Spin spin whoosh smack

For the theme "pinata," I went with some traditional star-shaped pinatas, arranged into a pattern based on this tiling. The colors are the synergy "mad" set, previously used here.



This actually seemed like it was going to perform better than I expected - twenty-six likes! However, it got barely more votes than that, and came in about two-thirds down the result list. My favorite entry was the crepe paper fringe repeat.

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.

Best recent contests

Bringing the catchup to a close, here are some contest entries that have done quite well (by my standards).

For the theme "calligraphy," which also had to be in black and white, I focused on ligatures - joined-together letters. I thought it would be fun to put them in circles, to focus on the shapes rather than making it look like something you should be reading.



This got 149 votes and came in 26th out of 205! My favorites were the textured assortment of pens and ink (which won), the friendly speech bubbles, and the bold sampler.

For the yearly tea towel calendar, I did an assortment of ephemera - menus, tickets, etc, each of which had one month's worth of numbers on it.



The background is the "kitchen table" I created previously. This got 186 votes, almost made it into the top 20% of entries, and I even sold a few. The ones I liked best were the tall ship and the trees.

Finally, near the end of October, there was a contest to do something related to Calaveras, a.k.a. sugar skulls. I pondered what kind of shape or creature to apply that decoration style to, and since there are so many oak trees around here, settled on acorns. Also, the Synergy project has a "haunted" color group, so I used that to tie it into Halloween more specifically.



I had a lot of fun with this one and I'm quite happy with how it came out. It got 42 "likes" (second only to Baby's Book of Computer Science), 198 votes, and came in 29th out of 250. My favorite (other than my own!) was this one.

The most recent contest was a good one for me as well. The theme was "spoons," this being Spoonflower and all. I tried to think of something other than "cutesy layout of spoons in nice colors," since that would be what most people would do. I tried to think of some other theme to apply to spoons - Disney princesses as spoons? The seven deadly sins as spoons? Eventually I settled on putting a piece of advice on each spoon, and calling it "spoon-fed wisdom."



The colors are from this menswear palette. The advice is:

• Don't drown in a cup of water
• The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place (George Bernard Shaw)
• Not my circus, not my monkeys
• It's ok to have an unexpressed thought
• If you can't explain it to a six year old, you don't understand it yourself (Albert Einstein)
• Worrying won't stop bad stuff from happening, it just stops you from enjoying the good

This came in 25th, ending up in the 91st percentile - the best relative finish I've had so far! Can't complain about that. My favorite was probably this one, which included a bunch of other kitchen implements.

Best results from recent contests

Today I'm finally caught up with summarizing my recent contest entries. Yesterday I rounded up a couple of designs that performed pretty well (at least by my standards), so we're wrapping up with the ones that have performed the very best.

The most recently finished contest was for something to do with beetles.  Of course I immediately thought of doing something punny with Volkswagons or The Beatles (or both at once), but decided instead on Egyptian scarabs. One of the other synergy designers is working on a set of colors matching those used by ancient Egyptians, of which I selected a subset. It was fun doodling a whole variety of variations on standard scarab carvings.



This got 133 votes and came in 55th out of 288. My favorite was this one (which won).

Further back in time, the theme was surfing, and we had to use these colors (plus white):


Color by COLOURlovers

I went with a pretty straightforward combination of surfboards and hibiscus.



This got 104 votes and came in 31st place out of 169. My favorite entry also featured hibiscus.

Finally, we got a theme of tennis. Not a topic I find particularly interesting. Thinking back on tennis historically, it reminded me of going to Hearst Castle, where one of the stories the tour guides like to tell you is how Hearst always wanted his guests to be active - illustrated with old film of his glamorous guests heading off to the tennis court. So, how about some twenties-style tennis clothes? I used the same colors as my art deco and library cards designs.



This got 136 votes and came in 23rd! That's my highest placement in quite a while. My favorite was this graphic repeat of tennis balls.

Now we're getting somewhere

Yesterday I went over some contest entries that couldn't make it into the top 50% - now I'm going to show you some that did!

