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.

October Free Printable Calendar and New Phoenix Trading Card Design

The days are getting shorter and the leaves are starting to change colour and fall here in the UK; so October's printable calendar has an Autumnal leaf theme.  Autumn is not my favourite time of year, mostly because I don’t like the long dark nights ahead, but there are still things to enjoy like the colours of the changing leaves.  The end of September was quite summery and warm, so the leaves that have fallen were crisp – there is something quite satisfying about walking on crunchy leaves!

Despite Autumn not being my favourite time of year, I think this calendar design for October might be my favourite of the year so far!  (I created this design by adapting elements from my Woodland range of designs)

You can download the PDF here and you can view and print the calendar with Adobe Acrobat Reader.

The calendar is A4 in size, but you can scale it to fit different sized paper if you prefer.  You can print onto any type of paper you like, for best results I recommend using your printer's highest quality setting and a good quality paper.

Please note this calendar is for personal use only!  You can print it as many times as you like for your own use but you may not redistribute it in any form (digitally or printed).  You may not modify the calendar or claim it as your own.  If you would like to share the calendar on your blog, Pinterest, facebook etc please include a link back to this page (not the download link).  Thank you!  I hope you enjoy using it :)

On other news for October 1st – I have a new tractor birthday card design out with Phoenix Trading today! 

Exciting news – published greeting card!

Recently my London bus and taxi design was accepted by Phoenix Trading to be published as a greeting card!  The card was released this week as part of their new Autumn range…

This morning I received some samples – it’s so exciting to see the finished card printed!  The design has been embossed and I’m really impressed with the quality of the print.