Becka’s Project Journal

Vote for my finger puppets in the Spoonflower fabric contest!

Spoonflower, my favorite digital fabric printing company, is having a competition.  The rules were pretty simple – design a fabric with fish, and using just 4 specific colors.  “Paisley Fish” above is my entry.  Voting started this morning and you have until Tuesday to choose your favorites.

Go vote!

Of course I want you to vote for my design, but even if you don’t, it is a lot of fun to look at all the entries and how many different things that people came up with.

You can now purchase my designs on fabric from Spoonflower!

Go to Becka’s Spoonflower Profile and you can see the 6 designs I have available.  Order a swatch or even several yards to use for your projects.

• I have 2 designs inspired by 1930′s quilt fabrics.  Myrtle is my favorite.  The colors are warm and cheery.
• Two are based on my Animal Outlines embroidery designs (which you can find in my etsy shop.)  You could coordinate a hand embroidered t-shirt with a pair of pants all with a wild west theme!  How cool would that be?
• The oboe print is for Andy.
• The fishes are because, well just because I always have to have fishes.
• More on the way soon.

Here are swatches of my latest spoonflower designs.  The first two are called Frances (pink) and Myrtle (yellow).  These were both based off of a couple of patches on a 1930′s quilt.  My fabric is just a little larger scale than the original.  The pink/red one is pretty much the colors of the original fabric (as I envision they were 70+ years ago).  The yellow/orange combo is my invention.

“Fish N Hook” is printed on Spoonflower’s knit fabric.  It is a really nice knit – super heavy and very soft.  It was inspired by a sign that I saw in the background of someone’s vacation photo on Flickr.  I can’t tell you any more than that.  The photo wasn’t very memorable, I think it was Italy, but the fish on the sign at the restaurant stuck in my head.  I am thinking if I can find a pattern for a really cute boat neck t-shirt, I might splurge on a yard and make myself a shirt.

Then we have “Oboe Blues” designed for Andy.  There’s a silhouette of an oboe there – some of the people I showed this one to didn’t see that right away.  This one is printed on the home decor canvas weight fabric.  The base fabric is not my favorite, it seems to have a sort of loose weave.  My swatch has frayed a lot with handling.

I decided to mix this one up with a few more colors.  Added a darker red and orange to the mix and made the green pop a bit.

At work right now we have up a display of quilts from the 1930′s.  Grandmother’s Flower Garden patterns, Dresden Plate and of course very fun fabric prints.  I took some photographs of some of my favorite blocks and have decided to make some fabric designs based on the 1930′s prints in the little 2 inch scraps I can see.  Here is the one I started last night.  I have ordered Spoonflower swatches so we will see what it looks like when it arrives.   I am not trying to make it look exactly like the print, but just using the print as a jumping off point.  I made one swatch in a similar colorway to the original and then did a warm earth tone one as well.