Creating a design for the Women’s Institure
When the Women’s Institute asked me to design a mug, I thought I knew what the WI was about. When Hampshire Federation asked me to mark their centenary, I instantly thought of the Calendar Girls and my local market, where they sold homemade jam and cakes, and there were women crafting. I then designed a set of characters in the same spirit.
I took the designs to a meeting with Hampshire Federation and they were horrified. This was not what the WI was about. They handed me a booklet on the organisation’s history and sent me away to try again. In reality, the WI is a campaigning organisation and has been for decades, often ahead of the national conversation. They campaigned to save honeybees before anyone else was talking about it. More recently, they have campaigned in support of women in prostitution.
This led me to redesign the mug with characters throughout the decades, each holding a placard from one of the WI’s campaigns. It sold well, and I went on to design versions for eleven different federations, each with its own name on the handle.
Creating the Suffragettes range
I was then asked if I was doing anything for the centenary of votes for women. That conversation led to a suffragette range, drawing on Lady Denman and the design language of that era. The mug came first, in 2018, and it now sells in places like the Museum of London alongside a cosmetic bag, a tea towel, notebooks, coasters and bookmarks.
The range did well in America too. We adapted it slightly, changing some of the placards to ask what the President was going to do about women’s suffrage, and changing the colours to yellow, white and purple, the suffragette colours used there.
My Suffragettes range has become a favourite among many, and I was honoured to be able to present a mug to Helen Pankhurst, the great-granddaughter of Emmeline Pankhurst, at a talk at Portsmouth University!
I’ve since added pin badges to the range, made from laminated wood, sold singly or as a set of three.
You can view the entire Women’s Institute range here, and the Suffragettes range here.
