Like Persephone returning from the underworld, I have returned after three years (also pomegranates are involved)

Let's see who still has this blog plugged into a feed reader somewhere and forgot all about it! 

I took a looooong break from Spoonflower contests but decided to hop back in. For the contest for food-related ditsy patterns, I went with pomegranates. This was a bit of a tactical error, because red shades suffer the most from compression algorithms, so the design looks fuzzy on most renderings on the website.

I'm reasonably happy with how this turned out. I would prefer it to be scaled smaller than this, in fact, but then it looks even fuzzier and it's harder to decode online. I'll have to see how it looks printed.

My favorite entry was this blackberry bramble.

Two kinds of blankets

The last two contests were for designs for very specific usages. First, a large-scale pattern that could be used for a duvet cover (which is one of the pre-made options you can get via Spoonflower now), in neutral tones. Then, a 1-yard design that could be made into a cheater quilt.

For the duvet, I based my design off of this quilt.



It's...pretty meh, I guess. Definitely missing something.

For the cheater quilt, I've always wanted to do a take one on of those amazing Tibetan tiger rugs, so I took this opportunity!



Yes, this is stretching the bounds of a cheater quilt, which technically should look like patchwork, but I'm calling it "faux applique."  I'm pleased with this one! It got into the top quarter of entries.

My favorite duvet pattern was the first-place winner, and my favorite cheater was the cathedral windows.

Flags, blocks, cocoons

For the "moths" contest I reused the cocoon design I made before, with a slightly different repeat and different colors. My favorite was the Mayan-style moths.



For the pirates theme, I did a bunch of designs based on real pirate flags, then improvised a bunch in the same vein. Had a ton of fun with this one but it didn't go anywhere in the contest. I liked this gray/sepia design.



Then for "colorblocking," I used the same colors as the dog noses with some basic geometric shapes.



This actually did pretty well and got into the top 20% of entries. My favorite was this one, which is based on a patchwork design.

2019 Bags

Tomorrow we depart for the yearly trip to the Redwoods. I'm still carrying on a family tradition from my Grandmother, who made little "treat bags" for all of us grand kids for long car drives. Last year's bags (and links to previous years) here. This year I didn't make designs totally from scratch, but I did do custom tweaks to existing designs.

For Isabel, I took the firefly luciferin molecules, made them very small, and in an aqua-violet color scheme. For Emmett, I tweaked the colors of the Norse eagle/hawk to be more blue/cool (in a color temperature sense, not a hipness sense). For Bruce, I took the geology design and removed everything but the volcanoes and colored it orange. For James, I tweaked the rhinos to be more green. And for Eddie, the large-scale alphabet design, scaled down and turned red.

Cat tree

For the "cats" theme, my spouse suggested a repeat of cat towers, so I drew that and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out:



This was fun to draw! It actually did pretty well, ending up in the top 100. My favorite was the colorful cats in boxes.

Dinosaur skulls

So to follow up last week's dogs, for the "dinosaur" theme I did t-rex skulls using the same set of colors.



 

The colors don't work nearly as well with negative space in between! I'm pretty happy with how the lineart turned out, though. My favorite was the painted parasaurolophuses. 

"Dog days" best finish so far

For the "dog days" contest, I did a little scallop of upturned dog noses.



The colors are inspired by this image.

This actually got 38th place! Since it made it into the top 50, they set it for sale without me having to proof it. Pretty cool!

My favorite entry was this damask with hounds.