I have rented a garden plot this year and as I have never grown a vegetable in my life, my goal is to produce one edible piece of produce, the bar is low hahah! I have spent so much time planning, digging and sowing seeds that it was my obvious inspiration for the Spoonflower Toile with a Twist challenge this week .
My plot does not have a She Shed but I have planted peas carrots and beans!
I’m a bit surprised that Spoonflower is having another Art deco challenge. It is not a style I see anywhere, but then again maybe I am going to and looking in the wrong places. I have done pretty well in the past ones ( 4th here and 9th here) but there is no knowing these days, how designs will be received.
I took a feathery peacock approach
Art Deco Peacocks
Phew, a challenge this week that can be void of flowers!
A few years ago I lived by a forest preserve that kept pigs. I used to keep all my cooking scraps and take them over to feed them. They were so excited to see me and would jump up at their sty wall to greet me. They were my surrogate pets and my inspiration for this week’s challenge!
I absolutely adore the block print look and love designing in this style. But it is another floral challenge… and the challenge will be swamped like the last one.
As usual I did a number of colorways.
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.
I took a boho approach and was inspired by lace.
I also worked up the design in a number of monotone colorways.
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.
I did the design in a number of colorways too and added it to my Farm to Table Collection
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
I got so carried away I built a whole load of colorways, here are a few but you can see the whole collection in the Knit One Purl One collection
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.
It is available in a host of other colors in my Quilt Block Collection
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.
