Happy Valentine's Day!

Yes, I know it's not until tomorrow, but not only did my husband and I already exchanged our presents, the Valentine's-associated contest at Spoonflower ended today. Actually, the theme of the contest was Anti-Valentine's Day, and in addition had to be faux cross stitch.

I spotted some early entries, before I started mine, which were pretty impressive: one that fully embraced the cross stitch format, and one that brought candy hearts into the mix - and both exhibiting exhilarating levels of unromantic snark. So I decided to take a different strategy. Rather than say something negative about the usual sentiments of the holiday, I wanted to say something positive about something that was the opposite any those sentiments. I looked around for quotes about being by yourself, and at various vintage samplers (you should be able to pick out my reference material from here). And for the colors, I decided that the Synergy "serenity" colors, which I had previously used for my newborn dinos, would be a good fit both for the material on its own, and as a further contrast from traditional Valentine's pinks. So assembled into a panel and put in a simple repeat, it came together like this:



But then I started thinking about how you might actually use this fabric, and decided to make a format where you could actually use (almost) everything in a standard fat quarter. That size actually makes a good fit for a 16" square (as we learned with the Spring Cheater contest), so I decided to go for something that you could make into a front for a 16" throw pillow.



I'm very happy with how this came out. I even took the time to turn some of the elements into their own repeats - and I could happily add more, given time. I got a respectable 117 votes, and just squeaked in to the top third in the rankings.