I would actually love to do a Spoonflower challenge where flowers are BANNED but there we go, that is not the case this week. The challenge this week is Bold Floral and I know it will attract record number of entries.
Ooh this sounds like an interesting Spoonflower challenge, Heritage Revival and it looks like we can take this prompt in any direction we see fit. It will make for an interesting voting because at least we won’t be swimming in a sea of same shapes aka Paisley or stripes or be limited to a a color palette you either love or hate.
So when thinking about Heritage my mind goes straight to history and the traditions which come from the land. With that thought process I landed on dairy farms of a bygone age where milk came from pasture fed cows (no nut milks then! ) and was poured into churns which would sit at a farms gate waiting to be collected. Elevated milk churn stands can still be seen outside old farms in the UK.
It’s funny how design ideas for a prompt sometime come at me in a flash while others take a lot of thinking about. When I read about the latest spoonflower challenge, Novelty Paisley, the image of an octopus twining itself around paisley shapes immediately shot into my brain. A few hours later and I had my design!
I adore a stripe and really don’t design enough of them so it has been fun playing around with them for this week’s Spoonflower challenge. In my book the challenge here is to create a design which will stand out in the challenge but actually be saleable!
I can imagine the challenge will be full of floral type stripe so I wanted to steer well away from that concept. I sometime think it would be nice if Spoonflower had a challenge where florals were banned!
I got inspired by my winter sweaters and cable knit patterns and came up with this cable knit design
OOOh the challenge to design a quilt block in just two colors. Bring it on!
I have never really tried my hand at serious quilting. The precision required not only with the cutting but sewing really puts me off, but I really do appreciate a beautifully made quilt.
In my head I thought it was really important that the quilt block I designed for this challenge could actually be made so I got carried away with geometry in Illustrator. It was a nice change from my free flowing ipencil. I gave my quilt block a modern feel.
Ohhh, I have to say it is good to be moving on from Pantone’s Mocha Mousse this week on the Spoonflower challenges. The latest prompt is to design an accent wall wallpaper.
I was inspired by the English countryside where I grew up, a sweet little village and with a farm that had a windmill on a hill! I also really love the look of block printed linocuts and channeled that it the design style I used.
We have had back to back challenges on Spoonflower requiring the use of Pantone’s color of the year, Mocha Mousse. This week the challenge was to use the color with a slightly different color palette and Spoonflower also suggested creating a design which coordinated with the Mocha Mousse wallpaper challenge
It is that time of year again when Pantone have announced their color of the year 2025. I had an inkling that it would be a brown and I was totally correct. This year’s color is Mocha Mousse.
Spoonflower is having two challenges using this color. The first one is for a wallpaper and the second is for a fabric. We get to combine Mocha Mousse with different color palettes for each.
So Mocha Mousse for me conjures up smooth elegant jazz and that was my immediate inspiration for the wallpaper challenge.
The theme for this week’s Spoonflower challenge is Western Americana where the prompt encourages the designer to get immersed in the old west. I’m not sure why but a saloon bar immediately popped into my head and this is what resulted!
Here is the wildest dog in the west bursting into Mutt Saloon for a bottle of woof and a juicy bone!
I also created a few south western type abstract patterns to coordinate with my mighty Mutt! and they are available in my Wildwest Wilderness Collection