My first Spoonflower sale!

Someone bought my Hanukkah calendar! Pretty exciting. She even messaged me asking if I could make it available for sale a few days before I could. (Spoonflower doesn't let you make a design available for sale unless you purchase at least a swatch of it first to proof it) So as soon as I got the proof of it, I flagged it for sale and viola, she bought it the next day! I got a blistering $1.10 (10%) commission out of it. Woohoo!

I do crafts almost entirely to make gifts for people, which as far as I know are mostly well received. But it's a different kind of feeling to have someone (a stranger!) actually want to buy something of mine on purpose, of their own volition.

Actually, I have made one other "sale" on Spoonflower - when someone bought a swatch of my Christmas ornament pattern. Just a week or two after that happened, they finally changed the policy so that you get the 10% commission for swatches too. Of course!

Kites with kites

This week's contest theme was kites, with the extra stipulation that it be a small print. Usually they have the contest voting on samples showing a fat quarter of the print, but for the small print contests it's just a eight-by-eight swatch. I struggled awhile to come up with an idea that wasn't simply literally kites, until I remembered that "kite" can also mean a kind of bird! Things really came together when I Googled kites and found the swallow-tailed kite, which has a wonderful silhouette and bold black & white coloring. I decided that the black & white birds against a blue sky with red kites would make a nice combo. I had fun working with such a small palette - no shading or anything like I've done in most of my recent designs.



My design came in 52 out of 153, with 100 votes. There was one other design that had kites (the birds), but not also with kites (the toys!), which I did end up coming out ahead of in the votes.

Advent style calendar

Well, I messed up last week's contest. Plus, the contest ended on Thanksgiving, so I couldn't write about it until now. The goal was design an advent calendar - it didn't necessarily have to count down 25 days until Christmas, but the idea was some kind of counting calendar with things hidden in pockets or behind doors. I originally wanted to do a full advent calendar like the ones my mom made when I was a kid. She made two, which were these wonderful Victorian-style houses made of paper, with pictures behind the doors and windows. Since we celebrated both Hanukkah and Christmas, she would always put pictures for the days of Hanukkah that fell in December. For instance, in one calendar it was simply menorahs with the right number of candles lit, and in the other the pictures told the story of Hanukkah, with little stick figure Maccabees liberating the temple and finding the miraculous oil that lasted eight days. She also put in a picture for the Winter Solstice, which falls on the 21st or 22nd. Since those days change every year, she had to move around all the pictures. The remainder were filled in with more traditional holiday stuff. The first calendar had drawings of different ornaments on each day, with the 25th showing a tree with all of them hung up. The second one showed a snowman with more and more features each day. She said that a hard lesson she learned after making the first calendar was that having all the windows & doors at different sizes each year made it really hard to switch it around! She sometimes had to redraw the pictures if they ended up in a really different window. But then, some years later when she made the second one, she forgot about that in the rush of inspiration - and made all the windows & doors different sizes again. Oops!

So anyway, I do eventually want to make something like that of my own, with pictures for Christmas, Hanukkah, and the Solstice that move around every year, but since I had been spending my limited crafting time finishing this quilt, I had only a few days to work on the advent calendar for the contest, so I quickly decided to be less ambitious. I still stuck with the Victorian-style house though. I realized I could do just Hannukah, and have only eight openings to deal with! So I drew the house, with a menorah in each window, and then coverings for each window & door. It was fun to come up with eight different menorah designs! As I was making it, I was thinking to myself, wow, it's pretty cramped to fit this on a fat quarter with only eight! The openings/pockets for a regular 25-day calendar must have to be pretty tiny! Ah, foreshadowing.

Anyway, I finally managed to wrap it up in the early evening the last day for contest entries. I would have loved to have gotten more detail on the house, but I'm still happy with how it came out. I uploaded the design to Spoonflower, and entered it into the contest. However, I noticed that on the page where they show you how it will look when people are voting, it looked strange - instead of filling the whole rectangle, my design floated in the middle with a huge blank margin all around. So I took a look at the contest page again....and oops, it turns out the idea was to create the calendar on a WHOLE YARD, not a fat quarter! Eeeeeuuurghhhhhhhhh.

I wrestled briefly with the idea of trying to hurriedly adapt it to fit on a yard. Perhaps I could make a version where you could buy either a fat quarter and get just what I'd done so far, or buy a whole yard and get extra decorative bits, like backing, strips to hang it with, etc. Then I decided to just go with what I had. I'm just doing this for fun, after all, no need to stress! I still left it as a contest entry - no reason not to.

After all that, my design came in 28th out of 41, with 111 votes. I'm sure I would have done better if I had done it correctly and filled up a whole yard, but I was the only one to do a Hanukkah calendar, so at least I stood out in a good way in that aspect!

