Spoonflower and Robert Kaufman Fabrics are sponsoring a fabric design contest with the theme being “Geek Chic”. As a chemical engineer in a previous life, I have a lot of practical experience with geeky things, so I had tons of design ideas to start with.
I thought I’d do something with chemical symbols, but I couldn’t come up with anything that seemed like an interesting design. I drew a number of geeky accoutrements, including the ties, test tube, sneaker and glasses below.
Spoonflower’s weekly design contest theme is “Sailing” and I immediately knew I wanted to use the Notan design I wrote about in this post.
That design used 4 different sail boat-inspired patterns (on the left below), combined Nolan-style into the 16 blocks on the right.
Another week, another Spoonflower fabric design contest. The theme for this contest is Painted Eggs.
I thought I’d create a bunch of 3-dimensional eggs and ‘paint’ them with some of my other fabric designs.
First, here’s how I created a 3d egg in Adobe Illustrator (version CS5).
Last week I wrote about creating what is probably my last quilt for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative. I included a picture of my favorite AAQI quilt Fading Memories. Several people asked how I made this quilt, so I thought I’d write about it, since I made it before I started blogging.
Fading Memories
I started making small art quilts for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative in 2007 when I was a new quilter. Both of my parents suffered from Alzheimer’s, and I wrote a bit about why I make these quilts in this post.
This quilt, Fading Memories, is my favorite. Both my parents served in the Navy in World War II, so I started with photos of them in their uniforms. I overlaid these with photos from throughout their lives, including their children and grandchildren. Fortunately my brother won the auction for this quilt, so I still get to see it.
Fading Memories
I’m trying to finish up all the small quilts I was working on for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative since 2013 will be their last year of fundraising. This one is in memory of my father who grew thousands of daffodils.
I started with this photo of some daffodils in a mason jar. Continue reading
Here’s another small quilt I’ve made for the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative.
I started with this photo I took at the Milwaukee Art Museum’s annual Art in Bloom exhibit.
Last year Spoonflower.com had a contest to design a fabric based on a recipe. I chose to do a design based on one of my grandmother’s recipes, and I wrote about it in this earlier post. My grandmother, who we called “Gockoo”, did lots of cooking and baking, and kept a handwritten journal of all her favorite recipes.
The fabric was designed to be a repeating design, but I thought it would also be fun to make a version that I could turn into a small quilt. Continue reading
Another week, another Spoonflower fabric design contest. The theme for this contest is Australian Animals. So many great options it was hard to pick — kangaroos, wombats, koala bears, emu, platypus, Tasmanian devils… I googled Australian art and was inspired by the Aboriginal dot paintings. I thought I’d try a modern take on the dot paintings using kangaroos and geckos.
I’ll go through the technique I used in Adobe Illustrator to create the multicolored animals. 
I started by drawing outlines of a gecko and a kangaroo. I wanted to keep the outlines pretty simple since there would be a lot of detail inside each animal.
Daffodils mean the arrival of Spring, but they also always remind me of my father. Every year he would divide and replant the daffodils forming the border of our yard and the adjacent woods. Over time there were literally thousands of daffodils which would welcome us each Spring
We’ve had crazy weather in northern Illinois this winter–warm and no snow–and I’m almost surprised the daffodils aren’t already blooming. I took this photo this weekend (mid-January). These flowers (I don’t remember what they’re called) are usually one of the early bloomers in Spring. I’ve noticed that they’ve been trying to bloom since mid-December (which can’t be a good thing). After a particularly warm, wet few days, the weather turned back to normal for January and the poor flowers are coated in ice.
