Animal print

For the animal print contest, I did a pattern very loosely based on snakeskin:



My favorite entries were the fingerprints and turtle shells.

Valentine's Day, a month early

This week's contest was the V-day theme. Nothing more specific this year - just "be my valentine." I wanted to do something with cupids. I fell back on one of my favorite patterns - the good ol' cube optical illusion tessellation. (such as this or this or this).



And so I called it "Cube-pid!" Ha!

My favorites were the Mary Blair-esque animals and the matches.

Happy 2019!

Happy new year! The last contest of 2018 carried over two weeks, so that nobody would have to log in and vote during Christmas week. This was the "astrology" theme. I went with the Chinese zodiac and re-used something I made already. I had made this for year of the monkey and had so much fun I made all twelve. So for this one I just put all the symbols together:



My favorite was this simple "bubble" version of the zodiac symbols.

November-December catchup

OK, a few designs to catch up on!

For the "gender-neutral nursery wallpaper" contest, I went with the good ol' alphabet.

I actually wanted this to be a much larger repeat. I drew it such that the repeat would be four feet wide. However, I forgot that with wallpaper the max width of repeats is only two feet. (You can do extremely large repeats vertically though) So I had to make it half the size, darn it. The entry I'd be most likely to ever use was the pufferfish.

The next contest was Chinoiserie. I used a variety of CC-licensed icons and used colors reminiscent of Chinese vases. (I wanted to stay away from the classic blue-on-white since I knew the majority of entries would use that) And then, in a strike of utter brilliance, I forgot to actually enter it in the contest!

Oh well. My favorite was the koi fish.

Next! Something inspired by Fair Isle-style knitting. I wanted to do something that isn't normally on a Fair Isle sweater so I did poison dart frogs.

My favorite was the dragons.

For the "holidays around the world" I represented the celebration my mom made up for the winter solstice - chocolate pie, mixed nuts in the shell (of which I showed just pecans, my favorite) and mandarin oranges. I only had a very small window of time to work on it so I'm not all that proud of it.

My favorite was the little vintage-style snowy village.

Them, we had another wallpaper contest - for "large-scale black and white." I was able to correct my error of last time and kept the two-foot width in mind. I was inspired by this photo and came up with this:

The ones I liked the best were the monsters, the geometric clovers, these planets, and the columns.

For the sloth theme, I took a basic scallop shape and made it sloth faces:

My favorite entry was this one.

And there we go! Happy Holidays!

Easy mode: beanbags!

Since I already had beanbags on the brain, for this week's cut and sew project, I did mini beanbags - i.e. rectangles! Doesn't get much easier than that. And of course you could fill them with dried lavender instead to make sachets. Or potpourri or what have you.



This didn't get anywhere in the voting. My favorite was the plush VHS!

Pull the blanket over your head and ignore it

For this week's contest, we had to use these colors:

I thought the theme was also "cozy," but now I don't see that on the contest description anywhere so apparently I imagined it! I tried to make it look like people curled up, completely enveloped in blankets.



This did REALLY badly in the contest. (Hence the post title! Whoo!) My favorites were the forest floor items and the bananas.

Halloween Cornhole Beanbags

Bruce's second grade class is doing a cornhole booth for the school fair. Some other parents made and painted the board, and my husband got some black and orange beanbags. He suggested stenciling something on them to enhance the theme. Challenge accepted!

I decided to try out freezer paper stencils. Since the beanbags wouldn't be possible to keep flat while painting that seemed like an easier way to go.

I considered doing a different picture on each beanbag but decided to make it a little easier. After a little discussion with the spouse, I decided to go for skulls on the black ones and bats on the orange ones. I used this skull and this bat.

Once I had the freezer paper and fabric paint on hand, it was just a matter of finding the right moment when I could try to paint eight beanbags without having too many little fingers nearby. Fortunately James actually took a nap on a weekend, so I struck!

First step was to print out eight copies of each image (since I wanted to paint both sides of each beanbag) on the freezer paper, then cut out the shapes. It took me probably 20 sheets of freezer paper to get this right, because I kept putting them in the printer upside down! You wouldn't think I'd be able to make that same mistake so many times...but you'd be wrong.

Then, I got to use my little craft iron for the first time to stick the paper on. Had some trouble keeping it hot enough, though. It seemed like it would cool off after a few minutes of operating, and I had to turn it off and back on to get it back to maximum.

Next was paint! I used a metallic black for the bats. Two of the skulls were in flat white, and two in metallic white. I had to do two coats for the skulls to get it nice and light over the black fabric.

Here they all are drying off! Once they were dried, it was time to flip 'em and repeat for the other side. And then, I got to peel off all the stencils.

I also added little red dots for the bats' eyes. And ta-da! Complete!

Not perfect, but I'm pretty pleased considering it's the first time I've tried that particular technique.