Long time no post!

Its been a long time since I last posted.  Life got busy and my little blog, and my crafts, got pushed to the side.  My dad has been a sick for about a year with congestive heart failure. Luckily he was approved to be included in the trials for a new procedure to replace a heart valve (A calcified valve was the cause of his problem). He went through the surgery and did great!  Even the doctors were really impressed with how quickly he recovered, and  how quickly you saw the difference in him.  Its amazing, like someone just turned on a switch and gave him his energy back. We're all so happy, and now that he's feeling like his old self again, I can worry less and focus more on crafts and planning for my upcoming wedding.

As for wedding stuff, I'm planning on making a separate blog for that, mainly as a way to teach myself wordpress. I'm a designer by day, and I'd really like to add that among my list of capabilities.  Though I'm sure any wedding crafts I find and do will be cross-posted to this blog as well.

Like I said, because of all the real life business, I haven't had much time to create things, but I do have a few things to share once I take some photographs and wrap up a few loose ends.  One of those things is a pattern I came up with to enter into Spoonflower's Weekly Fabric Contest. The theme this time was "Squid". Designing repeating patterns has been on my list of "want to do" forever, so I really was happy to get to play around and come up with something.  I used a little doodle I had made a while back as the basis for my pattern and cleaned it up in Illustrator. Going back and forth between Illustrator for drawing and Photoshop for creating the offset repeat block, I came up with...



I really like how it turned out, and regardless of where it places in the contest I think I'll make it available for sale. I definitely want to order a few yards for myself to make some things, maybe some wallets or clutches.  If you'd like to vote this, or other fabulous squid-themed fabrics, head over to the Spoonflower Squid Fabric Contest page.

Working on pattern design was something new to me and I must say it was a whole lot of fun.  I'm excited to work on more pattern designs in the future. Currently I'm working on my entry for another upcoming fabric design contest, Project Selvage.  The overall winner will get a licensing contract with Michael Miller fabrics.  How neat is that?!  Although I would be stoked just to make it into the semi-finalist round. The deadline is March 24, so I need to get crackin'!

Spoonflower Fat Quarter Puppet Contest

I've heard about Spoonflower before. Its a really neat site where you can upload your own fabric designs and get them printed. You can also make your designs available for sale if you choose. When I first heard about it, it was still by invite only.  Now anyone can get their designs printed.

I also just recently learned that they hold contests.  I love contests! So I came up with something simple and cute for their Fat Quarter Puppet Contest. And here he is:

He's just a cute silly little bunny. We all know (or you should anyways) that bunnies are high up on the list of things I love.

The voting just started today.  So everyone go vote! You can vote for several designs, which is good because its hard to choose. Even for me, and I have my own design in the running! After seeing so many cute designs, I'm just hoping to get into the top 10. If I get into the top 5 I'd probably fall out of my chair. My personal favorite is Grrr...arrrgh! by milktooth.


Here are the 4 I voted for:

I'm currently working out the rough spots of my planned plush assembly line for my upcoming Etsy launch.  Launch date still TBD, but I'm thinking you'll see something sometime in June. Also, more doodles and art stuff next time.  :D