Zip Pouch Prototype.

A few weeks ago I was trying to come up with something small to make so that I can use up my test swatches from Spoonflower. I threw together this (wonky) little zip pouch using some of my thermos fabric and some vintage fabric for the lining. I used fusible interfacing to give the pouch some body but because it is quite small it just seems to have made it overly bulky. Next time I will try it without the interfacing. They could be good for coins, makeup essentials or your favourite Lego minifig.

Penguin Parade

This morning I was rather chuffed when I opened my email and found that my recent penguin design is one of the nine designs in the Spoonflower email advertising this week's design competition! The winners won't be known until the end of next week but I think this feels as good as a win. Especially considering I enter the weekly competition mainly to give myself a deadline to work to and a challenge to create something I might not normally do.

This week's theme is 'Penguins' and there are a lot of nice designs that have been entered. (Some can be seen in this screenshot of the Spoonflower email shown here.) Check out all the other designs here if you are feeling penguin-y.

I chose black, white and greys for my repeating pattern of penguins and drew it using Copic markers after sketching it out with pencil. I then fiddled around with my drawing on my old version of Photoshop to create the seamless repeat. I'm looking forward to receiving my test print of it on fabric so I can then decide what to make using it. Perhaps a t-shirt with this all-over print on a knit fabric, or perhaps some sort of top/blouse on a floatier fabric?

I have added the design to my Society6 and Redbubble stores and it will soon be available as fabric in my Spoonflower store.

EDIT - 16 Jan 2015.

With the help of the above appearance in the Spoonflower competition email this week my Penguin design broke into the top 40 after voting closed. I was very pleased to see that I came in 39th, considering that I average around 224th position. The only way is up! See you in Hit Songwords magazine. (Sorry... sorry for my bad "Top 40" references/jokes.)

12 Days of Design Spoonchallenge

Interested in taking your designs from paper to fabric? I've signed up to get some tips from Spoonflower (custom fabric printing place of excellence) about doing just that. 12 emails over 12 days and it's free. Starts December 1st. Maybe you would like to follow along with the 12 Days of Design Spoonchallenge too?

My Thermoses for the next Spoonflower Competition.

The theme for the upcoming weekly contest on Spoonflower.com is "Thermoses". My attempt is made up of hand-drawn, retro thermoses.