print

Designing in a very smart world.

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.

Here are some never ending possibilities.

And from all of those, I will build a final fabric print, that will look something like this.

I hope you’ve enjoyed my Hibiscus print journey.

❤️ Hayley

December 27, 2018 2

How my fabric print journey is teaching me patience!

This is a perfect example, of the patience that I’ve learnt, on my iPhone photo to fabric design journey.

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.

❤️ Hayley

August 8, 2018 2

My Life, my Passion, my Inspiration.

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.

Hope you’ve enjoyed the journey.

❤️ Hayley

July 17, 2018 4

When you dream about something for so long, and it comes true…that feeling!

Sewing thread in my four chosen colours.

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.

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.

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!

Hope you enjoyed the journey ❤️ Hayley

July 9, 2017 6

My year of juxtapositions…so far.

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.

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.

DD847B91-34F7-4429-8893-362C894E9007 — 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.

0180EAFC-A519-4180-8BB5-67DD293FA8B7 — 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.

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.

FullSizeRender — 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

March 19, 2017 5

Plain white fabric at 9am, print at 11am, Hayley Joy original at 1pm…dreams coming true.

I often used to joke that if I had my life over, I would have chosen fabric design rather than dress design, because my frustration in my line of work, has always been my inability to buy prints that I can see so clearly in my head.

Being a Plus size myself, and designing for Plus sizes, means that I have a pretty good idea of what works in terms of prints.
My aim on my new fabric design journey, is to debunk the theory that Plus size women don’t do colour, and that they don’t do bold, because they do, and my sales statistics prove exactly that.

Bold and colourful prints designed for a future Hayley Joy, Plus size collection.

So with my passion burning, I have realised my dream, and am designing and printing my own designs, that have been carefully thought through. I want to offer exclusive designs that have never been seen before, and I want extraordinary, because it’s time.

Future fabric designs, designed by Hayley Joy.

It’s been a really interesting experience, because I’ve designed so many potential prints that have ended up being deleted. Having the luxury of being able to print a sample, and see the print before it physically goes into production, means that I have complete control over the quality and design of the print and the colours. I’m also able to test the market by making a sample first, and I’ve loved the response to the sample made up in this design. I’ve had to put a note on it saying “Sample only, not for sale!”

I cannot even begin to explain the feeling I had two weeks ago, when I saw my fabric design dream come true.
I had plain white fabric at 9am, I had my own exclusive print at 11am and I had my first Hayley Joy original at 1pm.

This wonderful Lime Green print with so many design options makes me so proud. I spent a long time creating it, because I knew what I wanted. I just had to teach myself how to create it.
There are no limits to dream and I’m dreaming very, very big.

❤ Hayley

March 8, 2017 8

I’m taking full advantage of the incredibly smart world we live in.

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.

f8eb6f42-4d7d-43ff-bc89-54fe9a5be124 — 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.

❤ Hayley

February 16, 2017 3

Determination and Perseverance.

I’ve never been more determined than I was, to make it out of 2016 with my confidence and my determination intact, and I’ve never wanted to persevere as much as I do in 2017. 2016 was a challenging year but I didn’t allow it to take me down. I went back at it hard and focused on the end goal, which is always to deliver 100%. I made an interesting observation about ones state of mind in tough times. It seems to be so much easier to succumb than to fight back. Well I fought back, I never gave up (there were times when my faith was tested), but if I know nothing else, I know that I must succeed, there is to much at stake for me to crumble.

During the last 6 months of 2016, I had an awakening, I started to see things completely differently, and I started to really feel 2017. I’m not the biggest planner, I tend to wake up and see how I feel, which usually dictates the plan (interesting way to operate as an entrepeneur I hear you say). But it’s how I’ve always done things, and I’m lucky to have a team that flow with the uneven and unpredictable tide. The only plan that I ‘planned’, was to become more aware, more in the moment, and more determined to see only beauty in 2017.

So it’s back to work on the 9th Jan and part of the perseverance plan is to take me and my business to a new level. I have nurtured a great team around me, who are able to take care of themselves, so for me it’s off to have some fun. I’m going inside my creative brain and I am hoping to deliver the most wonderful and innovative designs that can be applied to any surface. I’ve seen a mock up of one design on a variety of surfaces, from bags, to cushion covers, to T-shirts to canvases, and the cliché ‘the sky’s the limit’ has never been more appropriate.

No limit is to dream. Anything is possible.

The photos that I took of these mushrooms, made me really think about perseverance. They were growing out of a pile of debris, and yet their determination to show off their beauty and determination, was never going to be impacted by their surroundings. In 2017, I’ll be looking to nature as my constant inspiration, and these photos prove how much inspiration there is all around us, if we just take some time to look.

❤ Hayley

January 8, 2017 0

Reflecting and Projecting

2016 was a year of learning for me. In my 52nd year I went back to school for the first time in 35 years. I chose to do an online digital marketing course with Getsmarter…yes me…the once VERY technologically challenged girl!
I ran my business and I studied for 10 very intense weeks, and I passed…proudly.

A certificate that makes me really proud.

I learnt how to REALLY delegate. Yes me the one time control freak. And how did it feel I hear you asking, it felt sooooooo liberating. If you’re not good at it, try it, it is life changing. Hire right, my business coach Brent Spilkin from Growing Pains said, never a truer word spoken. Delegating allows you to dream big, and deliver even bigger.

I learnt how to take a random chance and I signed up for an online iPhone photography course, that has completely transformed my life. It has unleashed a creativity in me that I never knew was there. It has taught me patience, it’s taught me to be so much more observant, it’s connected me with some of the most amazing humans all over the world. It’s awoken my creativity on an explosive level.

One of my favourite photos on my new iPhone photography journey.

I learnt how to expand my business without stretching myself thin. I took Hayley Joy online and have enabled women all over the world to have access to true Plus size fashion, designed by a genuine Plus size designer. To date we have not had one garment returned for a refund, and have only had two size changes. That is an enormous achievement in the online sales world.

fullsizerender

So how do I top 2016 in 2017?

I go back to school to do an online graphic design course, to realise a 30 year dream, to design and print my own exclusive ranges of fashion fabrics. They say that the only way we are going to make it in business, going forward, is to stand out. I have every intention of taking my new found love and knowledge of photography, and creating collections of fabrics that have never been seen before. I am going to listen to the future predictors, and I’m sooooooo going to stand out. I want to be that girl that at 52 took on the world and did it her way.

70d3062f-2b2d-4eeb-9c99-318938ae8349 — Future fabric inspiration from my magnificent Jacaranda tree in my garden.

❤ Hayley

January 4, 2017 4

Tag

print

Designing in a very smart world.

How my fabric print journey is teaching me patience!

My Life, my Passion, my Inspiration.

When you dream about something for so long, and it comes true…that feeling!

My year of juxtapositions…so far.

Plain white fabric at 9am, print at 11am, Hayley Joy original at 1pm…dreams coming true.

I’m taking full advantage of the incredibly smart world we live in.

Determination and Perseverance.

Reflecting and Projecting

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