10th season of Project Runway

Project Runway's tenth season just started! They keep congratulating themselves on their "tenth anniversary" despite the fact those ten seasons took place over just eight years. 

The big story far has been Gunnar Deatherage, the person with quite possibly the highest ratio of badassness in name to badassness in person in the entire country - as in, approaching a divide-by-zero error.  He was eliminated at the very beginning of last season, so he gets another chance this time.  He then completely blows any goodwill from this circumstance by acting like a spoiled, entitled brat and engaging in a pointless, random feud with doppelganger Christopher, who promptly wins the first challenge, thus earning immunity from elimination for the second.  In the second episode Gunnar puts on a fake, sticky-sweet act and goes around praising all the designers except Christopher, and talks non-stop about what he would be doing instead if he had won immunity.

Racing Gunnar to the bottom of the appealing personality list is Lantie, who not openly admits to wanting to work with only pretty people and being overly defensive in the face of criticism, but seems to be proud of both. Fortunately she's eliminated in the second episode.

On the opposite side of the spectrum is Nathan, who has a heartwarming quote about his father.  Apparently he never understood his son's interest in fashion, until he saw the first season of Project Runway - "this really is a real thing! An actual industry!" - and so Nathan credits the show with restoring his relationship with his father.

In the first challenge, the designers have brought one outfit from home and must make a second to go with it.  Beatrice, despite being the favorite of Project Runway All-Stars champion (and beloved-of-fans) Mondo, is eliminated based on two very blah outfits.  Christopher wins with a pair of ruffled dresses. Lantie narrowly escapes elimination despite getting called out for making the same dress for each of her models (and herself!).

The second challenge is to use materials bought at the fancy candy store run by Ralph Lauren's daughter, who then gets to be the guest judge.  The selection of the top three and bottom three were especially baffling here.  Andrea's ridiculous Victorian candy clerk costume was safe, somehow appealing more the to judges than Elena's retread of her previous design and Buffi's lumpy, slumpy pink confection - mediocre as they both were.  Lantie is eliminated for her crazy grade school craft project dress, and even though I despise Lantie I still think it was better than Andrea's!

Severus Snapes', I mean Dmitry's, beaded-looking dress was also unaccountably in the middle rather than the top.  It was certainly better than Sonjia's top-heavy dress with unflattering flappy peplums that the judges somehow put in the top three. Ven picks up the win with his pastel stained-window-esque crushed candy decoration.

The judges also continue their consistent history of inconsistency, by knocking Melissa's all-black entry for "taking the joy out of candy."  Uh, shouldn't that be considered creative? The challenge was just to make things out of candy, not to embody the Spirit of Candy.  Fabio wins the Shock & Awe award for making Tim Gunn swear when he agrees - "it's a glue the $#!+ out of it moment!"

Next week, the show continues the tour of the usual challenge types by forcing the designers to work in pairs. DUN DUN DUN. Who wants to bet the producers will make them "randomly" pair Gunnar and Christopher?

Summarizing Contests

Check out the "Spoonflower Contests" link at the top right of the page! Or if you're just reading this on a feed, it's here as well. I put together a spreadsheet of all the data on the contests I've entered.  Cells highlighted in green show the ones where I did better than others, and the dark green especially well.

Cocktail Dress

The latest Spoonflower contest was in conjunction with a nearby theater company, to create a print they could use to make a mid-century cocktail dress for a play.  It wasn't clear whether the play actually was being set in the fifties or sixties, or if they just wanted a retro look.  I looked at some mid-century dresses for inspiration, and found this skirt with a houndstooth/plaid weave I really liked.  Then I found this set of colors:


Color by COLOURlovers
  

And pulled it all together with some additional circular colorblocking.

 

My design came in 220 out of 367, with 60 votes. My favorite entry was this jeweled design. The designs I would most like on a dress for myself were this leafy one and these cubes with springs of flowers. There were a number of traditional tossed floral designs, the best of which I thought were these, these, and these.  Also good was this peacock/paisley meld (which came in second), these jester-like ovals (which came in ninth), and the tongue-in-cheek pills.

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.