Two kinds of blankets

The last two contests were for designs for very specific usages. First, a large-scale pattern that could be used for a duvet cover (which is one of the pre-made options you can get via Spoonflower now), in neutral tones. Then, a 1-yard design that could be made into a cheater quilt.

For the duvet, I based my design off of this quilt.



It's...pretty meh, I guess. Definitely missing something.

For the cheater quilt, I've always wanted to do a take one on of those amazing Tibetan tiger rugs, so I took this opportunity!



Yes, this is stretching the bounds of a cheater quilt, which technically should look like patchwork, but I'm calling it "faux applique."  I'm pleased with this one! It got into the top quarter of entries.

My favorite duvet pattern was the first-place winner, and my favorite cheater was the cathedral windows.

Flags, blocks, cocoons

For the "moths" contest I reused the cocoon design I made before, with a slightly different repeat and different colors. My favorite was the Mayan-style moths.



For the pirates theme, I did a bunch of designs based on real pirate flags, then improvised a bunch in the same vein. Had a ton of fun with this one but it didn't go anywhere in the contest. I liked this gray/sepia design.



Then for "colorblocking," I used the same colors as the dog noses with some basic geometric shapes.



This actually did pretty well and got into the top 20% of entries. My favorite was this one, which is based on a patchwork design.

2019 Bags

Tomorrow we depart for the yearly trip to the Redwoods. I'm still carrying on a family tradition from my Grandmother, who made little "treat bags" for all of us grand kids for long car drives. Last year's bags (and links to previous years) here. This year I didn't make designs totally from scratch, but I did do custom tweaks to existing designs.

For Isabel, I took the firefly luciferin molecules, made them very small, and in an aqua-violet color scheme. For Emmett, I tweaked the colors of the Norse eagle/hawk to be more blue/cool (in a color temperature sense, not a hipness sense). For Bruce, I took the geology design and removed everything but the volcanoes and colored it orange. For James, I tweaked the rhinos to be more green. And for Eddie, the large-scale alphabet design, scaled down and turned red.

Cat tree

For the "cats" theme, my spouse suggested a repeat of cat towers, so I drew that and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out:



This was fun to draw! It actually did pretty well, ending up in the top 100. My favorite was the colorful cats in boxes.

Dinosaur skulls

So to follow up last week's dogs, for the "dinosaur" theme I did t-rex skulls using the same set of colors.



 

The colors don't work nearly as well with negative space in between! I'm pretty happy with how the lineart turned out, though. My favorite was the painted parasaurolophuses. 

"Dog days" best finish so far

For the "dog days" contest, I did a little scallop of upturned dog noses.



The colors are inspired by this image.

This actually got 38th place! Since it made it into the top 50, they set it for sale without me having to proof it. Pretty cool!

My favorite entry was this damask with hounds.

Next batch of designs

For the "paint by number" contest, I used the paint-by-number roses I made for Maren's quilt, with bolder colors.



My favorite was the heron woods.

For "vintage postcards," I did the BACKS of postcards.



My favorite was the Hawaiian themed cards.

Then we had a theme to do an animal portrait that would fit on a tea towel. I thought it would be funny to do a tribute to the inescapable "Baby Shark" song, but in the style of those really old-fashioned portraits with the baby in a big, lacy white dress. So that was fun! I wanted to add more detail to the frame, to make it look like a carved wood frame, but ran out of time.



Next the challenge was to do a print that would work for boys' clothing. I adapted the orange doodle design I did of a bunch of Bruce's favorite stuff and did it in color instead.



My favorite was the bugs on stripes.

Lastly, another restricted palette contest where we had to use bronze, peach, and light & dark teal (and optionally black and white). I based my design on this image and added some mysterious symbols.



I thought the ginkgo best used these colors.

Of all these entries, the boys' clothing doodle did by far the best!

Fitness

For the "fitness" contest, instead of a repeating design I made a poster-type layout of that 7 minute workout that was going around awhile back.



