Rabbit Cut and Sew Doll Design

Creating a cut and sew fat quarter design was the challenge for this week's Spoonflower contest. I have been wanting to design more cut and sew projects for a while, so the contest was a perfect prompt for me to work on this!

Floral Butterflies Surface Pattern Design

This week's Spoonflower design challenge has a limited colour palette theme - the brief allowed us to create a design on any theme we liked so long as we used at least 3 of the colours specified by Spoonflower (black or white accents were also allowed).
I decided to create a floral and butterfly themed design...

Christmas Gingerbread and Candy on teal - my entry to Spoonflower's Challenge

With such a fun theme I couldn't miss out on designing for Spoonflower's Gingerbread contest!  This colourful design is created from my pen, watercolour, coloured pencil and felt tip pen illustrations of gingerbread houses, gingerbread men, Christmas trees, candy canes and lollipops.  This was a really fun design to make and I loved working with these colours!

My entry to Spoonflower's Black and White Colouring Book Contest

This week's Spoonflower contest is being held in conjunction with Lake, a colouring app, and we could create a design on any subject we liked, so long as it was in black and white.  Such open ended contests like this can be the hardest - how do you choose what theme to draw!? They also produce an amazing, diverse mix of entries, it's wonderful to see how creative everyone else has been!

More Circus Designs for Spoonflower

Continuing with the Circus theme, here is my entry to this week's Spoonflower design challenge; Circus Performers.  My design features girls (inspired by 1920s fashion) performing acrobatics,  gynastics (rhythmic ribbons!) and on the flying trapeze!  This week's theme was the one I was most looking forward to designing for and I enjoyed drawing the girls - first in pencil then pen line drawing, which I scanned then coloured digitally.  I added the stars, swirls and dots to give a sense of movement to the design.  As with all of this month's circus challenges, there was a limited colour palette to use.  The colours are probably not ones I would have chosen myself (yellow isn't a colour I usually use a lot of) but I actually like the yellow as a background for this and how the other colours work with it.



* UPDATE*
Thank you if you voted for my Circus Performers design - it came 32nd (with 86 votes) out of 135 entries!
You can see all the winners on Spoonflower here.

This design is now available to buy from Spoonflower - you can find it in my shop here.

- - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Below is my entry to last week's challenge; Animal Alphabet Limited Colour Palette.  It features some of the animals I used in my first circus design, plus some new ones; a zebra, giraffe and bear on a unicycle!!  The colour palette for this one was probably the most challenging for me - most of the animals were fine but I struggled to like any of the colours for the elephant.  I'm looking forward to playing around with these a bit more after the challenges with some different colour combinations.


Thank you if you voted for my design in the contest! The results are now in and my Animal Alphabet design came 65th out of 146 entries.  I definitely recommend you visit Spoonflower's blog to see the other entries, there were lots of great designs and Elena Naylor's winning Cat Circus Alphabet is a particularly fun and creative design! :)

My Entry to Spoonflower's 'Retro Circus' Design Contest

Roll up, roll up! The Circus is in town!
For the next 4 weeks Spoonflower's design challenges each have a theme based around the circus; Retro Circus, Animal Alphabet, Circus Performers, and Big Top Treats.

I'm having lots of fun working on these designs, although they are challenging too.  All the contests are limited colour palette and the colours aren't necessarily ones I would have chosen myself. However, the restricted choice of colours has forced me to think carefully about my designs and I actually really like the colours in this one now!


I gave myself plenty of time to start work on my circus designs and I've enjoyed having more time and less pressure to complete the first one (which amazingly I entered into the contest early, not on the last day like usual!).

Spoonflower Fabric Makes

I love to see my fabric designs come to life, being made up into something, and it is especially thrilling to hear from customers who have purchased my designs from Spoonflower and see what they have made! Here are a few...

The talented Rebecca from Elizabeth's Closet has made these gorgeous dresses, they would be so lovely for little girls to play in! She makes them in a range of sizes, from newborn to 7. You can find Elizabet's Closet on Etsy or follow on Instagram or Facebook. (Rebecca also has another shop on Etsy  where she sells adorable hair accessories: Elizabeth's Bow Shop)

Find the Hot Air Balloon dress here and my fabric on Spoonflower here.


