Mermaids and other things for children

Spoonflower had a contest for a mermaid design - and this was another partner contest. The winner has a chance at getting their design made into girl's pajamas! So they had some (somewhat confusing) guidelines about not making the design motifs too big or too small, and not using more than eight colors. I didn't fuss too much about it, because I had my own purpose in mind for a mermaid design.

I was getting ready to make another set of three bags for our upcoming family Redwoods trip, and unlike last year where I used fabric I had on hand, I wanted to make specific fabric designs for each kid for their bags. So for my niece, I wanted to make robot mermaids, using the same colors as her robot quilt.



And here's how it turned out as a bag:

The fabric for my son features some of his favorite things: dalmations, a convertible Mustang (just like Dad drives- well, except in yellow instead of gray), giraffes, and penguins. The penguins are facing each other because the last time he went to the zoo, he got to see two penguins pecking at each other and thought it was the most hilarious and interesting thing ever. "They were playing penguin BEAK FIGHTING!" he would say, with accompanying hand gestures. This uses the same set of colors as my animal tax accountant design.


Color by COLOURlovers

For my nephew, I found an interesting palette with his name:

Color by COLOURlovers

And for the design, I combined some of his favorite animals: cheetahs, dragons (a two-legged wyvern style) and penguins.

So for my family it worked out well but made no impact in the mermaid competition. My favorite entry was this night-themed one.

Well, *I* liked them

Continuing my ridiculous amount of catchup, here are some contest entries which I liked, but made little impression on my fellow voters.

For the theme "penguins," I did a little assortment of penguins hanging out on various levels of an icy landscape. The colors are some of the some from the fishing lures entry - and I'm much happier with how the color usage turned out this time.



This barely made it out of the bottom fifth. My favorite was this graphic Antarctic layout.

Moving on to another animal theme, there was another cat-related contest. This time, however, we had to try to do a "cubist" style. Hmm. I gathered up a few pieces of at least semi-cubist art here, to try to get away from the "The Dream"/"Nude Descending a Staircase" axis of cubism. I tried to convey the nonstop movement of kittens by having extra legs and tails.



The colors came from this set, which someone made in honor of their own cat:


Color by COLOURlovers

This placed about the same as the penguins. My favorite entry was this one - I felt it referenced the cubist style but still was pattern you could see being used somewhere.

Finally, there was a contest to make a cut-and-sew pattern for a plushie version of some mythological creature. I went with a changeling, as there's a longstanding family joke that I'm actually a fairy changeling, and the real Amanda is off somewhere with the fairies and elves. I had a lot of fun coming up with a whole playset, rather than a single stuffed animal.



Not only are there two babies (one human, one...maybe not), each with their own little bassinet and blanket to allow you to stage a little swap, there are a few things related to changeling folklore. There's a pair of iron scissors - if you leave them open sitting near the crib, it stops the fairies from coming and changing out the babies. Then there's a bowl of eggshells. If you suspect your baby of being a changeling already, you can leave the bowl next to the fire (as if cooking with it). This will eventually confuse the changeling enough that it's forced to ask what you're doing, thus blowing its cover.

I can't wait to get this and sew it together!

Anyhow, fond as I am of this, it didn't get all that many votes, and just squeaked out of the bottom quartile. My favorites were the Grim Reaper, Puss-in-Boots, jackalope, and cyclops.