My favorite entry was the one about kinesio tape.

Related to fitness news, we recently bought Fitness Boxing for the Switch and have been having fun with it. James has fun following along when Bruce is doing the punches.

🎶Guess who got a Cricut 🎶

My combined birthday/Mother's Day present from Zack and the boys is a Cricut! I haven't had a chance to do too much with it yet but I did a few small things to try it out.

I did a few of the free included projects they have online - a beetle greeting card and some page-corner bookmarks.

Then I used some of the free elements and composed them myself to make little banners for each of the kids. (You can see that James crinkled his a bit before I could get a picture!)

The 2018 Bags

Here were last summer's (2018) bags for the kids for the family Redwoods trip - I just realized I never posted them!

It's time for me to start pondering the design for this year, as the trip is just a few months out now. (Here are the bags from 2017, 2016, 2015, and 2014).

Almost June

Here's the designs I've made lately!

For the "April Showers" theme, I made a design in the style of a "tilted square" patchwork, with clouds and giant drops.



My favorite was the rainbow raindrops.

for "eucalyptus," I was just going to use the eucalyptus design I made already, but as it turns out it was pretty small so I ended up having to redraw it. So I also added some pods to it.



I'm really happy with this one - maybe one of my favorites I've created for a contest. (Still didn't do any better than usual, ha ha!) My favorite was this one that combined different types of eucalyptus.

Speaking of trying to predict what people will vote for, there were also contests for "shibori" and "abstract minimalism." Here are my respective entries:





In my opinion, the shibori one is way more pretty AND useful. But the abstract rectangle one did way better in the contest! The first ended up very near the bottom, and the second did quite well (almost in the top 100). Insert shrug emoji here!

I think the common perception of shibori is that it's always indigo dye. (Probably 97% of the entries were blue.) I specifically chose something to look like a traditional mulburry dye instead so as to not be one of the zillions of blue entries. I'm sure that ended up hurting me! You can see an example of the kind of elaborate shibori dye I had in mind on this page (the red kimono). Also I had made this base shibori pattern for an earlier challenge.

The abstract rectangle one is an homage to this artwork specifically.

My favorites for these themes were the simple shibori squares and the triangles.

Then, there was a contest to make a playmat, to fit on a yard of fabric. I made a solar system playmat. With more time I would love to add more details - like Voyager, the Mars rovers, etc.



My favorites were the circuit components and the nest.

For small-scale Summer-themed prints, I made one based on the shield-like badges you often see on bottles of suncreen.



My favorite was the fruits.

Pollen

For the "pollinators" challenge, I skipped the actual pollinators and just drew pollen. I made it similar to the "grains" design I did for the Matisse challenge.



My favorite entries were the clover and the bees and lemons.

Nautical Flags

For the nautical-themed contest, I based it around the classic flag alphabet, which I have used before. This one spells out a classic quote: "a smooth sea never made a skillful sailor."




My favorite entries were the sardines and the knots.

Feathers

For the "feathers" contest, I made a design of Stellar's Jay feathers. Such a nice color scheme! Such cute mohawks! I used this as the inspiration for the layout.



I got a thrill because Spoonflower used this design in their weekly email, in the section linking to the current contest:

I really liked the "pillow fight" entry and the chickens. My design actually did pretty well this week - I made it into the top 100! (79th place in fact)

Happy Third Day of Spring

First to catch up, the theme of "affirmations." Well, mine wasn't exactly an affirmation, but a motivational quote that has always stuck with me:



For the layout, I was inspired by this cuneiform inscription. Mine doesn't have nearly as nice a use of negative space, but I did what I could. I also did a version in yellow with gears in the background but ultimately decided simpler was better for the contest.



My favorite entry was "today I fly."

For the "Bohemian Paradise" contest (another one of those very loose, "you'll know it when you see it" kind of themes) I tried to make something reminiscent of the folk embroidery such as on this shirt (also inspired by this).



The entry I thought personally captured the spirit best was this one.