This cute pink donuts dress can be purchased from Elizabeth's Closet here and you can find the fabric on Spoonflower here.

My Design for Spoonflower's 'Whimsical Watercolour Insects' Challenge

This week's Spoonflower challenge theme is 'Whimsical Watercolour Insects'.  I remembered that I had drawn some pen and watercolour beetles in my sketchbook a while ago so decided it was a good opportunity to return to that theme and create a finished design!  Also, I'm not that keen on real creepy crawlies but I thought beetles would be something I could make into a fun and colourful pattern.

How to Finish Tea Towels From Spoonflower

If you are inexperienced at sewing you might be unsure how to finish off tea towels from Spoonflower - it's really quick and simple when you know how, so this tutorial is for you!  There is a great range of tea towel designs available to buy for Spoonflower (I have 3 in my shop including the Toucan design featured in this blog post).  You can purchase them either as a single fat quarter of fabric, or 4 on 1 yard (Linen-Cotton Canvas is the best fabric to choose for tea towels).  When you receive your tea towel you will find it comes as an unfinished piece of fabric, which you will need to sew a hem around to neaten the edges.

My Entry to Spoonflower's 'Lace Gift Wrap' Design Contest

If you follow me on Instagram or Facebook you will already have seen a peek at my design for this week's Spoonflower contest: Lace Gift Wrap. Inspired by images of vintage lace, which I found on Pinterest, I created a detailed, floral and leaf pattern.  Everything in this design was hand drawn in black pen (I like to use Faber Castell PITT artist pens), before being scanned and assembled into the finished pattern digitally.  As the design was too large to fit on 1 sheet of A4 I had to draw it on several sheets of paper...

My Entry to Spoonflower's Annual Tea Towel Calendar Contest - 2017 Tropical Toucan

It's that time of year again - time for Spoonflower's annual tea towel calendar contest!  This year I decided to go for a tropical theme and created a design featuring a colourful toucan surrounded by leaves (I love to draw birds!).  Here's what the finished design looks like...

A Look Back At New Designs in July

July was a busy month for me, working on new designs and products.  Unfortunately I'm not able to share all of them with you yet, but I do have plenty which you can see!

First up, here's a look at my latest set of printables from my Etsy shop - it's a fun collection inspired by the Wheels on the Bus song (yes, I did end up with the song stuck in my head while making these!). Designs from this set were initially created after a customer request and they are a spin off from my London Calling range, which features a red London bus. So far I have an invitation, birthday bunting banner, name place cards, cupcake toppers and party hats - more items will be added soon. A scaled down version of one of the hats is being modelled by one of my guinea pigs in the image below - the full size ones are 6 inches tall.


I have also added many new designs to my Spoonflower shop, which are available on fabric, wallpaper and gift wrap.  Some of the new designs are different colour ways or scales of existing designs and some are completely new.  My personal favourites are the 'Scattered Feathers and Arrows' and 'Seahorses in Teal' designs.


'Patchwork Bees Coordinates' is another new one - this has 4 coordinating designs on 1 yard of fabric; patchwork bees, floral, spotty and chevron patterns.  Coordinates designs are great if you're making something like a quilt and want several different designs in one project!  If you purchase a smaller piece of this design (a test swatch or fat quarter) you will receive just the floral pattern from the 4 coordinates.


Finally, here is a look at some of the new designs and products I have been adding to my Society6 shop. The colourful butterflies design in now available on a wide range of products like tote bags, phone cases, clothing and home ware. My seahorses design is also new - I love this one as a beach towel! I added some new products to existing designs too - you'll now find horses and rabbits on mugs and budgies on wall clocks!
Until 7th August you can get FREE Worldwide Shipping on EVERYTHING + 10% off art prints, framed prints and clocks via this link:
https://society6.com/hazelfishercreations/prints?promo=VG8MF8KMZH2W

Spoonflower Contest - Japanese Garden

This month Spoonflower have partnered with Sprout Patterns for their design contest.  The theme is Japanese Garden and the winning design will be featured in the release of a new kimono sewing pattern!

