pond_ripple's Fabric Blog

Calligraphy Spoonflower is partnering with UPPERCASE, a magazine for the creative and curious, to bring you a special Design Challenge. Together we’re offering designers the chance to create a calligraphy-themed print. Be inspired by the inky elegance of calligraphy! Create a monochromatic pattern using varying shades of black, white or grey. Go graphic with calligraphic messages and flourishes or be illustrative with pens, inkwells and other tools of the craft. The winning designer will be profiled in an upcoming issue of UPPERCASE. Previews will be sized as quarter yards (21" x 18"). Deadline for entry is Tuesday, November 11, 2014 .

My entry in the 2012 tea towel calendar contest at Spoonflower. Fan with cityscape Rocketeer  lion

This is my entry for the Circus fabric of the week contest on Spoonflower.  I knew that I wanted to at least include a few lions and a group on the flying trapeze, but apart from that I had no idea what I wanted. I ended up looking around on Flickr for some inspiration, and I came across wonderful black and white striped leggings. It led to the striped costumes on the lions.  I looked at a lot of photos of trapeze artists in action to be sure and get the lions in the proper positions. After the initial drawings of the trapeze lions, I started to just wing it. The high-wire act started out as two separate performers on different  tightropes, but they were making my repeat difficult. I was just going to cut one from the design, but then my brain started working. So, I combined the two acts. Oh, and the juggler is just kinda there. Not much of a story on this guy he just showed up in an almost finished form from the first pencil sketch. He does remind me of an Oom...

Full swatch I got my Monsters & Butterflies fabric in today. It looks so amazing in person; the pictures really don't give it justice. To read more about the design see my previous post here. Anywho, here it is: Blue Monster, Orange Butterfly Green Monster, Yellow Butterfly Yellow Monster, Red Butterfly Red Monster, Blue Butterfly

Spoonflower is always looking to push us artists to our creative limits. The most challenging contests to me are the restricted palette contests. This one takes the cake though: Palette-Limited Butterfly Contest . Design must use butterflies as a motif and use the palette pictured here. No blended colors, please. No gradients. You can choose to use some, rather than all, of the colors in the palette. Deadline is Tuesday, July 5th, 2011. [hex codes: orange: f28102 pink: d96fc3 light green: 7b9432 white: f5f8f8 (or ffffff) dark green: 003a00 blue: 1a87c8 ] No black on this one, please. No transparencies, either. Look at these colors!! And don't even get me started on no black. I was just about to throw in the towel on these colors, but I decided to give it a try anyway. So here's what I came up with: I am totally going to throw out that green outline as soon as the contest is over, but other than that I love it. It makes me think of a blanket that my grandmother made ...

This is probably going to be my entry in the Rain fabric of the week contest. I thought I'd show a bit of detail.

Click on the image to see it full-size, click on the title to see it as fabric on Spoonflower . Jet Over City

So I've been busy lately designing fabrics, and yesterday I did did something that I never thought I would. I deleted designs. Not a great many went under the axe, just a few that I had to be honest with myself about. I thought I'd share the ideas behind a few of my designs that have lived to see another day: Jesters Jesters is for the jokers and fools contest on Spoonflower. I wanted to do something colorful and fun, but I had serious doubts that I could do this contest. It took awhile for me to stumble across the right thing on my sketch pad, but once it happened I was really glad that I stuck with it. Primavera Primavera is a beautiful mural in Pompeii that I came across while doing a research paper on Roman paintings. For that project I painted a smaller reproduction of it. To make the fabric design, I took a photograph using my digital camera. I then used Pixlr to edit out the background which had too much texture due to the canvas and the reflection of the flash on the ...