Ocean life!

My newest design for Spoonflower's sea creature ditsy contest. I have a bunch of coordinates in the works, too!

BER-wyn!

I've been doing these designs lately that have a lot of personal meaning but very little broad appeal. Like my Memories of Home houses. Or this design.

I really enjoy illustrating them, but they've been terrible sellers. The 1950s ranch house didn't even make the Top 50 in Spoonflower's fabric of the week contest.

This latest design actually came in at #22 out of 180 entries. Not too shabby, considering how I thought a person would have to know something about Berwyn, Illinois to at all appreciate the fabric.

Now to order a stack of swatches so I can put more fabric up for sale, including this one. I'd love the City of Berwyn to order a bunch and use it to upholster chairs for their offices or something.

Playing together nicely

Even if my daughters can't do it, at least my fabric designs can!

Here's my latest Spoonflower fabric of the week contest entry, June Birthday, one of my favorite floral designs with a matching dot, geometric, and stripe.

MIA

October was the Month of Illness around here. At least one child and/or parent was sick all month long, and the youngest kid had back-to-back cold, roseola, cold, and another cold.

So I got pretty much nothing done for weeks. No new fabric designs, chicken nugget-like product for dinner every night, no housekeeping on the 2nd level since early fall. It's getting out of control.

Tonight I cooked a real dinner... we had raw veggies & hummus... this weekend I swear I will vacuum the heck out of the bedrooms... and I did something new for Spoonflower's advent calendar themed fabric of the week contest. What do you think?

Memories of Home

Some new stuff I'm working on: a series of house ornaments. They're especially meaningful to me because I started with the house I grew up in. I haven't been inside it in almost 20 years... sure wish I could walk through and see what changed, what stayed the same all this time.

I'm planning on illustrating one of every style that appeals to me (notice I'm not promising any particular number of houses, ha!), but each one will be the house someone I know has lived in. Kind of like a house portrait, but made generic enough to appeal to anyone.

So far I have the '50s ranch, early 1900's gablefront, 1930's bungalow and 1970's split level. Next up, 1920's Cape Cod, 1990's colonial, and who knows what else I'll come up with. Maybe I'll even throw in a chicken coop or outhouse or two.

Arachnids and Parsnips?

Another wacky fabric design for Spoonflower's root vegetables contest. It's called Root Cellar and combines vegetables, assorted containers and spooky labels.

At first I was illustrating it much more realistically, with perspective, shading and 3D effects (see below). I was just about finished when I decided I hated it, scrapped it and started over.

The final one's much brighter and more fun, but the style of the first one made more sense because of the Halloween-y subject matter.

What do you think: Should I have gone with my initial idea and submitted the first (bottom) version?

Bubble, bubble, toil and trouble

I wanted to share a great tutorial using my Halloween potions labels (available in the Silhouette online store).

Joy shows you how to start with shiny new wine bottles, age them using Mod Podge and other fun stuff, glue the labels on, and create fantastic Halloween party decorations. Or set them up on a shelf in your kitchen any time of the year and make visitors really nervous. :)