I enjoyed having longer to work on this contest, which gave me the opportunity to spend time researching ideas, sketching and finally pulling my ideas together into a finished pattern.  I collected some of my inspiration on this board on Pinterest - like beautiful flowers and kimonos.  

I sketched ideas which included different flowers, birds and butterflies, but in the end decided to keep the design a little simpler, by creating a repeat made from intertwined cherry blossom and anemones, with a butterfly.

I'm happy with how this design turned out - as well as making it available to buy on fabric, giftwrap and wallpaper on Spoonflower, I plan to use it on products in my Society6 shop.  For the contest, I chose a turquoise shade for the background colour but I also plan to have some test swatches printed in other colours - I tried grey for the background and think this looked nice too.

Voting is now open (until 27th April) on Spoonflower http://www.spoonflower.com/sprout-design-challenge. I noticed that there are 705 entries - so lots of people were inspired by this theme!  I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else came up with.

New Spoonflower Samples

Last week I received a swatch sampler with 15 of my new fabric designs on from Spoonflower.  I have a real mix of seasonal ones in this set, with designs for Valentine's, Autumn and Christmas!

The Autumn Leaves design is one of my favourites, it was designed with my pen and watercolour drawings of leaves.

I also have ditsy hearts in 3 different colour ways, and larger watercolour hearts in pink...

These are a couple of my new designs for Christmas; decorative stars in red and white and a design featuring gingerbread people, houses and candy...

You will find all of these designs, and more, in my Spoonflower shop.  My samples were printed on Kona cotton, you can choose to have them printed on a range of different types of fabric as well as wallpaper and giftwrap.

Spoonflower Design Challenge and Free Shipping Day!

If you follow me on Facebook or Instagram you will already know that I have been taking part in Spoonflower's Design-A-Day Challenge, I thought that it would be good to also share a round-up here with all the things I have been drawing, painting and making over the last couple of weeks.  It's been a really fun challenge to take part in!  I've enjoyed trying out some new things and it's been quite liberating just playing with different mediums and designs without worrying about making things to sell/ if people would like them etc.  That said, there are several designs which I will be adding to my Spoonflower shop though!  I've also really enjoyed seeing what other people come up with each day and finding new designers to follow on Instagram.

Each day of the challenge Spoonflower sent out an email with a prompt for the day and some inspiration and tips to get you started.  Then at the end of the 15 days they announced one of the themes for the contest.

Here is what I have been drawing, painting and making...

Day 1: Pencil Drawing - I practised drawing foxes and a hedgehog

Day 2: Watercolour - experiment with painting watercolour flowers

Day 3: Abstract - I enjoyed playing with my watercolours so continued using them for the Abstract theme

Day 4: Block Printing - I went for something very small scale and used the erasers on the end of pencils to make some basic shapes and printed simple patterns in my sketchbook

Day 5: Pen and Ink - leaf and flower drawings in my sketchbook

Day 6: Geometric - patterns made with watercolours and my stamps from day 4

Day 7: Vector - I turned some of my leaf drawings from day 5 into a vector pattern

Day 8: Photographic - I used a 'kaleidoscope' effect on a photo of blossom and took one of the patterns I made to create a repeat design

Day 9: Open Source - design made with PicMonkey

Day 10: Steampunk - a repeat pattern made from my illustration of a clockwork hummingbird and line drawings of leaves and cogs.

Day 11: Dyed - pattern made from scanned fabric which I dyed with watercolours

Day 12: Typographical - pattern made from my watercolour paintings of letters

Day 13: Kawaii - Easter inspired pattern with cute bunnies, eggs, chicks and sheep

Day 14: Found Objects (I skipped this, but may come back to it another time!)

