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 .
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!
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
The prompt for this week’s Spoonflower challenge was to create a design that depicts a “nurturing, serene environment for a newborn that remains stylish and relevant as the baby ages”.
Bring it on!
I went for a gender neutral look with a design that is age appropriate to about age 10. I used a palette of soft colors and gave it a watercolor look
I also created a line art version which is available in a number of colors in the Hedgehog Nursery Collection a non directional print and a simple patchwork which was my entry for the baby blanket challenge.