Gift bag

This week, the design challenge was to make a at quarter cut-and-sew kit for a reusable gift bag. I based mine on this pattern, and reused my snow angel design. The light-colored fabric for the lining is the basketweave seen previously.



I got enough votes to just make it into the top half.

Most of the entries were pretty disappointing. A significant proportion of people ignored the whole cut-and-sew kit thing and just did the usual seamless repeats. The number of entries that were actually visibly appealing was quite low as well. Two that I did like were the ornament bag and the one that looks like a gingerbread house.

Family portrait

For the "family portrait" theme, my photographer husband gave me the great idea of doing kid's faces, making all the expressions besides smiling when pictures are being taken - eyes closed, fake smiles, etc. I had a lot of fun drawing a bunch of different exasperating children.



This was a tough contest to try to do something actually usable as a surface design, and not just a repeating illustration. (I don't consider myself to have succeeded in this regard either!) My entry just made it into the top quartile - not too shabby. The entry I liked best was this very cartoony one, which I could see being used for kid's pajamas or the like.

Constructing Cthulhu

I was finally able to sew together the Cthulhu pillow I designed - I gave it to my niece for her birthday. Fortunately, my design worked the way I was hoping so I don't need to tweak the fabric.

I got it printed out on the "minky" fabric, which looked like this:


Then cut out all the pieces.


First, I sewed together the inner pillow, right sides together, leaving a gap for reversing and stuffing.




Then I filled it with rice. (And sewed the gap shut - by hand - after taking this picture)


Next, I sewed the two sides of the slipcase together separately - just along the curve, leaving the bottom open.


Then, I turned one half of the slipcase right side out and put it inside the other.


I sewed the two halves together, again leaving a gap.


Here's what it looks like turned right side out.


And then turned so that the lining is inside the outer case, gap sewn shut.


And voila, now the rice-filled pillow can be heated or cooled, and placed inside the slipcover!




Also you can reverse the slipcover to show the pattern on the other side.

The moon, the sun, and so forth

For the theme "lunar cycles," I made a representation of how the lunar cycle matches up with the sun. Specifically, I realized I wasn't clear on what cycle determined whether you could see the moon during the day or night. So, I looked it up! The answer being: at the full moon, it rises at sunset, and rises later each day, until at the new moon it's rising at sunrise. So I tried to capture this:



The gray half-circles indicate when the moon is up, and the yellow/orange represent when the sun is up. The small light blue half-circles are for the high tides. I tried to balance being representational with being abstract enough to be a usable stripe/dot. It came in the bottom half of entries.

I knew there would be a lot of designs that had all the phases laid out in a row like I did, but I stuck with it anyway. My favorite in that vein was this one, plus this one that put them in a circle. Others I liked were the ones that looked like a quilt, sort of Scandinavian, or retro and sketchy.

Fitness and health

For the theme of "fitness," I was still thinking about the various glyphs and symbols I worked with last week, and wanted to do some basic icons related to fitness. I have a very young baby (almost 7 weeks!) so I'm not able to think much beyond the essential functions for life. So I came up with some very straightforward advice on health: get enough sleep, get some exercise, eat a balanced diet, and drink plenty of water. I made little "icons" for each of these.



For the colors, I used the "Doctor" colors from the synergy project, which I hadn't used yet. This entry came in very near the bottom of the contest. My favorite was this nice usage of running shoe treads.

The yearly calendar

Every year Spoonflower does a contest to put next year's calendar in a fat quarter-sized design, such that it can be used as a tea towel - you can see my previous entries here. This year, I was initially going to go with something generic that people like to have in their kitchens. Uhh, lavender flowers! And let's add fleur-de-lis and go for a French theme. But when I started trying to make the basic layout of all the numbers, it seemed kind of dumb and pointless. Back to the drawing board.

I had been laying it out in a diagonal checkerboard pattern, so I stuck with that. Then I had the thought to fill the background of each of the diamonds I was going to put a month in with just a large initial for the month. But, starting with "J", that seemed like it left too much empty space, so then I did the three-letter abbreviations instead, trying to stack them together like Mayan glyphs.

The Mayan connection reminded me of the ancient Egyptian colors I used before, so I used those. I made a polka dot background - instead of just circles, it's X's, stars, hexagons, and bursts, which you can see better here. I'm actually really happy with how that came out - it's one of the few designs I've made that came out exactly like I envisioned it.

In any case, the calendar came together like so:



It didn't go anywhere in the contest, but two people bought it. My favorite was this one.

After the apocalypse

This week's contest was another one for a toile, but with a "post-apocalyptic" theme. I went right for the "only the cockroaches will be left" approach, and drew some giant, irradiated cockroaches wandering around in overgrown ruins. I tried somewhat to emulate the style of Tom Gauld as a guide to conveying atmosphere without a ton of detail.



For the colors, I used a subset of the ones from my sandcastle entry, since I thought it had a bit of an eerie feeling. This came in near the bottom of the results. My favorite entries were this cartoony one that depicts life after an alien takeover and this sketchy, nearly-abandoned cityscape..