Tea towel calendar

So "tea towels" are thin, mostly decorative cloths that are meant mostly to be hung up in kitchens, as I understand it. Around this time each year, Spoonflower has one of its contests to design a tea towel (to fit on a fat quarter) that has a whole year's calendar on it. I tried to think of what would be an interesting representation of each month of the year. Then I remembered...PIES. My mom makes the most wonderful pies. She always makes a cherry pie, a lemon meringue pie, and a chocolate (custard) pie every year at Christmas, and another cherry pie for my dad's birthday. One time, my dad was suggesting other pies that would go with other special occasions, and then had a sudden flash of inspiration - "What about a pie every month?" Being a kid, I took this joke and treated it as a serious suggestion to be enthusiastically endorsed. Mom, of course, quickly and laughingly shut us down. But the dream remained - the pie of the month club!

I decided to make my calendar design of twelve delicious pies laid out on a table. It was surprisingly hard to come up with twelve distinct pies! Then I had to come up with ways to create lighter backgrounds to put the actual calendar numbers over. Most pies I just heaped up with whipped cream or meringue, or topped with a cloud of steam as if they were fresh from the oven.

Anyway, the pie flavors are:

• January: Key Lime
• February: Boysenberry
• March: Banana Cream
• April: Strawberry Rhubarb
• May: Peach
• June: Lemon Meringue
• July: Cherry
• August: Blueberry Cream
• September: Apple
• October: Pumpkin
• November: Pecan
• December: Chocolate

I think it made for a very sweet design. There were a lot of really great calendars in this contest! It came in 103rd out of 146, with 93 votes.



By the way, the only pie I've made myself is cherry:


Now that I know how much work it is, I can understand not wanting to make a different one every month!

Finished!

I finished the quilt for Cord! Even though I still have three more baby blankets to make, I feel like I'm back on track since the rest are for babies still well under a year old.

I was debating how much of the outlines around the pool to quilt, and eventually decided I would be happiest if I did all of it. That includes the edge of the water and the pool, the grout lines, and the outline of the main frames of the goals.

I printed out a tag for the back (including care instructions!) via Spoonflower as well. You can see the backing fabric through it, but I kind of like the effect. The backing fabric is a flannel that I bought from Fabric.com via Amazon. The batting is Quilter's Dream Cotton, in the "request" loft, which is the thinnest.

For previous quilts, I've made the bias tape for the binding myself, but that's something that takes me awhile. I haven't ever had a space where it's easy to lay out those large squares and draw lines on them, plus I just can't seem to get it lined up correctly when sewing the initial cylinder. So in order to help things along, I shopped around for some bias tape on Etsy. I was hoping to find a grey tape with white polka dots, so I was really happy to find this! The seller (Beewise Goods) only had her tapes listed in packages of two yards each, but I needed about five to bind this quilt. So I messaged her, and happily she was able to sell me a package of six continuous yards! The only way it could have been more perfect is if it was double-fold, but it looks great, and most importantly, I was able to finish it!

In the end, it took me just over a month from when I got all of the main components to finishing this up! I'm definitely a faster sewer than I used to be.

Military Fabric Design for Veteran's Day

This week's contest was for a military-inspired fabric, since today is Veteran's Day. My idea was to create stylized versions of uniforms - one for each of the five service branches. I made them geometric, almost as if they were pieced quilt patches. I learned that the uniforms of the US military are not really all that "uniform!" There are many different variations and options, especially when you take into account enlisted vs. officer. The Navy was the most challenging, as it seems they're in the middle of a uniform redesign, so it was hard to choose which one would be most recognizable. I also learned there are quite a few different shades of blue across all the uniforms! I tried to make them look more-or-less correct in relation to each other. This was a little extra challenging since they all tend to look lighter on screen than they print.

My design did pretty well - I came in 18th out of 83 with 216 votes!


The uniforms are as follows:

• Navy: khaki shirt, black pants, black belt with silver buckle
• Coast Guard: Medium blue jacket, pants, & tie, light blue shirt, four silver buttons
• Air Force: Dark blue jacket, pants, & tie, light blue shirt, three silver buttons
• Army: Dark blue jacket, lighter pants, black tie, four gold buttons
• Marines: Blue jacket with signature red piping and six gold buttons, lighter blue pants, white belt with gold buckle

I apologize for any mistakes! Hopefully they are accurate enough to be evocative of the real uniforms.

Cameo fabric contest

This week's Spoonflower contest was for fabric inspired by cameos. I thought, what would be the least likely subject to portray in a sweet little cameo? Being a huge fan, I had to go with Daft Punk. This is the result! I based the colors on this palette:

Color by COLOURlovers

I wasn't the only one who added a touch of Sci Fi - I was pleased to see a Dr Who entry as well. Oddly, there were a large number of entries with cameos of dogs.

I came in 50 out of 167 with 120 votes. I got a couple nice comments on the fabric page too, so at least a few people liked my take on the idea. This was my best placement in a contest by far, relative to the number of entries!