Day 15: Designer's Choice - I created my entry for the contest.  Spoonflower chose the theme 'Watercolour' and my design was inspired by some of my earlier designs, using watercolour letters, feathers and arrow shapes.  The image at the top of this post is a larger view of my final design.

Voting for the contest is now open!  There are so many great designs, with a wide range of subjects covering flowers, animals, geometric patterns and much more.  You can see them all on Spoonflower, and vote for your favourites too... http://blog.spoonflower.com/2016/03/vote-in-the-design-a-day-spoonchallenge.html

Spoonflower are currently holding a Free Shipping Day - a great opportunity to stock up on fabric, wallpaper or gift wrap!  The offer runs until 9am EDT (1pm in the UK) on March 18th 2016 and applies to standard shipping, worldwide.

(The image below shows my Steampunk Valentine design - you can find it in my Spoonflower shop).

Spoonflower Year of the Monkey contest and Free Swatch Day!

It's been a while since I last entered one of Spoonflower's contests, but this week's theme caught my eye and I decided I had to have a go!  The theme is Year of the Monkey, in honour of the Chinese new year, and I quite quickly had the idea of creating a design with monkeys in a forest of trees.  The challenge of creating this piece was to make sure the repeat worked with the trunk of the trees not having an obvious join and fitting the branches around each other.

I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone else came up with for this contest!  You can see all of the other entries to the Year of the Monkey contest (and vote for your favourites!) over on Spoonflower... http://www.spoonflower.com/contests/336

I also wanted to let you know about Spoonflower's Free Swatch Day.  They recently introduced a new fabric - cotton spandex jersey.  I think this sounds like a great fabric for sewing comfortable clothing and can't wait to see a sample of this myself!  The free swatch day starts at 10am EST on Thursday 21st January (that's 3pm UK time).  The offer runs worldwide and includes free shipping, so it's a great time to try out a design you've been admiring in the Spoonflower marketplace!  You can see my designs in my Spoonflower shop.

Learn How to Sew A Zippered Pouch

I've had the photos for this zip pouch sitting on my hard drive for a few weeks, waiting to be edited and shared.  I thought now would be a good time to share the project as it is quite a quick make and would be perfect if you're wanting to make some last minute Christmas presents!  In this tutorial I will show you how to sew this pouch with a zip and lining; it's just the right size for pens, pencils, small craft projects or make-up.  You can use the same technique though to make pouches of different sizes to fit anything you like - for example smaller ones as coin purses.

The materials I used to sew this zip pouch:
Rabbits on Kona Cotton Fabric (available from my Spoonflower store)
Green fabric for the lining
7 inch zip
Cotton thread

First cut your fabric to size, slightly wider than the zip and allowing a 5/8 inch seam allowance on all sides.  For my pouch I cut 2 pieces of the Rabbits fabric and 2 pieces of the green lining, each measured approx. 8 1/8 x 5 1/2 inches.

Lay a piece of the outer fabric face up, followed by the zip face down, then a piece of lining.

Pin and sew, so your piece looks like this...

Repeat for the other side of the zip with the second piece of outer and lining fabrics.  Open out and press your seams, then top stitch for a neat finish around the zip...

Now open it out so that the lining pieces are facing each other and the outer rabbit pieces are facing each other.  Make sure the zip is open (so you can turn it out the right way again!) and facing into the lining (this gives a neater finish when it is turned out the right way again).

Sew around the edge of the outer rabbit pieces and the lining but leave a gap in the bottom of the lining for turning out the right way.

Trim the seams and clip the corners, then turn out the right way.  Sew the gap in the lining closed by hand using ladder stitch...

Your pouch is now ready to use or give as a gift to someone else!

2 for 1 on Fat Quarters at Spoonflower and My New Designs

The results of Spoonflower's annual Tea Towel Calendar competition were published yesterday, which means it's also time for Spoonflower's 2 for 1 offer on all fat quarters.  Perfect for stocking up on tea towels, or buying fabric for making small projects and gifts!


