tea towel calendars and a 2 for 1 sale

Every year spoonflower holds a tea towel calendar contest at the end of November. These calendars are designed to fit on a fat quarter of linen-cotton canvas. This year my design features sweet peas. I worked on the winding trellises of sweet pea flowers during a holiday in Germany a few months ago and enjoyed creating a seamless repeat. I love working with a scanner and a printer which I don't have at home, it means I can work on multiple versions of the design by hand, rather than doing most of the touch-up and fine-tuning on the computer.
I shared a photo of the process on instagram a while back:

While I'm still tweaking the repeating pattern, I decided to use this for a calendar, since the trellis shape was perfect to hold twelve months.
Here's the final design, which is for sale now in my shop:

A close-up photo of the colours printed on fabric:

I also finally updated my 2015 blackberry calendar for 2016. This calendar is available here.

Finally, spoonflower is having a 2 for 1 sale on all fat quarters, so you can either get both calendars for the price of one or choose any other fabric or type of fabric in my shop!

watercolour power tools

I've often mentioned spoonflower contests I enter. Recently I made it into the top ten for the first time which was incredibly exciting. The top ten designs are immediately set for sale and are part of a fat quarter bundle promoted on spoonflower for a week, which means more people see (and hopefully buy!) the design. Spoonflower also takes beautiful pictures of the fabric which are bigger than the fabric swatches I usually get. Here's the photo they took and this is where you can buy the fabric. I love how the colours turned out!

Watercolour power tools is a kind of strange combination, but I got inspiration to make this design from two people. My uncle is a fine woodworker and has an amazing shop where I love to hang out whenever I'm in Manitoba. I recently asked him for some photos of tools to use for a series of designs (here are some others I've made for the series: power saw and woodworking tools).

When I was in the Netherlands at Easter I visited my grandmother who has always encouraged me to try all kinds of things like painting, sewing, knitting and even leather work. I told her a bit about designs I've been working on recently and she gave me a beautiful block of watercolour paper. This was the first painting I worked on. I love the look of the watercolour paint on the fabric, and hope to do some more watercolour designs soon.

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).

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.

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).

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!

a cut and sew fox

The fox is finished! I got the fabric in the mail a few days ago and sewed it together. One of our seat cushions got raided for stuffing, but other than that it was straightforward sewing. I took lots of pictures of the process in order to write a tutorial. Will post that soon, but for now, here's the finished fox. The fabric is for sale in my shop.

a Teumessian fox

I haven't entered any spoonflower contests for a long time, because I've been busy with other things (editing and revising mostly) but this week's contest really inspired me and I started doing bits and pieces a few weeks ago and finally finished my design just in time to enter. Every once in a while spoonflower has a cut-and-sew contest, which means, instead of just designing a pattern, you need to design a pattern for a three dimensional object as well. This week its stuffed animals, more specifically, mythical stuffed animals. I've always wanted to design a pattern for a stuffed animal, and have been playing around with ideas (and a few small prototypes) for years, so this time I finally started turning some sketches into drafts into prototypes into a finished design. I like it when I spend a lot of time on something over the course of a few weeks and feel like the finished product is what I had envisioned at the beginning.

Here is some of the process:

I ended up making three different prototypes, changing the shape of the pattern or the way I put it together each time.

As you can (hopefully!) tell, its a little fox. I was looking for mythical creatures when I started and came across a fox that inspired me - the Teumessian fox from greek mythology that was turned into the constellation Canis Minor.  I was also inspired by the foxes that live behind our house. Sometimes you can see them sleeping beside the train tracks in the sun.

Once I had the pattern finalised I transferred it to the computer and started the fun process of adding colour and design. I also designed a little dress for the fox to wear. 

You can see the finished design here, where it will be for sale soon. I ordered a quarter yard of the fabric on linen-cotton canvas and am eagerly awaiting it so I can sew the fox with the real fabric and then write a tutorial for anyone who wants to buy the fabric and make the fox. So, more soon hopefully! 

