Gosh where to go with a prompt like Patchwork for this weeks Spoonflower challenge? I settled on imagining a granny with a huge bag of blue fabric scraps and how those pieces be patched together to make something beautiful. Whimsical trash to treasure if you like.
Doesn’t it make a fabulous duvet cover!
I may have potentially entered something that is going to completely bomb in the challenge… I am sure there will be lots of beautiful and intricate patterns!
The 2021 Chinese New year will celebrate the Year of the Ox and this week the Spoonflower challenge is to create a repeat design to celebrate that magnificent of bovine creature, you guessed it, the Ox.
I went with a traditional Chinese lucky color palette of red and gold with my sweet Oxen dotted among whimsical leafy elements.
It fits nicely in my Whimsical Fantastic Animal collection
I have been taking part in a doodle a day challenge on Instagram and each day drawing to a prompt. I don’t quite know how it has happened but a little cat has featured in quite a few of my doodles. I don’t own a cat and am more of a dog than cat person, but that cat must be buried somewhere in a dark crevice of my gray matter and it keeps popping out of my ipencil.
So for this week’s Spoonflower challenge I decided to further embrace all the cat doodles I have been creating and work them up into a repeat pattern for the Yellow and Gray prompt. I hate yellow and gray together but the prompt is based on the Pantone colors of the year.
My repeat pattern features a sweet white cat reading the newspaper, enjoying a dance, taking a nap, playing with yearn and getting mucky with paint.
Voting starts January 28th and oh how I LOVE your votes and so will my sweet little white kitty!
So….. I second guessed myself for my entry for the Re-imagined Damask challenge and ended up banging out another design at the last minute. ( check out my original idea) There is nothing like a time crunch to put my design skills through their paces… it actually added a fun dimension hahaha! Maybe it was fueled by a glass or two of something lovely. The Love of Wine was born!
I am not much of a fan of the Damask design style but staying on target with a 2021 personal challenge, where my goal is to again, enter every single Spoonflower challenge, I have come up with a design for this contest: Reimagined Damask Wallpaper
Here is my Damask Bird Delight pattern where sweet little blue and white birds flit about. The pattern is a mirror image typically seen with the damask style.
Yikes!… I had a sudden bout of self doubt and ending up designing something completely different right at the last minute …check out what I entered here
Through design you can transport yourself anywhere so while it is snowy, cold and lets face it, quite disgusting here in Chicago, it has been a pleasure to think of the warm climate of Hawaii and dream up a design for this weeks Spoonflower challenge – Hidden Hawaiian
The twist with this design prompt is that there should be something hidden in the design.
I took a whimsical approach and designed Tiki Masks – these little fellows have food and drink on the brain! Hawaiian Tiki Mask Hunger
I also did a version with a jungle green background but am planning on entering the lighter version .. but then again now I look at them together I am not sure which one to submit. They fit right in with “It’s My Life” collection where just about anything goes!
At the beginning of 2020 I challenged myself to enter every single Spoonflower challenge – that was a total of 50 challenges.
It was quite a journey, where I designed out of my comfort zone but with that achieved some real personal success. Out of those 50 challenges I
Won 1st place with my Ink Splat Indigo and green Tie Dye design
Gained top ten placement with a further 6 designs.
And placed high enough in another 23 of the challenges to be awards a free proof.
The design challenges have been a lot of fun and certainly helped give my sales a kick up the rear end!
I am continuing again this year – check out my entry for the first challenge of the year – small scale geometric
A new year and a new design challenge – Small Scale Geometrics and oh my goodness did I go overboard on this one.
I started by designing this – Boxed Up Geometric . It is inspired by the Bauhaus style, using plain simple elements. I have been itching to have a go at this for ages.
It inspired a further 23 designs which now make up a new collection – Small Scale Geometrics.
I then had the dilemma on which one to choose to enter for the challenge. I put up some of my favorite choices on Facebook but the opinions were all over the place so I decided to go back to basics and enter the first one I created.
Let’s hope I made the right choice!
Well what a great start to the year, I came in at 13th place but as there were ties for both 2nd and 3rd place in actual fact I was 10th and got $20 Spoonflower credit …yippppeee! Thanks so much for all your votes!
The final Spoonflower challenge of 2020 was to come up with a design they can use on their packaging.
The thought process behind my design was one that depicted a community of designers where each creation is crafted with LOVE. I call my pattern “Made with Love“
Pleased as punch to come in at number 46 and earn my 30th automatic proof of 2020. Interested in seeing a breakdown of all my challenges, click here
Pantone announced their 2021 color for the year today and it turned out to be not one but two colors, Illuminating and Ultimate Gray.
Illuminating is a sunny bright yellow and Ultimate Gray is to me a downright boring gray … or grey , depending on which side of the pond you live on.
They remind me of the color combination you get with a hard boiled egg ..that little gray line the outlines the yolk.
The thought process from Pantone is that the yellow is for optimism and the gray is for dependability and sort of reflects the mood moving forward in 2021 and hopefully away from Covid and all the mess it has created.
Maybe I was ahead of the curve as I was using a very similar color paring back in 2017 with the create of my first fabric collection: contemporary circles
I have created a new collection on my spoonflower and RedBubble shops in celebration of the 2021 Colors of the year – only the two solids and a one design so far but I will be adding more patterns shortly!
Shop collection on
