Milo

We lost a member of the family on Friday. My cat that I've had for 16 years got very sick and I had to make that terrible decision.

I walked into the dining room this morning, half expecting to see him asleep on the chair in the sun. I always left the shades up and the chair sideways just for him, because he loved sleeping there so much.

I hope wherever he is now, there's an automatically refilling bowl of cat treats, a faucet that's perpetually turned on to just a trickle so he can get a drink whenever he wants, and a soft chair with a patch of sunlight always waiting for him.

I'm glad he's not suffering anymore, but man oh man, I miss him.

Riley Blake pincushion tutorial

It's up on the Riley Blake Cutting Corners blog! Look for the downloadable PDF with pattern, photos and instructions (link is in bold, red type).

I hope you like it... and hope it makes sense, since much of the sewing, photo-taking and writing was done while fending off a very curious 2 year old, or at about 1 AM!

Big news in my little corner of the world!

I'm so happy to announce my design, Hero-saurus, was chosen by Timeless Treasures as the winner of their Be My Hero contest on Spoonflower!!! Which is awesome in and of itself... but most awesome of all is they're going to license it! It's dorky, but it's pretty much a dream come true.


For sure I thought mine would NOT win... there were some really amazingly good designs, like this one by CJL Designs/Julie Lynch, which was probably my favorite. It's such a great illustration, and the layout, interesting repeat and unique color palette make it even better.

I just KNEW mine wouldn't win.

Last Thursday while the younger two were having breakfast, I saw the email from Spoonflower. I expected it to read, "Congrats, you're in the top 10, but unfortunately we didn't choose you design as the winner..." but it didn't. I just couldn't make sense of it. It took about four reads for it to register.

Then I think I yelled. My two year old jumped. (Luckily he was buckled into his high chair so he didn't fall out.) My four year old didn't understand what was wrong with Mommy.

I decided to be an artist when I was four years old, I think. At first, things looked fairly promising: At age eight, I won 2nd place in a nutrition placemat contest where the prize was breakfast with a bunch of senior citizens (not super fun for a 8 year old). In high school my artwork won a bunch of prizes, some local and a few Scholastic Awards.

I even got a BFA in visual art, in painting and drawing, specifically.

In the years after college, I meandered around the worlds of children's book illustration, fine art, crafts, graphic design, and illustration, never really finding my niche. I entered many art and design contests, but only won one: an American Graphic Design Award. What the heck was I going to be when I grew up??

Then I found Spoonflower. A couple months into my adventure in fabric design, I was shocked to win the Pointillism Fabric of the Week contest. Then came Alphabet, Hawaiian Quilt (a tie with this lovely one by Jessica Greenwalt), Bowling, Sewing, and now, Be My Hero. Craziness.

I feel awed having won six FOTW contests... and quite honestly, I feel very lucky to have found fabric design in the first place. It's a great mashup of a lot of the stuff I love to do: draw, paint, make repeats, create silly little characters, use my odd sense of humor, tell a story, use bright colors, ask my children's opinions on my work, create something really cool that's useful at the same time. I think it might be a perfect fit.

Owlicious

Last Tuesday, as usual, I was waiting for #3 to wake up from his nap, while cooking dinner and working on some things on the computer. I was putting the finishing touches on an owl illustration, when all the sudden I was compelled to stop what I was doing and design a calendar for Spoonflower's Tea Towel calendar contest.


It was so weird. I had absolutely no intention of entering. But it was almost like the owl made me do it.

Good thing I did, I guess, because the calendar made it into the top 10, and my email notifications from Spoonflower sales (mostly of the owl calendar) have been going absolutely nuts! It's also a "hot seller" on Spoonflower's site... yay, me!

After a trying week of still not feeling well (three weeks of probably-bronchitis?), sick kids, angry clients, and exhaustion, it was really lovely to have something nice happen.

Now I'm thinking of designing a collection that includes the owl... but are owls a waning trend, like those "Keep Cool and Whatever" posters?

Blog neglect and hard drives in plastic baggies

I was driving home this morning after dropping off the eldest at school, thinking how the past six years somehow simultaneously feels like it's gone by in about an hour but also like it's taken an eternity.

It was an extraordinarily hot summer, and now that it's suddenly cool enough to kill off my sad little tomato plant with the one solitary tomato clinging to its branches, it feels like summer was only a week long. Yet while we were in the midst of it, it lasted about three hundred years.

Between breaking up kid fights, taking the knives away from the toddler or getting him down off the counter / table / chair / stairs / the geriatric cats, I've been neglecting a lot this year. Client work... getting really super serious about my fabric designs... vacuuming... keeping up with this blog... backing up my files.

A few weeks ago, my computer started making weird noises. One morning it just wouldn't turn on. Turns out the hard drive was dead. So dead even my in-house IT dept (my husband) couldn't get any data off it. Which means two years of stuff was gone, too, since I hadn't done a full backup since just before the youngest was born. Really big, giant oops.

Since then, I've been sitting around thinking of random stuff I want to use / read / look up / send to people, and then I remember it was all on the dead drive. Ugh. So much stuff.

The good news:

• I just did my first Spoonflower design since HDD day and I have about a million more super exciting ideas in my head for new fabrics
• I have an old computer with a new fancy giant hard drive
• I'm almost over this cold
• I get to draw dinosaurs
• It's not 105 degrees outside
• Nor is it snowing
• I've discovered I'm an optimist
• It's the season for Halloween / Dia de los Muertos and all the awesomely cool and creepy decorations that go with it
• I get to design a pincushion and write up a tutorial for Riley Blake <-- (possibly the most exciting recent development of all)

So not all is lost (no pun intended.)

Hamlin Beach on the brain

This weekend's Silhouette-shape-drawing obsession was retro camping. When I was a kid, we had a 1973 Go Tag-a-Long camper and a powder blue station wagon (I'm sure my dad has photos of both, if anyone's interested.)

That camper went as far from home as the Adirondacks, but usually we'd drive it to Hamlin Beach on Lake Ontario for the weekend, which was a lot closer to home.

One day I found a real shell in the water, and it was the greatest treasure ever. We had a picnic lunch and somehow during the aftermath, my shell was lost. I may have cried.

Somewhere in the boxes in our basement today, I bet I have beach glass from that place. I never did find another shell, but in those pre-recycling days, I filled buckets full of those little frosted bits of blue, green, white and brown.

If I just had an extra week or two...

I'd use up some of my fabric stash. I'd unpack my new birthday serger, read the instruction manual, and actually use it. I might even break out the oil paints and spend the day at the Arboretum. I'd definitely make more fun stuff for the kids, like these things:

The first project is a doorway puppet theatre. It's made from a stack of fat quarters of Patty Young for Michael Miller's Playdate fabric, which I bought with no particular purpose in mind. It was just perfect for this.

Letters are freeform-cut and sewn felt; the clock hands really turn; I borrowed some ideas for this from random puppet theatres I saw around the internet; the pattern was my own creation. Fortunately it was one of those fabulous but rare projects that magically just works out. It was fun to make.

Unfortunately, our littlest child loves to pull it down as soon as we put it up, so it's in the closet 'til he gets a bit older.

The other is a set of monster beanbags created from a stack of felt and dried peas, made for our oldest's 5th birthday party. We had a pin the eyes on the monster game, and a monster toss game, for which I made these beanbags -- she specially requested a monster/SpiderMan themed birthday party. What a cool kid.