Next up, "moody florals." I did poppies and orchids combined. This is one of those designs where I really liked it as I made it, and then once I uploaded the final design I disliked it instead. Ah well. (The colors are from this cake.)



My favorite entry was the roses, which for some reason I really want to make into a shirtdress.

And finally, for the theme of "maximalism" (which most people interpreted as "busy!"), it fell in one of those weeks where I had almost no time so I slapped together something super quick in one of my favorite color schemes:



My favorites were the halftone squares and this psychedelic abstract.

Out of all these, the "affirmation" one did the best by far - it actually made it into the top half of entries.

Pysanky

So for the pysanky contest, my struggle was how to do something different. I knew that most of the entries would be depictions of traditionally-decorated eggs, either scattered, in a grid, or scalloped - or, just the traditional decorations themselves unrolled. What could I do that wouldn't just be an iteration of one of those?

Well, in the same vein as the papercut contest where I depicted the leftovers of doing a papercut, I decided to show the eggs BEFORE they got decorated. I made a lovely little gradient of eggshell colors, inspired by this.



This obviously had no chance of doing particularly well in the contest, but it may work well enough as an interesting - but not TOO interesting - pattern to get some sales. For instance, one of the designs I sell the most of (so perhaps half a dozen per year) is this one based on ye old primary school lined paper. The highly detailed, super-saturated novelty prints do well in contests, but I think they can be tricky to actually use. Most of the overall best sellers are actually quite simple - chevrons, arrows, and crosses, or very limited color usage. It's a little counter-intuitive, as you'd think people would get those kinds of prints more cheaply from regular fabric, rather than paying the premium for print-on-demand.

Bananas and Bricks

We had another limited palette contest, this time with these colors:

The middle coral color is the 2019 color of the year, hence the theme. I wanted to do something a little silly so I drew bananas - a funny word on its own, plus Bruce is kind of obsessed with the word. (Not the first time I've included bananas because of him). The layout is inspired by this classic pattern.



So of course the "keystone" color is the one I used the least of! My favorite entry was the pencils.

Then, there was kind of a weird theme of "Desert Modernism." What this really meant was that a foundation in Phoenix, Arizona that preserves Mid-Century Modernism specifically, and specifically around Phoenix, was looking for a design to use on throw pillows at an event. Ooookay. I took inspiration from one of the houses they feature on their site, the David Wright house (designed by Frank Lloyd Wright for his son).



My favorites were these two - I do love me an isometric landscape!

Two different retro styles

For the Moon Landing design (another collaboration with Princess Awesome) I re-used the moon landing design I already made for "the sixties," but with different colors.



It actually did a little better this time. My favorite entry was this one.

Then, the theme was rockabilly. I wanted to do a cheater print combining some of the fabrics/motifs the style is known for - stripes, dots, checks, plaids, bandanas, denim, skulls, and cherries. I remembered that I had already done a cheater print of entirely denim before, so I reused that but added some of the other prints in.



I only had time to do a few of the other prints. It would probably look a little nicer if I worked in some other designs - some burgundy bandana print and some red and black plaid, say. My favorite was the tattoo print.

Animal print

For the animal print contest, I did a pattern very loosely based on snakeskin:



My favorite entries were the fingerprints and turtle shells.

Valentine's Day, a month early

This week's contest was the V-day theme. Nothing more specific this year - just "be my valentine." I wanted to do something with cupids. I fell back on one of my favorite patterns - the good ol' cube optical illusion tessellation. (such as this or this or this).



And so I called it "Cube-pid!" Ha!

My favorites were the Mary Blair-esque animals and the matches.

Happy 2019!

Happy new year! The last contest of 2018 carried over two weeks, so that nobody would have to log in and vote during Christmas week. This was the "astrology" theme. I went with the Chinese zodiac and re-used something I made already. I had made this for year of the monkey and had so much fun I made all twelve. So for this one I just put all the symbols together:



My favorite was this simple "bubble" version of the zodiac symbols.