Coordinate contest

The latest Spoonflower contest was to create a design that fit four different designs on a yard of fabric, with at least one stripe and one polka dot, that all harmonize together. I've been knocking around an idea involving the various Dr Who costumes through the years, so I wanted to use this as a kind of proof of concept. The one thing I wanted to include for sure was the stripes of the fourth doctor's scarf. I refreshed my memory of how the rest of the doctors dressed, and decided I also wanted to do something tartan-like, and something tweedy.

However, the Tuesday evening deadline loomed ever closer around and I still hadn't even finished the first design. Tuesday itself was a pretty tiring day - my son fought all of his naps and work was frustrating. So I decided to put a backup plan in place. I had created five different fabric designs for the quilt I made for Maren, plus a sixth that matched but didn't make it into the quilt, and only two of them had been in contests before (the ginger and the sugarcubes). They ask that you not enter any designs into more than one contest, so I still had the other four I could use, that were already done and coordinating! So it was just a matter of pasting them all in a yard-sized rectangle and calling it a day. I decided to do that really quickly, just so I'd have an entry, and finish my Dr Who design later in the evening if I had time.

But then, of course, I initially messed up and made it a fat quarter instead of a yard (yes, AGAIN), which I didn't discover until I uploaded it. So it took way longer than it should have.



I knew that to have any hope of finishing my other design, it would have to be mostly NOT drawing things. I had already figured out the seven colors for the scarf stripe, fortunately, so I decided that the other three designs would just use subsets of those colors. I created the tartan and the tweed-ish stripes just with various tricks involving flood fills of geometric areas, layer masks, and tiled patterns. I still hadn't decided what the last pattern (something polka-dot-ish) would be. So I browsed the internet for Dr Who costumes and was reminded of the epic Time Lord collars. Ah ha! So I drew the silhouette of one of those and put it in a repeat. Then I just had to put it in the same quartered-yard setup and call it a night.



The gestalt is actually kind of Halloweeny, with the collar dots looking mostly purple and the red/yellow tweed-ish looking orange, so perhaps I might have swapped the yellow and the purple or something like that. And if I had spent more time I would definitely have refined the tweed pattern to look a bit more obviously like a tweed weave. But besides those flaws, I'm pretty happy with how this turned out!



My entry came in 141 out of 200, with 95 votes.