I absolutely adore designing just using blue and white, so a delft tile challenge was right up my street.


I absolutely adore designing just using blue and white, so a delft tile challenge was right up my street.


It seems that the prompts for the spoonflower challenges are being written by AI, the images that accompany the prompts are certainly AI and they have been called on that. This is the challenge description
Retro Nouveau
“This mashup mixes the organic motifs and ornate shapes of Art Deco with the bold colors and geometric patterns of a retro vibe.”
Art deco and Art Nouveau are not even that same styles, so the whole thing is very confusing.
Even more confusing is what to design.
I ended up going with a stain glass art nouveau peacock and I actually had a lot of fun with circles in this design, can you see them?


This was an interesting challenge to design for. I imagined myself lying in a garden meadow looking up to the stars! With all the light pollution we have in the Chicago area it never really gets very dark!


If 70′ decor is making a come back then I cringe, but it is the prompt for this week’s Spoonflower challenge.
I fiddled about with loud geometric shapes but nothing really spoke to me so I went in a completely different direction and ended up channeling platform boots … as you do! It would make a really interesting wallpaper for a vintage clothing store.
70s Platform Shoes And Paisley


I also updated a old design I had done for a previous 70’s challenge to reflect the colorways of my new design


Cottagecore is the prompt for this week’s Spoonflower challenge and it was a fun one to design for. I went for a soft color palette and transported myself to a floral meadow with free range ducks.


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.



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



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



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.


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.

