Some Prints Stay With You

When I was four years old, I had a little shirt covered in tiny daisies.

It was olive green, with small white flowers scattered across it—simple, cheerful, and completely of its time. I did not know then that I would remember that print decades later. I only knew that it was one of those pieces that somehow felt like mine.

Looking back at this photograph now, I am struck by how much can live inside something as ordinary as a shirt. There is the pattern, of course, but also the summer light, the backyard, the clothesline behind me, and the feeling of being small and completely at home in the world.

Years later, that memory became the starting point for a Bullfrog Prints design.

I did not want to reproduce the original shirt exactly. I wanted to keep what made it special: the earthy olive ground, the tiny daisies, the slightly old-fashioned sweetness of the print. Then I reimagined it for a new kind of shirt—one that could be worn now, styled simply, and carry a little piece of that earlier story forward.

The result is Olive Daisy Calico.

For me, this is what wearable art can be. It does not always have to begin with a grand idea. Sometimes it begins with an image that stayed tucked away in your memory: a favourite print, a colour you remember from childhood, or a small detail that still feels familiar years later.

The things that shape our eye do not disappear. They come back in new forms.

Olive Daisy Calico is a nod to one little shirt, one old photograph, and the way a pattern can travel with you through time.