I have barely broken out my summer clothes but am already channeling fall, with thoughts of Halloween and ideas for the retro Halloween Spoonflower challenge.
I have gone super funky hippy psychedelic with a pumpkin and mushroom design. It is a bit wild!
Once again the prompt for this week’s Spoonflower challenge is a bit of a puzzle. Palms Springs. They had an identical prompt a few years back and I have to say, if it is a trend that is blowing up all over the place, it is not something I have noticed. So to run it again is odd and when you have designed for a prompt once (and successfully landed in the top 10 – 6th place), it is even harder to design for it again.
Phew got that off my chest.
I decided to riff off my design that place well last time, using some of the same design elements and an identical color palette but I introduced some fun flamingos and well thought out angles. It ended up looking very different
In typical fashion I created a few coordinate designs too!
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!
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
