I am continuously blown away by the colours in nature. I have been watch a group of Aloes that have begun flowering, and I am in awe of their beauty. I have fallen in love with Macro photography and especially taking close up photos of Bees, so I share these photos of our very special food providers, and their food, with love.
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