Flower border print for mom

For the contest right before Mother's Day, the challenge was to make a floral border print, the idea being you could sew such a print into a skirt to give to your mother.

I wanted to use some of my mom's favorite flowers: jasmine, cherry blossoms, honeysuckle, and orange blossoms. (Which are also some of mine, seemingly not very coincidentally!) But I wanted to go for a more graphic rather than ornate feel, so I kept it to just navy and white.



Since all the flowers except honeysuckle are five-lobed, I used a tessellation of pentagons as the basis for the layout of the flowers. The background is a simple basketweave, previously seen here.

 Like so many of my designs, this one was in the bottom quartile of votes. The entry I'd be most likely to wear as a skirt myself featured thistles and yarrow. The one I liked best based on visual appeal, without regard to wearing, was this super-sweet and cute one.

Passing grades

Often Spoonflower will do contests with a required set of colors, but usually there will be some kind of theme as well. For this one, we had to use coral, mint, black and white - these shades specifically:

Color by COLOURlovers

But there were no other parameters. So there were nearly 700 entries, the largest set ever. It made for quite a long voting process! I figured most people would use white as a background, so I immediately decided to use black instead. I was in the mood to make a floral, so I thought of making it like a calico. I used some of my favorite flowers: jasmine, honeysuckle, orange blossoms, and fuchsia.



This did moderately well - almost into the top third. There were a number of other florals/botanicals that I liked, as well as this cute little map.

Another contest was "rockets." Obviously the main focus was supposed to be on the space ship type of rocket, but I wanted to branch out from that. The word "rocket" can also refer to fireworks or arugula, so I combined those two things (the colors are from my previous space ship related design):



This made it well into the top third. My favorites were the control panel repeat and the abstract take on Apollo rockets.

One very specific theme was "Kittens in Mittens." I focused mostly on the mitten part, and did little paw-tread mittens in this color scheme I'm still trying to get a good use out of.



This got 155 votes and actually made it into the top quartile! My favorite entry was this one.