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.



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:



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.