A couple of cakes

Here, finally, is the last of the backlog of Spoonflower contests I have to catch up with before going back to merely once a week.  This contest was another more specific one - we had to make designs involving cake (or cupcakes) out of collaged paper, with only the minimum of digital manipulation needed to get it into a repeat. I decided to make plain cake slices, and thought it would be fun to make them out of pictures from catalogs! I gathered up Pottery Barn, Williams-Sonoma, and Garnet Hill, then cut out all the areas I could find that had large-enough, interesting textures.  Then I paired them up and decided which ones would be "icing" and which would be the actual "cake." In lieu of scanning them in, I enlisted my husband - who has been honing his photography skills by taking tons of amazingly cute pictures of our son - to photograph them.  Then it was just a matter of getting them all arranged in a repeat so that the light/dark values were evenly distributed.



My entry came in 20 out of 143, with 239 votes. Definitely one of my best results!

My favorite entry by far was this one, which came in second. It reminds me of a set of illustrations I saw years and years ago in Sesame Street Magazine.  It was a cut-out game, of memory or go-fish or something, where all the sets were little cakes.  Instead of drawings of cakes though, they were photographs of little clay cakes. They were all two or three layers, in all different colors, with fancy piped borders and decorations and flowers.  I loved the three-dimensional look of all those perfect little cakes. This fabric is simpler, but has a similar charm.  I'm trying to think what it would be good to make into - maybe placemats.

Pomegranate Cookies

Pomegranates! Everybody make a pomegranate fabric!  OK.  I was inspired by the animal cookie design in the extinct animal contest and decided to make my design of pomegranate cookies. I thought about how one might make pomegranate cookies, and made up a little narrative. Someone with older children getting bored during Summer vacation might try to come up with things for them to do.  I imagined such a person would have them bake cookies, but challenge them to come up with other things the traditional cookie cutters could represent.  So ball ornament shapes have been iced as pomegranates, and bell shapes have been iced as pomegranate flowers.  The kids also mixed up custom colors for the icing.  I think they did a pretty swell job!



My design came in 259 out of 290, with 20 votes. I'm pretty happy with how the repeat came out here - I kept rotating it as I worked on the layout, which helps avoid too much directionality. (Of course, then I added the shine all facing the same way, so technically it's still one-directional!)  I also tried to add a little depth to the background. Layered over the check (which is reused from the background of the hipster piglet) is the eucalyptus leaf pattern I created for the family crest.

Of the more realistic designs, my favorites were this very lush design that I would love to make into a tablecloth (and came in seventh), and this warm tonal. The more graphic ones I liked were this pomegranate/lime combo, a watercolor of whole pomegranates and one of just the seeds, one reminiscent of batik, and this one that looks like a pomegranate vine.

A Clever Title about Stars and Stripes

The Spoonflower contest closest to the Fourth of July was themed "Stars & Stripes." My first vague idea was to represent "Betsy Ross' sewing kit" - as if she looked down, saw red stitches on white linen, with needles scattered on top in the shape of stars, and that became her inspiration for the American flag.  In the end, I decided to make the stitches yellow instead, to try to stand out from what would undoubtedly be a preponderance of red, white and blue designs.




My entry came in 242 out of 328, with 31 votes.  Of the red/white/blue designs, my favorites were the jets that came in fourth, and the overlapping circles that came in eighth.  I liked a couple of the designs that referenced stars in the sky - this one that is Matrix-esque, and this peaceful night sky.  Also good were these cute wrapped stars and vending machines.

Dancing Dinosaurs

For the Spoonflower contest to make a design involving an extinct animal, I went with a dinosaur even though I knew there would be many, many other dinosaur entries. I wanted to make it a fabric for kids, but tried to think of a way to balance it so it could be either a girl or a boy fabric. How? T-rex doing ballet.



T-rex's poses are all based on photographs of Nijinsky. This came in 142 out of 226 with 54 votes, though as I looked at the voting page I saw that apparently I failed to vote for it myself.  Whoops!  My other favorite dinosaur design was just tracks, and my favorite of the many dodo entries was this one. Also good were these very pretty proto-starfish, and the animal crackers.

One color + one color = two designs

In this contest, Spoonflower required us to use only a specific shade of green and a specific shade of purple, and optionally white, to create a geometric design.  There were a ton of really great entries!  I'll just say right off the bat that mine came in a blistering 371 out of 375, with eleven votes.  Ha ha, BURN!  Definitely sets a new low from my previous worst.

I made a design of tesselating plusses:


And then layered in white a stylized circuit design for a full adder, arranged again into tessellated plusses. This represents the logic needed to add two one-digit binary numbers (i.e. it computes 0+0, 0+1, 1+0, or 1+1).



This was fun to make - I enjoyed working out exactly how to place all the logic gates to get them evenly arranged in the plus shape.

I really like this semi-paisley that came in third, and the sketchy triangles in fourth. Also fond of these tangram animals, even though the designer had some issue getting the green color to show up right. And for plainer geometrics, my favorites were these circles and squares, triangles, and polyhedra.

Crest with Zest

A very interesting recent Spoonflower contest was to create your own family crest.  I decided right away that I wanted to make mine more like a Japanese style crest (aka "kamon") rather than a European heraldic shield type. I first became aware of kamons when I was a kid, and we had a drawing program on one of our computers that came with a ton of vector clip art, arranged into pages.  One of the pages was all different kamon.  I had no idea what they were at the time, but I really liked their graphic qualities and "collection-ness." Years later I became familiar with the quilting work of Kumiko Sudo, who made a whole book of patterns turning kamon into patchwork and applique designs, called "Circles of The East : Quilt Designs from Ancient Japanese Family Crests." I love this book!  I also read Susan Briscoe's blog, a quilter in the UK who does similar kind of work - I haven't gotten her book yet but I want to.

Back to my design - I wanted to incorporate computers, guns, and something about the area where we live (Goleta/Santa Barbara). For the computer aspect, I made the circuit diagram symbol for a transistor in the kamon style, and made that the overall design.  I decided to make the foreground & background each composed of their own repeat, in a semi-cheater style. 



I also uploaded each design separately, so you can see the repeat more clearly. The background is eucalyptus leaves, in reference to all the eucalyptus trees that grow in this area.



The foreground is a repeat of little guns (Sig Sauers to be more specific).



My design came in 54 out of 86, with 55 votes.  My favorite entry is this cute, minimalist one. I also like this more ornate design that came in second place.  This Zelda-inspired entry is pretty great, and I was pleased that this very punny one came in ninth.

Vroom vroom!

There has already been a design contest for bicycles, for which I fudged a little and created an entry with motorcycles instead.  Well, now there is a contest actually for motorcycles.  What now?  I decided my lightcycle motif was perfectly good, so instead of the regular striped arrangement I did before I went for a tossed print.  I also decided to use the same colors as the "Isabel's Robots" design I made before. I had a hard time deciding on the background, though. I ended up going with the flat black since that was the most "Tron-like.'



I wanted to add some other subtle design or texture to the background, but I also was resistant to adding another color, since the only other one already in use in the collection is the light yellow.  I think any use of that in the background would be too disruptive to reading the foreground figures.

My entry came in 97 out of 119, with 28 votes. I also liked this other lightcycle entry, and these eight-bit motorcycles. I think this entry would be great as a skirt.  Well, I don't really wear skirts often, so maybe a tunic-y shirt.