Each week Spoonflower sponsors a fabric design contest using different themes.  (Spoonflower is an on-demand fabric printing company where you can upload your own designs and have them printed on fabric.  You can also look at other people’s designs and buy those on fabric.  It’s quite fun and addicting to design fabrics.)

The most recent contest was to design a Hawaiian Cheater Quilt.  A Hawaiian Quilt traditionally is a radially symmetrical applique pattern, often in a botanical design using strong colors on a white background.  Here’s an example from the International Quilt Study Center in Lincoln, Nebraska.

A “cheater” quilt is a single piece of fabric printed to look like a real quilt.  So, the Spoonflower contest was to design a yard of fabric (42 inches by 36 inches) that looks like a Hawaiian style quilt.  As part of the rules, we could only use 4 colors in the design.

For my design I used the turtles and flowers which are such iconic images of Hawaii.  Since this is a “cheater” quilt, I decided to make the design much more complex than you’d be able to make in a real appliqued quilt.  Also, since the contest dimensions were rectangular rather than square, I added some flowers and leaves to the left and right edges to fill out the space — so the design isn’t truly radially symmetric.  Here’s my design:

I was very happy to learn I’d finished in the top 10 designs after people voted.  Spoonflower printed my fabric and posted some photos on their Flickr site.  Here’s one view of the printed fabric.

And here’s another view.  I love how the colors turned out.