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.
I took a deep dive into the woods for this week’s Spoonflower challenge “Cabincore”
My favorite character in my design was the bear and I took him on a little design journey of his own and created Marshmallow Bear and feathered friends
oooh and I also created a monotone version of my deep woods design.
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.
The prompt for this week’s Spoonflower challenge is Conversational and I went around and around trying to find inspiration for this one. A conversational design is one that takes an everyday object and turns it into a design.
So I had my hair cut last week and as I sat rabbiting to my stylist I had an ahha moment!
I feel a little collection coming on but I have not yet got to it yet!
It seems the preppy look never goes out of style but the look and feel of it has definitely morphed a bit over the years. Preppy is the prompt for this week’s Spoonflower challenge and went full on coastal preppy with my entry with palm trees, lush tropical foliage and of course yachts what is more preppy than a yacht!
Hide and seek, such a fun prompt for this week’s Spoonflower challenge.
I went for a totally kid orientated approach and created a maze for some funky little robots and hid numbers along the way. As a kid , I would have loved to have this on my bedroom wall and lie in bed solving the maze and finding the numbers! It would also make a great print for table placemats.
Spoonflower recently started offering two new metallic substrates for their wallpaper, so it is no surprise that we now have a challenge specifically gears to one of those. First up is the gold version, I am sure a silver challenge is in the works too.
So the prompt for the challenge is Vintage Glamour and with that in mind I was instantly transported back to the 1920’s and the fashions it conjured up
So part of the challenge her is to design to make the most of the metallic effect.
Here is my design
and this is what it will look like printed on metallic gold stock paper
I created a whole collection around lobsters and tidepool friends last year, so when the theme of this week’s Spoonflower challenge was announced, I was not particularly thrilled. It was a subject I had already explored and here I was trying to approach it from a different angle again. And boy did I come up with some completely different concepts which then left me with the tricky decision on which to enter.
My first go came up with these delft inspired crabs… my love of blue and white lies deep.
It was a design concept I love but as I started seeing other designer share their take, I thought my design would not stand out enough.
So then I went the Bauhaus approach
but wasn’t totally in love with that but I really liked some of the geometry of the shapes, so was spurred on to explore that a little further.
After fiddling around with just basic circles, Happy Round Crabs popped out!
and it is this design I finally decided to go with but it was really down to the last minute whether to switch it out with one of my delft designs. Too lates to change my mind now, the deadline has just past.
I went back to basics with oil paints and a big old fat palette knife for this week’s Spoonflower challenge – Tonal Texture Wallpaper. I knew what I wanted and there was no way to digitally create the effect I was going for so time to break out the paints!
It makes stunning wallpaper, especially in small areas!
