Draw what you know

After the previous, more specific challenge, the next one was back to wide-open.  The idea was simply "hand-drawn," with a minimum of digital manipulation.  I didn't want to hassle with actually drawing something and scanning it in, so I just used SketchBook Pro again to make it look fairly hand-drawn.

This design is based on what I can see sitting here on my couch.  There are some overlapping segments of a baby gate which form a rounded grid, and the colors are based on the back yard behind me (tall hedges, stone retaining wall, some flowers).



The shapes didn't come out exactly like I wanted - the points of the leaf shapes don't quite line up right to balance the negative & positive space.  I lost sight of that when I was trying to get the overall repeat to look right.  I decided to leave it, since I would have had to redo almost the whole thing to fix it.  A lesson for future designs!

There were a couple of different polyhedron/crystal entries I liked: a purple one, another of jewels, and one of salt. I also really liked these raindrops.

My entry came in 160 out of 500, with 95 votes.

Oh, a "Jug!"

It's interesting how the Spoonflower contests vary in specificity.  The last one was just "watercolor," which implies actually not a whole lot about what the resulting design will look like.  This next one was much more constrained: we had to use a set group of colors, and the design had to be kitchen-related.  We were given the exact RGB values for the colors, which were brown, beige, yellow, and red (and optionally white).

My first thought was to do sets of matching pitchers and bowls, but I found so many interesting shapes of vintage pitchers (on Etsy and plain old Google image search) that I stuck with just that.



Many of the other entries were in a similar vein - representational, single-orientation prints of collections of objects.  My favorites of this type were the mugs, egg cups, appliances, and tea kettles.  Other than that I liked this one, which has representational stuff and abstract motifs arranged in stripes.

My design came in 79 out of 281, with 133 votes.

Postscript: The title of this blog post is from an incident that I think about nearly every time I hear the word "pitcher."  When I was a young teen my family went to the UK.  At one restaurant, my father asked the waiter for a pitcher of water and we got an incredibly blank stare in response.  My father then mimed the act of pouring a glass of water, and the waiter said, "Oh! A JOOOOG!"

Doubled up

There was actually a second contest that closed on the very same day as the non-owl animal contest, with a much harder theme. Spoonflower announced they were teaming up with Robert Kaufman fabrics, and doing a mega contest, where the designs had to look at least partially like watercolor paintings, with two rounds. The top eight vote-getters of the first round would get a few weeks to create full collections around their first entry, and the winner of that round would get a contract with Kaufman to be a professional fabric designer.

They actually announced this one first, and then two weeks before it closed, posted about the animal one closing on the same day.  Whaaaa? I thought it had to be a mistake at first, but alas, it was true.  This was especially irksome for me, because I was going to be traveling for the week leading up to the last day of these two contests.

Since I hadn't made much progress on my watercolor entry, I figured I would just finish my animal entry first and then go back if I had any time. Hipster Piglet actually came together pretty quickly, so I got a little bit done before the trip started.

Of course, 'watercolor' is just an appearance, and doesn't give any suggestion for actual subject matter. I tried to think of something that was really 'me'. When I was little, I wanted to be a Ballerina Plumber - fixing plumbing by day, dancing on the stage at night.  I drew a couple of the little B.P.s and some plumbing for the background, all in SketchBook Pro so I could make them look like pencil drawings.

Once we were back, I had one evening to finish up.  I followed this tutorial to make the color look a little more like watercolor paint. The end result is still far short of what I was wishing to make, but a decent first attempt.



Definitely one I want to take another stab at!  Not sure if I would necessarily make it a watercolor design again, but it's a concept I want to develop.  One of the weakest parts is the color - I tend to be far too literal and representational with colors, so I need to do some thinking on how to come up with a scheme for this that is more cheerful and bright, but still allows for the ballet & plumbing elements to come across clearly.

I also uploaded a version with just the background, which I think makes an interesting blender print on its own.



Alas, but unsurprisingly, my design didn't make it into the second round.  They didn't show the voting results so I don't know the extent of how poorly it did, ha ha!

My favorite entry was this one, which also didn't make it into the finals. Of the final entries, none particularly grabbed me.  I thought all of them were good, but nothing seemed like anything super-special that's beyond what you see in conventional fabric collections.