One of the recent themes was one of those oddly-specific ones that seemed to have been inspired by randomly picked words, or something. Monsters, but done by hand-drawing with crayons. Well, I didn't feel like digging up some crayons and scanning something in, so I just used a crayon-esque brush in GIMP.  One of the synergy themes I hadn't used yet was "mad", so I made my monsters angry and used that color scheme.



It garnered 66 votes and came in 75th out of 167. The design I liked best was this one.

Next, the theme was "herb garden." I went for all herbs that are all native to California, using mostly this page as reference. Also, the colors are all from the state flag! Well, except for the yellow, and that's from the "California Welcome Center" sign I've referenced before.



The plants featured here are Tule mint, wood strawberry, miner's lettuce, yerba buena, Western yarrow, alum root, wild ginger, and California sagebrush. I'm pretty happy with how this came out - when I have the time I think I'll put each plant by itself in a repeat. This got 83 votes, but essentially the same relative placement as the crayon monsters due to there being many more entries in this contest. My favorite entries were these two.

Then, the contest was for Rhinoceroses. I used the same set of colors as my jazz design. Thinking that the most signifying feature of a rhino is the horn, I used just heads to try to make a pattern that looks abstract, almost like a houndstooth, from afar, and then resolves into rhinos when you look more closely.



This got 76 votes and placed a little higher, at 88 out of 251. I liked this very cute Mary-Blair-esque damask and these more sophisticated home-dec style rhinos.

Ahead and behind

First, the "behind" - I have two contest entries to blog about.

First, we had to do a cheater print (previous cheater contests have been themed with zig-zag and robots), this time including something floral and being seasonally apt for Spring. And also using these nine colors (plus white):


Color by COLOURlovers


Color by COLOURlovers

I searched around for florally-suggestive traditional quilt blocks and liked "Thistle Bloom." That design requires five different fabrics. As a twist, though, this is a square block and the contest entries get shown on a 21" by 18" fat quarter, so I tried to come up with a way to have it work as a full FQ or if you just wanted a square block. My solution was to make the block a fairly standard 16", then add a 1" seam allowance all around, then add 1.5" sashing to each side to fill it out. So with a different design for the allowance, that brought it to six sub-designs.

I considered drawing six new floral repeats, but got a little light-headed at the thought, so instead I just took some of my existing designs that have gotten the most amount of positive attention and recolored them. I even managed to upload them all as their own repeats, so you can see them all here.

The easiest, just involving swapping the colors, were the seadragons, the basic stitching, and the baby praying mantises. I also took the "wailing spirits" and redrew their faces so they were happy and laughing instead. I had previously turned the campground patten into an abstract texture, so I used that one again as well. And finally, I took just the Rothko egg from the painters' eggs and put that in a small repeat.

So the end result:



I ended up using only the cool colors, plus the light yellow and pink from the warm. I thought it would give a more serene look, but I think it was a mistake as it simply looked washed out compared to all the other designs that featured the red, in particular. It came in a bit below the 50th percentile, with 60 votes. My favorite entries were the ones based on millefiore and Baltimore-style applique. For plainer types of patchwork cheaters, I really liked the 3" squares, hexagons, and cathedral windows.

As to the "ahead" part of the post title - I had managed to get ahead of the contests by the time I was working on this cheater, so I even made a few more coordinating designs. I put just the 16" patch in a repeat without the extra filler:



And I also made some plain quarter-inch checks using various combinations of the same colors I used in the other fabrics, and combined them all to make a nine-patch cheater print:




Part of this burst of coordination was also procrastination, because I was lacking inspiration for the next challenge, which was "magic" (as in Houdini, not Harry Potter). I had an idea of a scatter print of white-gloved hands in poses suggesting sleight-of-hand, but hands are some of the most challenging things to draw, so I kept putting it off. But, finally, I loaded up a video of Penn and Teller demonstrating their principles of magic and did my best on a representative sequence. It was at that point I decided to just put the hands in orderly rows, so that you could "read" them in order like a little illustration of the technique.

