Ups and Downs with Dragons, Horses and a Guinea Pig

The last week or so has been full of ups and downs for me, which I meant to blog about before now, so I have a few different things to share.  I’ll start off with the ups…

Thursday before last, I had a lovely surprise when I found out that my Dragon design made the top ten in Spoonflower’s Mythical Creature Plushie pattern contest!  It came 6th (out of 149 designs) with 314 votes – thank you to everyone who voted for it!  Wood Mouse Bobbit’s Griffin Kitten design came first – it was my favourite entry to the contest so I was really happy for her to win.  Her design consisted of lots of different parts to create a 3D toy, so it was a very impressive design and looked great made up.
I have ordered a print of my own dragon design and should have it within the next week or two, and will then be able to make it available to buy from my Spoonflower shop.  I’ll let you know when it arrives!

In other good news, I had a new card design released with Phoenix Trading last week.  It features rows of horses with different markings; palomino, piebald etc. so would be great for horse lovers! Here’s a pic from the new catalogue (my design is on the right):

The samples of my horse card design arrived early this morning and I love how the design has been printed on matt card with the horses embossed…

I have been busy working on new designs to submit for Phoenix surveys but I can’t show you any pictures of those yet.  They are for general, everyday cards and Christmas ones.  Phoenix have regular surveys where designs submitted from all the artists are sent out to the traders who vote for their favourite designs.  Phoenix then use the results to choose which cards will be published in the next product release.  Fingers crossed they like my new designs!

As I mentioned at the start of this post, the week had it’s downs too.  Sadly my guinea pig Basil became sick and died last week.  Tuesday involved a trip to the vet for him and then I spent the rest of the day syringe feeding him with painkiller, medicine and special food.  Unfortunately he was very weak and didn’t make it through the night.  I’m missing him very much but take some comfort in knowing he is no longer in pain and we did what we could to try and help him.

To end on something a little better, I have a long list of blog posts planned with some things I’ve been making and baking recently (last weekend was my sister’s birthday so I baked her a fancy cake!).  I should have a bit more time to write about them next week, as my Christmas designs need to be in to Phoenix by the end of the week.  You can expect to be seeing more flower and garden photos soon too – the first daffodils are opening in my garden, announcing the arrival of spring and the weather has been warming up so I have started doing some gardening again.