The pitter-patter of little feet; the incessant poking of little toes

As well as replacing our old mattress last weekend, I tackled another bittersweet project - packing up a batch of clothes my son has outgrown, for my nephew, who is a year younger. This is only the second time I've had to do that, since it seems like most of his growth since he was six months old has been just to make his limbs longer. I've been seeing him in some of those little shirts and footies for months and months now, and they're only just now too small, so it caused some pangs to give them up! But hopefully at least a few items will find use again for his cute little cousin.

To that end, I tried to do some repairs on one of my favorite little footies. He wore it so much that the feet developed holes at the toes.


First I took the foot bottoms off as carefully as I could.


I have no way of replacing that fabric, so in order to get a nice knit, I grabbed an old onesie that got a bad stain on the back. It has a pleasing waffle-weave texture.


There was enough room on the onesie around the seams & stains to get a double layer on the feet. Also I decided to incorporate the embroidery that had been on the front.


Then it was just a matter of pinning the new feet in place...


...and sewing them in place.  To try to replicate the performance of serging with handsewing, I both straight-stitched AND whip-stitched all the way around.


Right-sides out again, here are the 'handsome' new feet!


So these are on their way to my nephew now, with all the rest.

The ebb & flow of life, as demonstrated by mattresses

In the summer before my last year of college, nine years ago now, I was an intern at the company where I now work full time as a software engineer. My then-fiancee and I were living in Isla Vista, where most UCSB students live. The internship actually paid pretty well, so I had some extra dough after expenses and whatnot. (My parents smartly left me to entirely support myself over that summer.) We decided to go for a big-ticket item - we replaced our crappy futon with a Real Mattress and Real Box Spring. We got just the most basic metal frame possible as a bed. It was soooooo nice! We did eventually get a real, grown-up bed, once we later moved to a real, grown-up apartment - but kept the mattress.

I spent the next nine years trying to remember to flip it regularly. I did pretty well for a while there by doing it on the first weekend of every month, with odd-numbered months requiring a rotation and even-numbered months an end-over-end flip. (I turned this into a name as a mnemonic: r(otate)+odd and fl(ip)+even became "Rod Fleeven".) However, after we bought a house two years ago, with a master bedroom with a ceiling fan thus requiring a lot more care be taken while flipping, this tapered off significantly.

I'm sure I don't need to describe how slumped and saggy a mattress gets after nine years. We had two nice little depressions on each side. It was time to go.

So now, across the hall from our sleeping toddler, sits our brand-new mattress. We bought it from a man who can only be described as a "mattress nerd." He & his family own & run a store in Santa Barbara that sells mattresses (and apparently they also construct them). It was amazing! He knew everything about the composition of mattresses, when certain mattress technologies came about or became unpopular - a regular font of information. So with his expert advice, and a lot of awkwardly lying on mattresses in public, we got a natural latex foam mattress. It's supposed to be a balance between a traditional inner-spring mattress and a memory-foam mattress, very breathable, and even eco-friendly.

Best of all, they took away our old mattress & box spring away when they delivered the new one. It was a little sad to see it hauled away, thinking of how proud I was to buy it back then. The new one could, in theory, last for 20 years. In 20 years our son will probably be in college, perhaps reaching the point where he's starting to get tired of his crappy futon and thinking about getting a real, grown-up bed. Hopefully he can find a mattress nerd too.

I'll let the pie do the talking for me

Hipster Piglet

Hipster Piglet.



Because, what else would you make for a contest that calls for an animal-themed fabric, with the restriction it can't be an (overused, cliche) owl? More specifically, the idea was to come up with a design so compelling, your chosen animal would unseat the owl as the favorite of the crafting world. So I tried to think of an animal that has a distinctive silhouette or features, but that hopefully not too many other people would also land upon (like cats, dogs, or rabbits). Somehow the image of a pig wearing glasses entered my head, and who could turn down an inspiration like that? So I went whole hog (see what I did there?) and decided to make him a full-on hipster with ironic glasses and trendy scarf. I used the same colors as the seadragon fabric, but added black (for the eyes) and gray (for the checkerboard background).

This came in 163 out of 226 with 62 votes. My favorite was a crocodile pattern that came in 2nd. I also really like this quail entry, which I fully admit I saw before I made mine and inspired the layout.  And finally, I'm fond of this cute panda fabric, which should remind family members reading this blog of a certain toy I had when I was small.