Playin' with the Queen of Hearts

This week I made my first little Flipagram animation for my Instagram feed, showing the designs in my new Queen of Hearts collection. I'm trying to focus for awhile on making smaller prints, which I'm hoping could be useful for a larger variety of projects. Let me know what you think! The collection is available on fabric, wallpaper, decals and gift wrap from Spoonflower, and totes, pillows, cards, and iPhone cases in my Society6 shop. (By the way, I can see this Flipagram thing becoming an addiction!)

It's a Paint-By-Number Christmas!

Inspired by my collecting obsession with vintage paint-by-number paintings, I decided to go the "original" DIY route with this week's Spoonflower contest entry.

The assignment this week: create a festive tree that can be printed on one yard of fabric. My one yard features a 24" x 30" tree painting in a vintage frame, along with seven ornaments you can paint yourself (using the color key provided, or using your own colors), then cut out and attach to the tree! One yard of Linen-Cotton Canvas actually has an additional 12 inches, so the extra space includes more unfinished ornaments, as well as seven finished ones. I plan to adapt this to a wall decal, too, once the contest is over. Might be a fun way to decorate a child's room for Christmas!

What do you think? Wanna vote? Click here! Thank you!

Detail of the unfinished ornaments:

Detail of the finished ornaments, using the color key provided:

And a mockup of a decorated tree!

Geek Chic: Dorky But Cool

It's that time of year again: time for the Robert Kaufman Fabric8 Contest. In this competition, the judges from Robert Kaufman Fabrics and Spoonflower pore over hundreds of designs (one entry from each designer) and choose 100 semi-finalists. Then the general public votes, and the top eight designers then create a collection around the original design. The general public then votes again on the collections to determine a winner, who will be given a contract to work with Robert Kaufman!

The theme for this year's contest is "Geek Chic", so I went back to my '80s roots and focused on fashion and hobbies of the hipster dweeb, naming the collection after the term coined by Judd Nelson's character, John Bender, in the ultimate '80s flick "The Breakfast Club". Using hand-drawn illustrations, as if doodled in a notebook or *gasp!* on a desk, the collection features cameras (perhaps thrifted for 25 cents before the obsession became mainstream), calculators (everyone turned into a nerd when the calculator became a necessity in the trigonometry classroom), record players, Swiss fashion watches, combs we'd put in our back pockets, hi-top sneakers, and of course, "The Cube". All of these things have become "cool" again, perhaps even more so, some 30 years later. The ultimate revenge for those of us who have always been geeks at heart!

The first design shown below, "Make It Snappy!", is the print I'm entering into the contest. It features a collection of vintage and retro cameras, including those resembling the Brownie, Polaroid One Step, Canon Snappy (my first camera)...even a couple inspired by Fisher-Price toy cameras. These may not have been geeky at the time, but collecting them now is all the rage for geeks like me. To me, "Geek Chic" could be defined as "dorky and cool at the same time." And it seems kind of dorky-yet-cool to go back to using analog objects now when digital cameras and apps for processing and sharing are the mainstream.

Make It Snappy!

Cal Q. Lator and High Energy (Gray)

Apple Pi with close-up

Hi-Fi (Black) and All-Stars (Gray)

May the Cube Be With You and Magic Cube

Hi-Fi (White) and High Energy (White)

Geeky Stripes (Black on Grid) and Oh, Goody! (Black)

All-Stars (White) and High Energy (Red)

Hi-Fi (Yellow) and Oh, Goody! (Pinstripe)

Swiss Time and Geeky Stripes (Color)

I've had so much fun working on this collection, not only because the subject matter is so nostalgic, but because it is different from anything I've done with surface pattern design. Doing the drawings and then seeing them come together with color and in patterns...I could get used to this! There are just too many geeky-but-cool things from the '80s--I have a feeling I'll be doing a second collection!

12 DIYs of Christmas: Snow Globes!

Who doesn't love snow globes? I bought my three-year-old son his first one at the drugstore last week. It has The Charlie Brown Christmas theme and only cost $1.99, and it's his favorite thing right now. So why not make your own, and personalize your scene? The folks at The Sweetest Occasion have posted some simple steps with great photos, and you only need a few items.



Also, if you haven't seen this: Yesterday Emma Jeffery of Hello Beautiful posted a tutorial on the Spoonflower blog on how to make a festive serving tray, and she used wall decals featuring my Christmas Forest and Christmas Ornaments prints on decals! What a great idea for using the decals! I'm so flattered!

Holiday Gift Tags

So sorry for the week of no blog entries. I was down and out for three days with a 24-hour bug that has turned into an annoying congested cold. All of those coffee-fueled late nights finally caught up with me!

Here's my entry in this week's Spoonflower contest for Holiday Gift Tags. Using fabric or decals, you can make six individual tags, or three double-sided tags that are folded in the center and then sewn or stuck together. If you like them, you can vote for them, and all your favorites, here. Thank you!

Quick reminder: If you haven't yet participated in my current giveaway, check out all the info here. Contest ends in just a few days!

Wallpaper and Wall Decals? Oh, my!

What's the saying? "When the cat's away, the mice will play?" Though I really wouldn't consider myself the cat, but... When I returned from vacation, I found an email from Spoonflower saying they now offer wallpaper and wall decals! So I spent the first couple of days making sure the bulk of my designs translate to the new product.

Wallpaper is available in standard 24" x 144" rolls at $60 each, or you can get a 24" x 12" swatch for $5. And it's easily repositionable, so no paste is involved! Wall decals are made from the same material and come in three sizes: 5" square ($5), 15" square ($15), and 30" square ($30). The decals are not die cut, so they need to be trimmed using scissors or an Xacto knife. And they can be applied to just about anything! I thought a small decal of my Staxx design would be fun to apply in the living room of a dollhouse!

Here are some examples, including a 30" x 30" Footnote Flower decal sheet. Now, if Spoonflower would start printing wrapping paper...