Mid-Holiday catchup

Here's what I've been up to for Spoonflower designs!

I made a bonsai-inspired entry for the "fall leaves" contest. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, but it did not resonate with the community and got only five votes (and came in second from last). That stung a bit!



I think that perhaps the trees are too close together and so just get read as blobs. Maybe a less dense arrangement, and in a one-way-up orientation, would work better for this. My favorite entry was this exuberant nature assortment, followed by the tessellated oak leaves.

I used a couple of patterns I had on hand - the background is from the isometric graph paper and the leaves use the lattice pattern I've used in a few places before. And speaking of that graph paper set, somebody bought the scantron design on a roll of giftwrap! I bet that's for a present for a teacher. (Someone else also got the snow angel kids as giftwrap - I bet those will be some cute presents.)

And speaking of giftwrap, the next contest was to make a small-scale print, with a mitten theme, to be used as giftwrap. I thought of the way my son adds extra consonants to words - pitcher is "pist-stir," button is "bun-ton" - and mitten became "mint-en." So I drew mint leaves in the shapes of mittens.



I used these colors:

Color by COLOURlovers

I'm very satisfied with how this came out. I ordered a roll of it on giftwrap to use for the presents I'm giving this year! It got 31 votes and came in the bottom quarter of the contest. My favorite entries, any of which I would happily use as giftwrap, were these: one, two, three, four.

And most recently, the contest was for a design that fit on a yard of fabric that you could hang up as a festive decoration (in lieu of an actual Christmas tree, perhaps). My husband suggested a tree grown into the shape of a menorah, with Christmas-tree-type lights as the candle flames. I didn't have time to do a fully rendered take on that idea, but I at least suggested it in a minimal way.



The idea here is that you hang up the bottom portion, and cut out the individual lights and put them up in the usual Hanukkah way. The background dots are the same as I used for (again) the graph paper and the firefly molecules. The branch/vine texture in the menorah is based on the howling spirits/haunted ghosts pattern, just with all the features filled in and the bodies joined together.  It came in the bottom third, with 51 votes. So the design I threw together in about two hours at the last minute, got more votes than the previous two - which I had put quite a bit of work into - combined! Isn't that the way.

The best straight-up traditional all-out Christmas tree entry was this Victorian one. I also really liked this stylized geometric one. The ones I liked that had more of a twist were the pressed flowers, New Zealand Christmas, Japanese crest, and Indian block print. And the best one that had an interactive element like mine was this "Twelve Days of Christmas" tree.

Advent style calendar

Well, I messed up last week's contest. Plus, the contest ended on Thanksgiving, so I couldn't write about it until now. The goal was design an advent calendar - it didn't necessarily have to count down 25 days until Christmas, but the idea was some kind of counting calendar with things hidden in pockets or behind doors. I originally wanted to do a full advent calendar like the ones my mom made when I was a kid. She made two, which were these wonderful Victorian-style houses made of paper, with pictures behind the doors and windows. Since we celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas, she would always put pictures for the days of Hanukkah that fell in December. For instance, in one calendar it was simply menorahs with the right number of candles lit, and in the other the pictures told the story of Hanukkah, with little stick figure Maccabees liberating the temple and finding the miraculous oil that lasted eight days. She also put in a picture for the Winter Solstice, which falls on the 21st or 22nd. Since those days change every year, she had to move around all the pictures. The remainder were filled in with more traditional holiday stuff. The first calendar had drawings of different ornaments on each day, with the 25th showing a tree with all of them hung up. The second one showed a snowman with more and more features each day. She said that a hard lesson she learned after making the first calendar was that having all the windows & doors at different sizes each year made it really hard to switch it around! She sometimes had to redraw the pictures if they ended up in a really different window. But then, some years later when she made the second one, she forgot about that in the rush of inspiration - and made all the windows & doors different sizes again. Oops!

So anyway, I do eventually want to make something like that of my own, with pictures for Christmas, Hanukkah, and the Solstice that move around every year, but since I had been spending my limited crafting time finishing this quilt, I had only a few days to work on the advent calendar for the contest, so I quickly decided to be less ambitious. I still stuck with the Victorian-style house though. I realized I could do just Hannukah, and have only eight openings to deal with! So I drew the house, with a menorah in each window, and then coverings for each window & door. It was fun to come up with eight different menorah designs! As I was making it, I was thinking to myself, wow, it's pretty cramped to fit this on a fat quarter with only eight! The openings/pockets for a regular 25-day calendar must have to be pretty tiny! Ah, foreshadowing.

Anyway, I finally managed to wrap it up in the early evening the last day for contest entries. I would have loved to have gotten more detail on the house, but I'm still happy with how it came out. I uploaded the design to Spoonflower, and entered it into the contest. However, I noticed that on the page where they show you how it will look when people are voting, it looked strange - instead of filling the whole rectangle, my design floated in the middle with a huge blank margin all around. So I took a look at the contest page again....and oops, it turns out the idea was to create the calendar on a WHOLE YARD, not a fat quarter! Eeeeeuuurghhhhhhhhh.

I wrestled briefly with the idea of trying to hurriedly adapt it to fit on a yard. Perhaps I could make a version where you could buy either a fat quarter and get just what I'd done so far, or buy a whole yard and get extra decorative bits, like backing, strips to hang it with, etc. Then I decided to just go with what I had. I'm just doing this for fun, after all, no need to stress! I still left it as a contest entry - no reason not to.

After all that, my design came in 28th out of 41, with 111 votes. I'm sure I would have done better if I had done it correctly and filled up a whole yard, but I was the only one to do a Hanukkah calendar, so at least I stood out in a good way in that aspect!