Bees

For the contest theme "bees," I worked on Napoleanic imperial bees. and tried to go for a semi-gold-embroidered look.



This ended up in the bottom quarter of entries. My favorite was the second-place entry.

Creativebug fabric design

This contest was a little odd - it was only open to people who enrolled in a fabric design class in Creativebug. But, you could do it with a 14-day free trial, so I figured what the heck (I only ended up having time to watch two of the five lessons). There were no other restrictions than that. We were just supposed to apply whatever we'd felt we'd learned from that and make a design (so you couldn't use a design you had created already).  I decided to combine two things I'd seen on the internet lately that had caught my eye.

First, I really liked the pattern of the windows on this architectural model, so I started with that. Then, I read a post about the discovery of some ancient "treasure" in Kingsmead, and was struck by the list of beads made of gold, amber, jet, and shale. which inspired me to create this color palette:


Color by COLOURlovers

So, it all came together like this:



This design didn't have much of an impact and came in the bottom quarter of designs. Other than the bird-based design that won, I also liked the strawberries.

Dotted islands

For the contest theme "islands," I created very simple "desert islands" in a rough polka dot:



The colors are the same as from the palette-restricted "sailing" theme. I used some details to try to expand the apparent number of colors: the sand is white speckles on yellow, the water is dark blue crosshatching on light blue, the palm leaves are yellow lines on blue to give a green impression, and the palm trunks are red lines on blue to give a purplish-brown impression. I feel it would work rather well as a Hawaiian-style shirt.

My favorite was this rather glowy overhead map. Mine didn't crack the top half of entries.

Quadcopters

The theme of this contest entry was "flying machines." I went for quadcopters.



I got the colors from here (with the addition of black):


Color by COLOURlovers

This made it just into the top two-thirds of entries. My favorite entry featured lots of little planes sensing each other with radar. The majority of entries featured biplanes or hot air balloons, but there were actually a few others featuring drones.

Briefly online

Well, as soon as I caught up on the blog, I fell behind again. And I'm about to drop off for awhile again, as my second child is due any time now - in fact I was due three days ago. So, I'll catch up as far as I can, and who knows when I'll be back!

Related to the subject of babies, there was another "partner" design contest - to make a Southwest-inspired pattern that could be used for baby bedding. The winner would actually get theirs made up into bedding by the company involved in the contest.

I went for a somewhat faux-Pendleton style, with little stylized sprouts. I pinned a number of thematic images, and started with this as guidance for colors.



I just missed making it into the top two-thirds of entries. My favorite was this abstract assortment of diamond shapes.