There were so many lovely tea towel designs this year, it was nice to see some of the ones I voted for made it into the top ten!  You can see all of the entries on Spoonflower's blog.
My cats themed design came 96th out of 296 entries (with 139 votes) - thank you if you voted for it! Unfortunately you will not be able to buy my cats tea towel calendar yet as I need to order a test print first, but I have plenty of other designs available for you to take advantage of Spoonflower's fantastic offer!
I have updated the dates on my Budgies tea towel calendar, so you can use it for 2016 now...

This Dragon Cut and Sew plushie pattern fits on a fat quarter (27x18 inches) - you could make it up to give as a gift, or give it as a project for a crafty friend to make themselves...

I have over 80 different fabric designs in my shop and the range has just got bigger!  I received samples of my latest designs last week and have just been making them available to buy.  Here is a small selection of my new Christmas star and snowflake designs, Octopuses, 90s Nostalgia, a new colourway of my rabbits (on pink) - to see the rest of my designs visit my shop: Hazel Fisher Creations on Spoonflower

You can mix and match different designs from different designers to take advantage of the 2 for 1 offer (see all the details over on Spoonflower).  Spoonflower have also been sharing ideas for projects to make using a fat quarter of fabric on Pinterest.

This is also a good time to let you know about ordering dates for Christmas; to receive fabric, gift wrap or wallpaper by 24th December, with Standard Shipping, order by Sunday 6th December if you're in the US or by Thursday 19th November for everywhere else.  Full details can be seen on Spoonflower here.

If you buy any of my fabric I would love to hear what you make with it!

August Review

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…

I baked a banana, blueberry and walnut cake which I shared the recipe for last week.  You can see more recipes I have shared on my blog in the past here.

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!

I’m using this Drops pattern, which I’ve pinned to my Knit and Crochet board on Pinterest along with other knitting and crochet patterns and tutorials…

Follow Hazel's board Knit and Crochet on Pinterest.

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.

July Review

July started off well for me but ended with an unplanned (and very much unwanted) break when I came down with the flu.  After a couple of weeks of doing nothing at all, things are slowly starting to return to normal this week.  It’s taking me a while to get my brain back into gear so this month’s review will be particularly helpful in reminding myself of all the things I was working on before I got sick and I hope you find it interesting too!

New designs…

I worked on several new designs in July which unfortunately I can’t share with you yet, although I did design a new set of Lavender flower themed scrapbooking papers (which you can see in my shop here).  If you follow me on facebook you will have already seen a picture from my sketchbook when I started designing these papers.

I also created some new surface pattern designs for Spoonflower, to coordinate with my existing fabric designs.  I  received the sample swatches last week and am in the process of making the new designs available to buy from my Spoonflower shop as fabric, gift wrap and wallpaper.

I added a new colour way of the ditsy sheep design with a lemon yellow background and 2 coordinating flower and spotty patterns…

These designs are part of my Rabbits collection…

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…

Blog…

In July I shared some ideas for teacher gifts, I was able to reveal the secret project I had been working on for 3 Picnic DIY Ideas and I posted a colour palette inspired by a photograph of a beetle I found in my garden.  Hopefully August will run a little smoother than July and I will be able to share more of the craft projects and tutorials I have been planning to do.

Other Work...

July was a time for catching up on admin and taxes, not very exciting but it had to be done!  I also decided to make a few changes to the design of my pages online - I changed the background to my blog from a basic chevron pattern to a hand drawn floral pattern (hope you like it!) - I thought it reflected my work a bit more, being hand drawn, and was more interesting than the old pattern.  I also tweaked things like my cover photo and profile image on facebook and the banner in my Etsy shop.  I'll probably continue making a few more changes to things in August.

Other things…

At the start of July we had 2 gorgeous new additions to our house – these cute guinea pigs! :)  The one on the left is called Lily and the one on the right is Rosie.  We soon noticed they have different characters – Rosie is the shy one while Lily is bolder and more curious.  Lily is also a lot more lively and wriggly, whereas Rosie is quite happy to sit still while you hold her.  They haven’t squeaked much yet, although they do get very excited especially when they get new hay – it’s funny watching them popcorn and dashing about!