I've been absent from Spoonflower contests for a while. MATS and other things have taken over my life since February or so, but I couldn't pass up this most recent contest: Cosmic Voyage.
I have a special fondness for space and astronomy. It ranks right up there with my interest in tornadoes and apes that communicate via sign language. Growing up in a rural area with very dark skies, we could regularly see the Milky Way, and in college I was fascinated by SETI and went on a reading binge where I read a bunch of books on the subject. Aside from my own interest, my husband always wanted to be an astronaut when he grew up, so he really, REALLY likes astronomy.
The first Christmas my husband and I were dating, I bought him a big, fancy telescope kind of like this one. It was so awesome: it was motorized, had an automatic star finder device, and could track celestial objects across the sky. It went with us on our trip to NY to see my parents that December, and one night as my husband-to-be and my dad looked at the stars together from out on the driveway, he asked my dad's permission to marry me.
Now, 11 years later, our oldest child is maybe just old enough to appreciate (that is, not break) the telescope. Maybe we'll get it up out of the basement this summer!
Here's what I came up with for the Spoonflower contest -- some astronauts, watercolor planets, and goofy aliens. It's entitled "Space… A Friendly Place!" because thinking that the aliens might not be glad to see us (as in, they might want to annihilate us) is something I'd rather not contemplate. Thanks to my husband's Ancient Aliens just-before-bed obsession, I often go to sleep creeped out by alien abduction and that sort of thing. (Actually I do like to get a glimpse of that guy's hair.) So my aliens are a little bit goofy and very, very nice.
