Inspired by the deadline

Having spent a lot of my recent months in a bit of a time crunch, I've had several contest entries that I had to whip out at the last minute. And for the most part, it really shows!

One of the toughest themes to deal with was "marching band" - not one that resonates with me. Also it's hard to come up with something that conveys the idea but can still be quickly executed. My husband came up with the idea of having the band marching in formations that are themselves musical instruments used by the band. I also tried to go for a bit of an Ed Emberley look. Not super pleased with how it came out, but it's the beginning of an idea at least. The individual marchers are cute, but the layout is not very attractive.



This came in the bottom fifth of entries. My favorites were the ones inspired by the traditional uniform braids and the "self-marching band."

The very next week, I also had very little time. The challenge was to make a cat-themed damask. I went with a damask that could have been made BY a cat:



I made a brush in Gimp shaped like a paw print, and used that to outline a traditional damask. Since there's so much symmetry, I only had to draw a portion of it, then mirrored it, so it came together pretty quickly. This version, which came in the bottom quarter of the contest, is ginger cat colored, and I also made a grey tabby colorway. I was inspired by these cat-colored yarns, but got all my colors from this set:

Color by COLOURlovers

My favorite was this ultra-cute one.

But it's not all bottom-of-the heap. This year's Valentine's Day contest also had to have a steampunk theme. I had maybe two hours to make it from start-to-finish, so I used a clipart heart and a gear to get the shapes right, the colors below, and my pre-existing knit and isometric lines patterns.


Color by COLOURlovers



I got 147 votes for this, and almost made it into the top quartile. I want to make an alternate version that has the hearts rotated in all four directions so it's more usable, but haven't had the chance yet. My favorite entry was this one.

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.