Another month has flown by and it’s September already! That means it’s time for a look back at some of the things I did in August…
New designs, Spoonflower…
I don’t like to waste things so when I realised that I was running out of space in my current sketchbooks I decided to make myself a new one from spare pages left at the back of some old uni sketchbooks. I used to like making books but hadn’t done any in a long time, it got me thinking about putting together some different book making tutorials – I’ve added that to my ‘to do’ list!
I used my newly made sketchbook for drawing ideas for Spoonflower’s annual
Fabric8 contest. This year the theme is Botanical Sketchbook, so I took inspiration from my garden and drew some of the plants, flowers and vegetables which I grow…
Here’s my final fabric design… Unfortunately it was not picked to be one of the 100 semi-finalists (there were close to 800 entries!), but I will still be making it available to buy from my Spoonflower shop in the near future. (I took advantage of
Spoonflower’s Free Swatch Day and ordered a sample.) I am also planning to create some coordinating designs to form a small collection around this one. The 8 finalists in the Fabric8 contest have now been chosen. They are all lovely designs, you can see them
here.
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.
Baking…
Knitting
When I was recovering from being unwell in July I started knitting a cardigan. After a bit of a false start (when I got in a muddle having dropped some stitches only a few rows in and had to start again) it’s going well now. I’m knitting with
Sublime Extra Fine Merino Wool DK which is a gorgeous soft yarn. I would usually avoid wool because I’ve found it irritates my skin, but this yarn is so soft – hopefully it will feel good to wear too!
Other things…
A few months ago I wrote about
trialling Adobe Illustrator and wanting to try Serif’s DrawPlus X8, well I now have the full DrawPlus program and have been really happy with it so far. Learning how to do new things is so exciting and satisfying too – there were a few things I wanted to be able to do with DrawPlus but I wasn’t sure if I could. It doesn’t work in exactly the same way as Illustrator but I have worked out how to convert my scanned line drawings to vectors and draw scalloped circles!
Well, I think that’s about it for August! August was a bit of a disrupted month work wise, but I'm starting to get back into a more normal routine again now it's September, so hopefully you'll soon be seeing more new designs and craft projects / tutorials I have planned to do on my blog.
I hope you've enjoyed the DIY decorated stationery posts I have been sharing this week - have you tried any of them yet? Today I thought I would share a quick round up of all my Back to School projects, you'll also see that I've also been collecting other ideas over on Pinterest!
