Hand-drawn, botanical tote bags; my difficult and continuous journey getting the perfect print.

You may well have been keeping your beady eyes on my Instagram feed recently and noticed a very frustrated me, sinking painfully into an abyss of lino cutting and screen printing and wondering why the tote bag world is so dead set against me! That may be slightly dramatic but who else thinks that the entire world and his dog can see only, and all of, your mistakes? Well unfortunately I am one of those people and as someone that never studied art past school, most of my experiments are done through trial and error (mainly error). So, how is it going I hear you say? Well, let me fill you in on this rollercoaster of a tote bag journey. Strap yourself in.

 A girl and a dream of the perfect illustrated tote bag.

As with most of the things I create in my business, the idea starts in my head, in between the thousands of other creative thoughts I think I can undertake with no prior knowledge. I am a huge fan of tote bags. They’re reusable and eco-conscious, you can get some amazing designs and I also like to think of them as a bit of a statement piece. If I see someone with a cool-ass tote bag, I immediately want it!

My foray into hand-drawn tote bags started with lino cutting. A set I requested for Christmas last year, I found it so therapeutic to sit down and glide the blade through soft lino. Less therapeutic when the blade glided through my thumb! Ginkgo was my chosen design, and still is, and I had a lot of fun carving this bad boy up, slathering on the ink and printing a near-perfect ginkgo leaf design onto my tote bags. You can watch my carving up the design here. My technique proved to be inconsistent, as not long after I started, the lino cutting began to get clogged and my prints were becoming less crisp and a little fuzzy. So, I decided to jump onto, yet another Christmas present I had received that year.

 Screen printing my Ginkgo design onto sturdy, cotton tote bags.

I will be the first to admit, I had zero knowledge of screen printing before starting this. Like nothing. Nada. To make this point even stronger, I attempted to burn my own design onto the screen with the fluid provided and leave it underneath a skylight to develop. I’ll just let you take that in for a second… So, I quickly learned from my wonderful community over on Instagram that this was a crazy old way to screen print, which is when I contacted the very helpful folk, local to me at Screen Tec Print Essentials, who very quickly and efficiently made me a screen and squeegee and provided the ink. Chris and Danielle have been an absolute godsend on this screen-printing journey, and I cannot thank them enough!

 After many attempts and hours of printing and cleaning, printing and cleaning, my design still was not coming through with the consistency I wanted. So, then we tried a finer meshed screen, to stop the flooding I was experiencing, which worked to an extent but now the issue I was facing was that parts of the design were not printing onto the fabric. After help from the lovely Danielle and Sally at Greengrams one evening, I finally concluded that the fabric I was printing onto was too coarse for the ink. I had chosen very thick, coarse, and sturdy fabric for the tote bags because I’m not a fan of thinner material, however, there’s a reason that most tote bags available seem to be somewhere in the middle of too thick and flimsy.

 So, in terms of screen printing, I have not given up! I love the process and fully intend to carry on with it. I have purchased some slightly thinner material tote bags to print onto and I have every finger and toe crossed that it will work this time around.

 How we got to hand-drawn tote bags.

 Even though I intend to continue screen printing my tote bags, I have approximately 20 of the thick, course tote bags left going to waste, and you know I hate waste! So, I purchased a blue washout marker and fine-liner fabric pen, and I did what I do best… I drew plants, flowers, and leaves all over those bad boys, (well 4 so far anyway, I'm not a machine) and you can see the finished results below-

I’m so happy with the result! The designs include Cherry Blossom, Houseplant, Toadstool Stamp, and a mixture of houseplant leaves.

 Where can you find these minimal, botanical, eco-conscious illustrated tote bags?

 I’m keeping these to myself for now, until I can build up more of a collection, but you will be able to shop at my next Christmas market at Middleport Artisan market. I have purchased a small bag stand to display them and I can’t wait to see how they go down. I am hoping that I will be able to have a few screen-printed Gingko bags there too. So, if you’re after a unique, one-of-a-kind, hand-drawn tote bag for your friend or loved one this Christmas, head on down to Middleport Christmas market on 10th December, if you’re local obvs, and you can be the first to pick one of the limited-edition tote bags up. Any remaining after the event will be uploaded onto my Etsy shop, I’ll make sure to let you know when they go up.

Thanks for reading!

Danni xx

From my little home studio in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire, UK. I’m a one-woman band of artist, designer, content creator, social media manager, admin assistant and so on. I create botanical and nature-inspired artwork, greetings cards and other illustrated goods, as eco and planet-friendly as possible, alongside commissions, personalised illustrations and small business logos and branding. I also offer wholesale and you can request a copy of my catalogue here or check out my Faire account here.