Be sure to check out the other designs in the contest and vote, it starts tomorrow. 

tea towel calendar

I posted earlier about my tea towel calendar design for 2015. Since I gave a few tea towels as christmas gifts, I didn't want to post photos in December. Here is a picture of the finished tea towel. I ordered the linen cotton canvas and hemmed the edges. The fabric is now available for sale in my shop.

dollhouse renovation

I found a dollhouse! Carried it home and have been sanding, filling in holes and now painting. Here are some pictures from before I started renovating:

And now I'll get started on the second coat of paint. Its going to be white inside (bone china to be precise) with white trim outside and dark (breton) blue.

ps. today there is another free shipping day in my spoonflower shop, for 12 hours only!

tea towel calendar and a sale

Every year at around this time spoonflower has a contest for tea towel calendars. This year the contest was followed by a sale where you can buy two fat quarters for the price of one. The sale is on for one more day! The last two years I've made tea towel calendars (2013, 2014, which I need to update to 2015!). This year I used elements from my most recent collection. I love the details of the leaves :-)

The tea towels are scaled to fit on one fat quarter of linen cotton canvas, which has different dimensions than some of the other fabrics.

fabric swatches

A few days ago I got a package with fabric swatches (always so exciting :-)). Here is my new collection in two different colourways:

I've now set them for sale in my shop. I'd love to try this one as wallpaper. What do you think?

tutorial - shifting an object in inkscape

I've been using inkscape for years and what I love about it is that I keep discovering new things it can do. I suppose that could be something that bugs me, since the user interface can be quite overwhelming to figure out, especially when you're starting out, but I like the feeling that there are all kinds of possibilities I don't know about. Yesterday I found the move function under transform (Object - transform, or Shift+Ctrl+M). What this does is move an object a certain number of pixels either vertically or horizontally.

In fabric design this is something I do all the time in order to create a repeating pattern. Until now I've been using a more convoluted method: placing an object at 0 on the x or y axis, duplicating, then moving the second object along the x or y axis depending on the width and height of the page, grouping the two and placing them where I want on the page (it sounds more complicated than it is, but its a lot of extra steps compared to using the move function).

You can see how easy it is to move the whole group of girls in the design below to quickly see how the pattern looks in repeat. Group them all, duplicate and move horizontally the number of pixels of my page width. 

The design I've been working on this week is once again for the spoonflower design contest. This week's theme is umbrellas, and I reworked some of the girls from this design, added a few more and played with colour and placement. 

You can see the final design in my shop (not yet for sale) and see the other designs in the contest here (voting starts this evening). 

Now I'm looking forward to trying out the different options of the transform tool and hopefully discovering other functions I didn't know about. 

beetles and blackberries

Last weekend we went on an outing to Beddington Park and saw lots of ripe blackberries. I didn't have a container along to pick any, but took a photo instead and inspiration for a new design.

I know the japanese beetles in the design are a bit strange, but I decided to add them so that I can enter this design in next weeks spoonflower contest (topic: beetles) and will make a version without beetles.

faux suede

The latest fabric added to the line of fabrics my designs are available on is faux suede. I ordered a swatch and really like the quality of the fabric. Its thick and would be suitable for upholstery or for sewing bags or pillows. The colours printed very well and also very densely, there is no white showing through anywhere. Its quite stiff and apparently gets softer with washing. 

The design I had printed is available for sale here. 

And in case you're wondering why I folded it so the head isn't showing, I reworked the original design since ordering the fabric, because the head looked very strange!

garden

My grandma had a huge garden and whenever I visited her I loved to roam through it, randomly picking raspberries and rhubarb stalks, smelling the lilacs and trying the crabapples. These designs feature plants from my grandma's garden and drawing each plant evoked memories and smells and tastes.

I entered one of them in this week's spoonflower contest. Its so much fun when a design starts to come together.

terrariums

Terrarium is a nice word isn't it.

I had a baby 7 weeks ago, life has changed a lot!

Last week I sat for an hour in a café sketching the little glass jars holding sugar cubes. At home I reworked the sketches...

... and created little terrariums filled with fabric flowers. The finished fabric design:

ps. its a bit sad what saving as a .jpg does to the image quality..

Heidelberg

I'm working on a last Heidelberg postcard. We moved from Heidelberg to London, UK at the beginning of August. A new country, new home, new job / work circumstances is not always easy.

I've been working on a design for quite a long time. Usually I don't take this long with one design, but I want to get this one right and make it the way I see it in my head. Its a postcard from Heidelberg in that the design features the houses along the river in Neuenheim. Kind of like these postcards from last October. In fact, that's one of the photos I used as inspiration.

Here's a progress update, since it isn't finished yet, and since I haven't written here for so long. Not quite ready to move on to postcards from London I suppose?

I want to use the design for making fabric, but I also want to use the design in an upcoming spoonflower contest for tea towel calendars. So this evening I'm working on watercolour letters for the month's names. Here's June.