I decided to use the Synergy "movie" palette, which is a bit of a stretch theme-wise - still entertainment, I guess? I plan on also doing a version with hands clapping, so perhaps that can bridge the gap. I entered this version in the contest:



And I also did a version with a gray background. My entry came in 34 out of 119, with 105 - a pretty good showing! My favorite entry was the playing cards.

Today is a good day to pie

I didn't post about last week's contest, as I didn't have an entry - alas, it was only open to thirteen- to nineteen-year-olds. This week, the theme was pie. Pie is such a staple of the kitchen-crafts design world that, despite having a deep personal appreciation for pie, I struggled to come up with any possible fresh take on the subject. I was sure (and was proved right) that there would be plenty of lovely representations of assortments of pies. I went down the path of deconstruction, and thought about doing something with a recipe, or just the ingredients. A step further down that path, and I went with the plants that the ingredients are harvested from. And as far as picking which flavor of pie, since there's a synergy theme of "apple," that was easy enough.

So the design contains the flowers of apples, sugarcane, nutmeg, and cinnamon, plus sheaves of wheat. Also, the outlines of the hexagons are done in a wavy shape that's supposed to resemble mammary cells, to represent milk.



This came in 109 out of 236, with 47 votes. Along with the designs I linked above, I also liked the simple blueberry pie lattice, stargazy, and fruit tarts. For the obvious puns, there were some "pi" entries, but none I liked all that much - though there are some in the synergy group, like this; and of course pie charts.

Constellation confirmation

This week's design theme was "constellations," so I reused the "star" colors and pattern from last week but in a different way and a different scale. Each star actually contains a gradient between two of the light colors (gray, white, yellow, blue, lavender), in groups of five or six stars each. I'm really looking forward to seeing how this one looks printed out.



This came in exactly 100th out of 211 with 89 votes. There were many, many takes on straightforward maps of the night sky which ranged from abstract to representational to somewhere in between. Diamonds (as in twinkle, twinkle) came up in a few, and I liked this one best (a fellow Synergy/Star entry to boot!). My favorite entry overall was the whales - think how neat that'd be as pajamas. Also unique were the QR codes - each one actually points to an astronomy website.

This fabric is made for walking

This week's design challenge was in concert with a shoe company called Milk + Honey, to make a small-scale geometric print that could be used on shoes. Milk + Honey are picking from among the top ten vote-getters to actually put on shoes they'll produce.

For the geometric layout, I really like sashiko designs, and was originally going to go with the classic interlocking circles pattern you see everywhere, but then I noticed that even the example shoe in the contest announcement used it. I used a variation instead, where the circles are replaced by octagons, and it looks like this.

Since the middle segments look like stars, I decided to try using the Synergy group "star" palette, which are not normally colors I'd gravitate towards, but figured it would be a fun exercise if nothing else. I tried to make it look a little bit crystalline, like the prismatic effect you get through cut glass.



This came in 279 out of a whopping 495 entries, with 70 votes. Boy howdy did it take a long time to get through the voting! There were indeed several entries that used the interlocking circles - my favorites were the poppy-colored and aqua gradient versions. Gems were also a big theme: in bubbly circles of all sizes (came in fifth), serene graphics, exuberant wireframes, and emerald dots. Many people tried to work in as many colors as possible, in circle segments (came in sixth), lozenges (came in ninth) and pixels. Other designs I really liked were this wiggly zig-zag, folksy patchwork, linen-textured motifs, Death-Star-like windows, and blackwork. The entry I'd probably most like on a pair of shoes were the buckyballs, or possibly the sequins.

A little side project

So I've continued to make a small trickle of sales of my designs (mostly Baby's Book of Computer Science). On the Spoonflower account pages, they show you a chronological list of all your sales. I was curious how some of the other designs stacked up, and started brainstorming how I could scrape all the data off the page and into, say, a spreadsheet. Then it occurred to me that, since I've been doing more front-end Javascript development in my day job, perhaps I could write it as a browser plugin and just add whatever statistics I wanted directly to the page itself! And the added bonus of doing it that was is that I could share it with other people.

