Monday 30 March 2015

armadillo baby bedding

This week for their weekly contest spoonflower teamed up with carousel designs, a design studio which offers custom baby bedding. The winner's design will be offered for sale through spoonflower as one of carousel design's lines of bedding. The theme was something I'm not very familiar with - Southwest US, but it was fun to research the theme, come up with ideas and colours and then for the whole design to come together. Here's the design I came up with, featuring three animals native to the southwest - the armadillo, bison and desert cardinal, as well as lots of cactus plants and diamonds.


Here's a mock-up from the carousel site to show how the fabric would look as baby bedding. I designed two coordinates (one is the blue diamonds below), and want to make a few more.


There are very many amazing designs in this contest. If you want to, head here to take a look and vote! (voting closes this Wednesday).

Thursday 26 March 2015

a new type of fabric - minky

I sell fabric on spoonflower where its possible to choose from many different types of fabric with my design printed on it. Every once in a while there is a new type of fabric available, and a few weeks ago minky was added. When I ordered my fox I got a little mini swatch in the package and wanted to share some pictures so you can get an idea of what the new fabric looks like. This page introduces the new fabric. Its very soft, a little bit stretchy and has a bright white background. All of my designs are now also available on minky fabric.


Thursday 5 March 2015

another sock monkey

At the beginning of the year I decided to finish one old unfinished project every month. (Actually, I thought I'd try every week, but that was a bit overambitious :-)). Last month I finished these little booties, and in February I finished this very pink sock monkey.


I bought these socks years ago with the plan to make a sock monkey out of them, at the same time that I made this monkey. The socks sat in my sewing box for years and now I finally got around to sewing them. Its such a nice pattern (there's a very clear tutorial with lots of photos here), but it does make a difference what kind of socks you use, i.e. how long the socks are, how big the feet are they're for. Its kind of cool how a few snips and stitches can transform a pair of socks.

Wednesday 4 March 2015

new shop

I've opened a new shop on society6 where some of my designs are now available on different products. From now until March 8 you can get free shipping if you follow this link to my shop!

Here are some of the products for sale:

products for sale


I will be adding more designs, new ones and some that I already sell on fabric.


fabric photos

One of the most popular fabrics in my shop is the design vegetable garden. I've written about the design before, which I designed as a tribute to my grandma and her garden. There are a number of different designs in the collection. Here is a photo of fabric swatches printed on cotton poplin for three of those designs (vegetable garden, gardening fruit and canning).


Tuesday 3 March 2015

mini trench coat

I made a trench coat years ago. I still wear it a lot but it really needs a new lining. I'm dreaming of a colourful one, the lining I have is black and falling apart at the seams.

Last week I made a mini trench coat. Have you ever designed clothes for dolls? Its so much fun to try to translate a normal sized pattern to mini. I used this tutorial about how to draft a sloper, and also got inspiration from this post about sewing a trench coat for a doll. A sloper is a pattern that is made to exactly fit your doll, so that clothes will fit well. Its fascinating :-). Since my fox isn't shaped like a person (well, I guess it is shaped more like a person than a fox), this means the trench coat fits the proportions of the fox.
Once I had the sloper I looked at a pattern for a trench coat and basically sketched out the pattern over the sloper, simplifying a bit as I went. I used a pattern from one of my burda magazines.


I love the finished coat, it has real working pockets, little belt loops, epaulets and gorgeous lining. I used a swatch of my cat damask fabric for the lining and a bit of leftover fabric from this project for the coat. And of course if you want to, you can sew the fox yourself with my cut-and-sew pattern. Let me know if you try a trench coat too!