‘Take me outside, sit in the green garden
Nobody out there, but it’s okay now
Bathe in the sunlight, don’t mind if rain falls
Take me outside, sit in the green garden…’

We love Laura Mvula’s ‘Green Garden’, her love song to nature. She has said her 2013 song celebrates the creative influence of her childhood back garden in the suburbs of Birmingham, England: 

“When we moved to our new house, for us kids it was a huge huge big deal to have trees in the back garden. Where we had lived in Selly Park, the back garden was more concrete than grass, so it felt like we were in a forest. Some of my happiest memories are of endless summer holidays where it seems like we spent most of the time in the garden, making up dance routines or having mammoth waterfights. The song is a celebration of that.”

In London and in Atlanta, at the Craft Crawl and at Couture Collective, we’ve been celebrating the creative power of nature at Bledsoe Bags, with garden-themed fabrics and a floral extravaganza. Here’s a taste of what we’re working on….

We’ve brought bag our lovely Frida (always popular!), we’re combining fantastic colourful upholstery samples from Pret a Vivre lined with Liberty cottons, and we’re using with some lovely nature-themed fabrics for backpacks, walkabout and dot phone bags, swinging cord bags, storage baskets and sturdy Boxy tote bags.

And we’ve been using an amazing piece of fabric made up of sample pieces for Shaukat Fabrics…one-off pieces, some of which never went into production and so are truly unique. The prints are stunning and perfect for Bledsoe walkabout bags, card wallets and facemasks.

So get outside, into the green garden, wherever and whenever you can! And for more on ‘singing gardens into life’, read this: https://singbetterenglish.wordpress.com/2016/03/03/laura-mvula-green-garden/