Meet the Team

One of the wonderful things about creative people is how they work together + spark ideas from one another. As we go forward it is our hope to showcase many budding artists, or to lend our platform to those who have something to contribute but have neither the time or desire to make selling their art their main thing.

One such person is my beautiful daughter Lavinia, who loves to paint with watercolours + acrylics. Her bio is below.

Also my Father has done some amazing acrylic pour paintings. The 3 featured were a gift to us. [Used with his permission.] My hope is to show more of his work.

So right from the start we want to bring more than just my own artwork + we hope to add to this over time. A mix of one-off guest collections + ongoing collaborations.

Terry McGovern

Terry is Rachel's father and has become a passionate hobbyist in his retirement. One of these hobbies has been learning the art of acrylic pouring. Many friends and family have canvases of his hanging in our homes. Utilising parts of these beautiful pours for prints and cards is an exciting new way of sharing his creative work!

Lavinia Ainsley

Lavinia is Rachel and Daniel's middle daughter and she has always been creative. Currently that is mostly being channelled into finishing her debut novella, but she has always loved painting and baking and is enjoying keeping those going on the side and is exploring how she might be able to do some fun business-type things with those hobbies. In the meantime she is excited to share some of her art here in the form of prints, cards and other items.

Rachel Brown

Lots of info about me is woven throughout the site but here are a few additional bit of information.

I did Art GCSE and Textiles GCSE and then a BTEC National in Fashion + Textiles

As a child I was taught to make clothes for Barbie / Cindy from an older lady in my church. I would cycle to go visit her, get books from a free library in the local wool shop and then have a very English tea with Kathleen and her husband.

My mum helped me with both knitting and some dressmaking. My Dad travelled for work and brought me fabric from Sierra Leone when I was 13ish - I made quite a few of my own clothes then.

Doing youth and work in schools for a time, I used my creative abilities then including making a cake costume for a play.

Home schooling used my creative abilities a lot. I spent lots of time doing art with my kids - especially the older 2. Actually now my youngest has finished high school and has started uni he is trying to dabble a bit in art; he is very musical so is already creative.

[For more information on home-schooling, we will be adding info here soon.]

In addition to teaching art stuff to my kids I also used my own creativity a lot during their childhood, mostly in the way we celebrated birthdays. I grew up with one of my aunties always making my brothers and I incredible birthday cakes and I wanted my kids to have the same.

When N was 5 she was into Jane and the Dragon (massively undervalued show) and as merch for this didn't exist I had to make stuff. We did a Pin the Scale on the dragon and I painted a 4ft dragon and I painted 4 inch card eggs that split in 2 that I got from Hobbycraft. We filled these with party bits and they were the party bags for this party and of course there was a dragon cake.

Myrtles Purple Turtle exists because of the hard work of some talented and dedicated people, most of whom are my family.

Daniel is Rachel's husband and is handling the project management, logistics, printing, cutting, haunting the print shop and designing and rolling out the website, shop and in the future, an app. He is THE Guy for this unruly family enterprise.

Niamh is Rachel and Daniel's eldest daughter and is taking command of social media, advertising and marketing. She is new to this kind of role but is enjoying learning what works for pushing out products and getting visibility. She is also looking forward to stealing as many products as possible for 'brand ambassadorship'. She is experimenting with social media more broadly at the moment and is also writing a Substack and several longer writing projects alongside her small tutoring business.

Jolly is Rachel and Daniel's youngest son. He is studying theology online through HTC and is serving as Daniel's right hand man, translating at the print shop, helping with the digital side of things and keeping everyone in a good supply of tea, coffee and sourdough bread.