A few weeks ago just as I was going to email Laura Ashley and ask if they wanted to be friends, they emailed me first and asked if I’d like to be their first blogger of the month. Well, yes! Absolutely!
I’ve been a Laura Ashley girl since I was seven. I’d make cardboard houses for my Sindy and Daisy dolls, wallpapered with Laura Ashley wallpaper samples – and I’d make curtains and bedding from fabric samples. I have no idea where these came from – perhaps Mum forgot to give them back to the interior designer when they were doing up our house. Come to think of it, David Scott would have been our interior designer, and he’d have given them to me to play with.
It’s a very odd thing that I’m not an interior designer – it was always what I was going to be, ever since I was little. In the holidays Dad (an Engineer) would let me loose with his Rotring pens and ask me to do some tracing for him. At home I always had my own set of Rotring pens and I’d draw up little houses for Anknel and Burblets, designing them around tree roots and worm houses.
When it came time for university I was in Germany and all of a sudden I thought I wanted to do international business and eventually be a Diplomat (ahem, yes!). So I studied Economics and Management, German and Japanese for a year. Mum suggested I change course and go to AUT to do spatial design but it was just when funding stopped and I couldn’t face the idea of having a hundred grand’s debt after four years. So I ended up learning to type, studied Sharebroking for a while and magically got myself a job as a graphic designer. The rest is history.
But, as they say, life begins at forty. And I have a few friends who have gone from graphic design to interiors. So perhaps this is it – a little reminder of where I began, of my childhood dreams.
That all began with Laura Ashley and Anknel and Burblets when I was seven.
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