Friday, March 30, 2012

Fabric from Photos

The contest this week was a little different. We had to use photos provided by the "Textile Center" in Minnesota as the basis for our designs. I took a little from each photo and put all the motifs together into a stripe:

Urban Sightings Stripes

The judging was actually in two rounds. Folks from the Textile Center narrowed the field from the original 236 entries into their top 45, and then the Spoonflower community got to vote on those to choose the winner as usual. I was pretty pleased to have made it into the initial cut to 45. My design came in 27th out of those. (For some reason they didn't publish the vote counts this week.)

Friday, March 23, 2012

Catching up with contests

I'm behind in posting about the most recent Spoonflower contests! First, the theme was toile - you know, that old-fashioned, elaborately detailed type of pattern featuring shepherds picknicking and what not. An upholstery/wallpaper sort of thing. Plus, it was supposed to be inspired by the towns where we live, with a little explanation of how it related to the town's history in the fabric description. Toile is not really my favorite, so this really felt like a homework assignment. I grappled with some way of making a "history of Goleta" (or even "history of Sacramento" since that's where I grew up) toile, and finally decided to discard the theme. If I could make a toile-type design based on anything I want, what would it be?

The first thing I hit upon was legos - what if I did all the traditional bucolic toile scenarios, but rendered with lego figures & lego greenery and so forth? I had to give that up as being way too much work, but that's something I still want to try at some point. Next I thought, well, I may have spent the most amount of my physical existence in Sacramento and Goleta, but where have I spent my mental existence? For many years, that would be doodling. So I pretended I was in a lecture again and arranged some of the types of things I doodled constantly in school in a toile-ish layout.

Toile of the Land of Doodling

The main thing I would want to change about this is to move it closer together - there's too much blank space between the repeats. But overall I'm pretty satisfied, given that I'm not the hugest fan of toiles anyway. It came in 60 out of 81 with 45 votes.

Next up, the contest was to create a cheater print involving robots. Ah ha! That was easy, given that I created a robot print for a whole cloth quilt for my niece already. So not exaaaaaactly a cheater print but pretty close. So I decided to take the same colors and robots and rearrange them. I wanted to make it look more like a fake pieced design (as cheaters usually are) so I also made several coordinating prints. The overall design came together like so:

Isabel

It came in 116 out of 132 with 40 votes. I will admit to hoping it would do a little better, especially since there were very few other girl-specific designs entered. My favorite entry was this one.

You can see all the coordinating designs here. The darker blue print is "Isabel" in Morse code, and the lighter blue print is postage stamps, in honor of her grandfather (my father) being a philatelist. The pink print is logic gates (AND, OR, and NOT), and the purple print is LEDs!

The last contest, that ended yesterday, was actually only open to Spoonflower staff. They had to make larger projects involving printed fabric. My favorite entries were the hankies and the black & white quilt that formed a QR code of the Spoonflower URL.

Thursday, March 1, 2012

Cycles

This week's contest was supposed to be for bicycles, using only three colors. I decided to run with it a bit and do a design with the lightcycles from Tron. Having done a tangentially Tron-related fabric previously in the form of the Daft Punk cameos, I decided to use the same colors as that design. This is what I came up with:
Light Cycles

I also decided to make a teeny version of the print:

Light Cycles - Small

But the larger repeat is what I entered in the contest. It came in 169 out of 199, with 41 votes.