Owls and Feathers

Ta-da! A big finish:

This is a bed quilt for my daughter's owl-themed room and I'm so excited to finish it as it has a lot of new-to-me aspects.

As I'm concentrating of curve piecing and developing a kind of Art-Deco inspired style with clean shapes and high contrast colours, I wanted to see how this style can translate to bed quilts. Me daughter's room already has curtains with an owl pattern that I designed and had printed at Spoonflower, and she said she would like a quilt in owl fabrics, too. I searched the Internet for fabrics that would suit the colour and style of our owls and discovered the "Where the Wise Things Are" collection by Quilting Treasures. I ordered two fabrics from it and complemented them by two from "Stonehenge Solstice" collection by Northcott, and I really love how they play together.

I wanted the blocks to have a stylised feather shape as I had the backing fabric with feathers and I am still planning to have wallpaper printed with the same feather pattern. After a lot of sketching and fiddling in Illustrator I came up with a block shape that repeats in rows in opposite directions, so that half of the blocks are in one colour way and the other half in a different one.

Something New

This is just a little post to share my latest crush - I've discovered Spoonflower and the world of pattern design. This is what arrived in the post today:

Many are familiar with it, but for those who aren't - Spoonflower is a company (American, but with facilities in Germany to serve Europe) that offers fabric printing on demand. You can upload your own pattern or choose from the thousands that other people uploaded and they will print it for you on your chosen fabric (I think they have 24 different types of fabric plus giftwrap and wallpaper). Here is a glimpse of their fabric samples with reference colours to see how they come out on different fabrics.

What is also fun about them is that they hold weekly design challenges with hundreds of people submitting their designs to a particular theme and the visitors voting for their favourite. As I just wanted to try my hand at surface pattern design, it was nice to have a theme to work to, rather than just drawing flowers. This particular challenge was a girly fabric with a science/STEM related imagery, so I made a simple pattern with star octahedrons (polyhedrons were my favourite part of school maths and I wrote a project on them and made a boxful of models to go with it). This is the pattern, I called it "Maths Star":

And then I decided to make a kind of collection to go with it, and made two secondary designs to support it, in different colours - the tiled octahedrons that are on the left above and the line grid below.

This is the way they print a sample of a collection (you don't have to design one, you can literally collect different patterns from different designers and put together a collection of your own):

I'm really excited to see my drawing come off the computer screen and onto a real physical fabric, I guess I have to design a quilt now to make with this fabric, to see it come full circle.

In the meantime I continue playing with pattern design and trying a different style, you can have a look on my page on Spoonflower in case you're interested.

Linking up to Main Crush Monday at Cooking up Quilts
Linky Tuesday at Freemotion by the River
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