Another month has passed – it’s 2nd June today which means summer (meteorologically speaking) has officially begun in the UK! It doesn't feel particularly summery here though - very windy, overcast and not that warm - I'm hoping it will be improving later in the week! The start of the new month means that it is time for a little look back at some of the things I did in May…
New designs / illustrations…
I’ve been feeling quite inspired lately with ideas for new designs – I just need the time to be able to work on them all! I did manage to add several new designs to my shop in May, filling out some of my existing collections – like the Elephant baby shower designs…
This is the
‘mint’ collection, it is also available in blue and pink. The set is available as instant download and includes ‘hello baby’ bunting, cupcake toppers, thank you cards, wishes for baby card and baby predictions card.
I also added some new Sunflower themed designs – an
invitation and set of
cupcake toppers which can be customised with your choice of messages.
As the end of the school year approaches I thought I would add some
thank you teacher printables too – so made these
Sunflower (Thank you for helping me grow!) and
Apple (Thank you for being a great teacher!) designs. They can be customised with a personalised message too…
My London Calling range of designs continues to be popular in my shop, so I decided to add a couple of new items; a sheet of
printable journal cards and a sheet of
printable labels…
This printable
box design was also new and features my illustrations of budgies…
Spoonflower fabric...
I entered one Spoonflower contest in May, with a
Mermaids theme. Initially when the results were announced Spoonflower only showed the designs in the top ten, but I noticed today that they changed their mind after several complaints and have now posted a list with all the entries. I suppose that it doesn’t really matter where my entries come in their contests, but it is interesting to see how well they do. My mermaids design came 158th out of 365 entries. By the way, I realised that I hadn’t mentioned about the results for the previous Spoonflower contest I entered (
Flowers for Mom border print). My design came 52nd (out of 315 entries) with 159 votes. Thank you if you voted for my designs! :)
Having created new designs, particularly for contests, over the last few months I had built up enough of a collection to send for a new swatch sampler from Spoonflower. The samples arrived last week! I’m always a little uncertain as to how my designs will look printed on the fabric – how the colours will look etc. I was really pleased with how this batch of designs turned out on the Kona cotton!
The
Steampunk Valentine design was already available to buy from my shop, but all of the other designs are new in my Spoonflower shop – like this sheep design…
You can buy them on a variety of types of fabric as well as wallpaper and gift wrap.
When I test out new designs from Spoonflower I usually order a swatch sampler of 15 designs, so they arrive on one large piece of fabric. I feel like I can’t spoil the fabric by cutting it up, but the large sheets are a bit unwieldy, so I decided it was about time I made a start on doing something different with them. I’m working my way through my swatches, cutting them out with pinking shears, I will then organise them into collection by theme and make them into little books – much easier for flicking through myself and for showing other people. I’ll post some pictures when I’ve finished sorting them out!
Blog DIY Tutorials
Garden
May is a very pretty month for our garden – although it is a bit overgrown the flower border has been filled with pink and purple aquilegia, corn flowers and forget-me-nots which give it a very cottage garden feel! The laburnum is lovely too – full of bright yellow flowers which the bees seem to love as well.
My seedlings are growing well – there will be lots of work over the next few weeks to get everything planted out and all the smaller seedlings potted up too. I’ve been experimenting with some tips I came across for growing different plants, controlling weeds and pests like aphids. I think I may do a few garden posts in the future sharing the tips I’ve found that work – hopefully they might be interesting / useful to people.
I picked the first strawberries from this year’s crop in our greenhouse – they smell so lovely, I wish I could bottle scents for storing memories as well as taking photos…
Other things…
I’m still trialling Adobe’s Illustrator program, as I talked about in
this post last week – 10 days left of the free trial for me to play! I still want to try Serif’s Drawplus too.
I had the urge to do more drawing last week – actually it was after seeing some amazing Caneletto paintings on
The One Show last week. So I got my sketchbook out in the evening and did some drawing from pictures I found on Pinterest. They’re just for fun but it did make me think about working on some new illustrations and maybe going back to work on some new Hexley things again…
I will end May’s review by leaving you with one of my Pinterest boards – something for Budgie lovers!
Follow Hazel's board Budgies on Pinterest.
There are lots of cute designs entered in this week's contest; you can see them all here (and vote for your favourites too!)... http://www.spoonflower.com/contests/339
Spoonflower are always coming up with unusual themes for their weekly contests - like this week's Microorganisms theme. Researching and drawing viruses, bacteria and amoeba took me right back to Biology lessons at school!
The theme for this week's Spoonflower contest is Cephalopods. I wanted to keep my design fairly simple and chose to focus on one animal; the octopus. I thought that their long flowing arms really lent themselves to creating a decorative design filled with swirling patterns. I drew just one version of the octopus and flipped it to create the pattern, then added in hand drawn swirls to fill in the gaps. I got carried away playing with colours for this design, before choosing the version above to enter into the contest. I love trying out different colour combinations with designs, there are so many options though it can be hard to know when to stop! I was really happy with how the design turned out, so I plan to add it to my shop what ever happens with the results for the contest. I think I will send for samples in a couple of different colourways, I just need to make a decision on which ones! Here are 4 more versions - which ones are your favourites and you think I should add to my Spoonflower shop?
I had fun creating this colourful design for this week's Spoonflower contest; 'Ditsy Lizards'! You can see all of the other entries (and vote for your favourites) on Spoonflower here:
I felt just like a child again! Remembering the things I used to play with, like my Polly Pockets, trolls, plastic dinosaurs and animals. I even found a website that lists all the Polly Pockets they made by year - I found the Polly Princess ring I had, but lost the Polly doll, and the Midge doll from a pencil, but I lost the pencil and dome - I wonder what happened to them!?
In August I also entered Spoonflower’s ‘Butterfly Coordinates’ contest – thank you if you voted for my design! My entry came 78th (with 109 votes) out of 274 designs – you can see all of the other entries here.
It’s hard to believe that the last Spoonflower contest I entered (Mermaids) was way back in May! I’m pleased that I have a little more time available at the moment so I can enter some of the contests again. This week’s theme was ‘Butterfly Coordinates’ and involved designing 4 coordinating prints on 1 yard of fabric. I decided to use my existing butterflies design (top left) and create 3 more designs to coordinate with this.
I also designed a star pattern to coordinate with my Rocket in Space design, a snowflake design (which would be great for Christmas projects!) and a new blue flower pattern…
These cloud designs were created to go with my hot air balloon collection. I also decided to add a new fish pattern as my existing fishing flies design has been quite popular…
This week’s Spoonflower contest has the added excitement that the winner will have the chance of their design being made into pajamas by CWDkids! The challenge has a Mermaids theme and one of the requirements was that the design should contain a maximum of 8 colours. At first I found it quite difficult restricting myself to just 8 colours, but it was a good challenge and made me think carefully about how I used the same colours across different elements of the design.
I was excited to see the results from last week’s Bees themed Spoonflower contest – my design came 27th out of 502 entries (with 263 votes)! Thank you to anyone who voted for it! You can see the winning design, and the rest of the top ten, on Spoonflower’s blog. I’m getting a collection of new designs together so hopefully it won’t be long before I have enough to be able to order another swatch sampler and then make the new designs available to buy.
You can see all of the entries to the Flowers for Mom Border Print contest, and vote for your favourites, here: http://www.spoonflower.com/contest_voters_temp/new?contest_id=301
