Geek chic, a fit of pique, and candle mystique, so to speak

It's "Fabric8" time again - the yearly contest run by Spoonflower where the winner gets to make a mass-produced fabric collection for Robert Kaufman. This year's theme was geek chic. For some reason they always schedule these so that the Fabric8 contest closes on the same day as a normal contest (so one evening is the final deadline for two contests). They pick 100 entries out of the lot (750 or so this year they said!) and we all get to vote on those. The top eight go on to make a mini-collection of four fabrics and then we all vote again in a few weeks. Anyway, just like the last time (and the one they did with Timeless Treasures but the same setup), sadly I didn't make it into the voting round. I'm a little more sad about this one than the previous times, because I did feel that mine had a unique point of view. It did seem that the glasses/bowties/mustaches axis was, shall we say, amply represented. In any case, I'm happy with how mine turned out.

My idea was to make literal the names of some of the most common programming languages and put them all together. Take a gander and see if you can puzzle them out:



So, it's coffee for Java, and fancy scrolly initial J's on the coffee cups for JavaScript. The rubies and pearls are for, well, Ruby and Perl. In the background are sea-colored pairs of plus signs, for C++, and shells, for shell script.

My favorite entry was this isometric arrangement. A close second were these colorful icons. I also liked these two very dreamy patterns, and these two very cute ones. None of those made it into the final eight, alas.

The contest that closed last week was to inaugurate the new option to print on wrapping paper instead of fabric - a pattern for birthday paper! I figured most people would go more towards designs for kids, so I wanted to make something you wouldn't be embarrassed about using for an adult. I wasn't sure what, so I was browsing birthday-themed palettes on Colourlovers and found this one:


Color by COLOURlovers

Perfect! It immediately made me think of candles in a darkened room, so that's what I went for.



This came in 43 out of 226, with 154 votes. Not too shabby! Obviously there were a lot of other candle-themed entries, of which I liked this best; for the other predominate theme, of cake, this was my favorite. My favorite overall was this confection of birds and flowers, that came in sixth, and the one I'd be most likely to use to wrap a gender-neutral present is the one that won.