So I took a couple of hours and did just that. I managed to get it working in Chrome and Firefox. (For reference, plugin development is MUCH easier and more clearly documented for Chrome.) Here's a screenshot of what it looks like in place:


 

The plugin (and installation instructions) are here. I was very nervous about having others try it out, since I could only test it with my own data, and there could easily be other types of sales that would break my code. I offered it to the Synergy group though, and so far a couple of people have tried it out and said it works. Exciting!

Sleepy, wiggly creatures

This week's contest was dinosaurs! I have been thinking about trying to make a design for a lovey blanket for my son, so making some uber-cute dinos seemed like a good possibility. Then, looking through the Synergy palettes, the "Serenity" group seemed to fit both "calm and sleepy" and "dinosaurs."

Then it was just a matter of drawing a bunch of sleeping dinosaurs - I decided to go for non-species-specific heads and anthropomorphic bodies. It was fun to think back to all the funny little poses my son would make when he was a tiny baby. Then, I filled in all the little onesies with all the "small" patterns I have on hand from other designs.



I really want to make a cheater print as well, using all the little sub-patterns in use here. I'm pretty pleased with how this one came out - it's very close to the vision I had in mind. It did quite poorly in the contest though - a mere 19 votes. Insert sad trumpet noise here. No matter, this will be another one like the adder, where all I can say is, well, I liked it!

Novelty prints for kids certainly dominated the entries. Indeed, it's hard to think of any other kind of fabric you could make based on the dinosaur theme. My favorites were this damask that went more towards the girly side (and came in second), and these colorful dinos all standing atop one another that would be considered more of a boys' fabric. Moving into less cartoony territory, I thought this mix of doodles and bright pixelated textures was a really fresh combination. Then there were two plesiosaur designs that I really liked - this almost Edward Gorey one with lacy textures, and a more graphic take with a plaid underlay that was my favorite entry.

Hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and sulphur

This week's contest theme was fireflies. I figured there would be plenty of representations of fireflies, so I wanted to do something more abstract. (Come to think of it, fireflies are themselves a fairly abstract concept to me - like the classic snowy Christmas, an iconic, nostalgic image I see referenced frequently but have never experienced myself.) I looked up what it is that makes fireflies glow, and saw that the key compound in their bioluminescence is called luciferin. So I decided to draw the molecule instead of the beetle.

As for the colors, I recently discovered a group of Spoonflower designers who formed the "Synergy Project," where they come up with their own themes and color schemes for designs. There's no time limit - you can add your fabrics to the individual themes (by tagging them) whenever you want. One of the hopes is that people wishing to buy coordinating fabrics can browse the whole theme, and see work from designers they might otherwise never find.

An additional goal of the group is to avoid treading on any intellectual property, so no explicit Dr Who or Star Trek or other references here. And as a step further, most of their themes are reclaiming over-exposed words (like "Vampire") to prove that we can make designs based on those words that don't have anything to do with pop culture.

I had been pondering joining the group, and this week ended up being a perfect opportunity, because one of their themes is "Firefly!' (having nothing to do with the sci-fi show, of course.) The colors they chose are yellow and a dark blue (plus you can also have black and white).

At first, I put my yellow and blue molecule in a denser, smaller-scale print, but that made it look like I just mashed up a bunch of circles and it didn't read as molecules. So contrary to my usual preference for making everything teeny-weeny, I decided instead to make it as large as possible while still fitting on a fat quarter. It almost reminds me of a Marimekko print.



This came in 151 out of 246 with 62 votes. There were a ton of really good entries in this one. All the top ten are great. The trees-at-dusk pattern that came in second is also part of the Synergy set, and I also really liked the very similar, but more graphic, one that came in fourth. My absolute favorite is probably the geometric take that came in ninth. It might have been this swirly abstract design instead, but unfortunately that one is just a fat-quarter-sized illustration and not a repeat. Also making good use of transparency was this one with a magical feel. Fireflies in jars were of course a popular theme, my favorite of which was this very simple take. Another good one was the fireflies on wheat. (Huh, that sounds like a very weird sandwich...) And in the realm of very cutesy designs, I liked this glowy one and this sunny one.