New folk fabric design

Sometimes I make a new fabric design from the embers of some old designs and that's what I did last week when I created an American style folk fabric.

A few years ago I designed some Amish people cut & sew kits which I think I only sold one of, the idea was to make a family group and string them like bunting.

I took some of the design elements from the kits and worked out a pattern repeat and then picked a selection of muted colours for the range and these are my results.

I've already had some cotton samples back from print which I'm quite pleased with and I think this one will be nice for kitchen textiles, aprons, patchwork etc.

Another design just finished is a mish mash of lots of other elements, butterflies, embroidered flowers, vintage postage stamps. birds. I'm thinking Hawaiian shirts with this, maybe because the sun is shining on me today!

Some recent creations and vintage books

It seems I finally got the cooler weather I wanted which has made it a bit easier for working again. I have to say though that it is noticeable the nights drawing in, I'm sure it's dark half an hour earlier than mid July, lets leave the grim thoughts right there!

I ordered myself some of the mini cards from Moo which lead to some little handmade business card holders to house them. All are in the style of string tie envelopes.

We have a bright pink floral felt one

Green Harris Tweed

This one is some handloomed fabric from Skye Batiks

On the subject of fabric I have my ditsy floral butterfly fabric samples back from print and they are now listed in the Spoonflower marketplace. I need to order myself some for making things.

Did a couple of designs in Regency style, chintzy stripes.

Also popped a new colour of camping fabric into the mix as it seems to be selling quite well following the caravan cushion tutorial in Mollie Makes.

Something else I have recently completed was this embellished linen shirt.
This was inspired by a wonderful blouse my friend the textile artist Corinne Young had made. The last time I saw Corinne she was wearing an amazing creation made from upcycled vintage table cloths, it really did look lovely. I'm not very good at dressmaking so wouldn't even attempt a blouse, my quickie version was to take an old shirt and embellish the bits of tablecloth on to. This linen shirt worked well as most of my tablecloths were linen.

I quite like it but I have had the comment it looks a bit country and western, hey ho, brings out my inner Dolly Parton!!

This brings me round to some lovely old vintage childrens books of mine which I picked up last time I was at my parents. A bit fusty and musty now and with a few scribbles on the pages but there are some fond memories when I look at the illustrations.

One last vintage item, my mum dug this out for me, it was my very first craft apron as a child. Some friends brought it back from Wales for me. I might give it a new life and turn it into something.

Time to go and as this picture says.......

New on Spoonflower & free shipping day

At 5pm GMT today Spoonflower are offering free shipping for 24hrs on all their fabric. That even includes international shipping which is great news for us here and it's a great way to try out a swatch which I believe is 8 inch sq for $5 as you can make some lovely little things with that size.
I intend to order some festive fabric and some of my camping fabric as I've just uploaded a new version in pink with a smaller pattern repeat.

http://blog.spoonflower.com/2012/11/free-shipping-day-is-coming-november-15th.html

Other Spoonflower news: I'm entering the design contest which goes live this evening. This is quite an exciting contest because it is in conjunction with Mollie Makes magazine and I think the winning fabric will be featured in a future issue.
The subject was Flight of Fancy and this was one of those competitions where you had a limited colour palette which was pre-decided. It was an odd and difficult selection of colours to work with, lemony yellow, apple green, grey & light teal which you could add black or white to.

After starting out doing a bird related design which I couldn't get to work or rather I felt it wasn't very interesting, I then changed to good old butterflies. 
I coloured some vintage butterflies in the specified palette and these I scattered over some music note paper. I also had some other designs I'd worked on in the past but not done anything with them called Flower Faces and I scattered a few of those around too. This is the result, the yellow version is in the contest, I quite liked the teal version but thought it might be a bit dark to show the details.

 Here are the Flower Faces which are in the design, I think they might surface again at some point for another design.

This was the bird design I abandoned.

And lastly, this is the new pink camping fabric which will be for sale soon once I have ordered a swatch. I was also thinking of doing a fat quarter with 4 different colour portions to give a bit of flexibility for small projects but I'm not sure I've settled on these four colours yet or whether one needs to be a bright green!

Spoonflower also do wallpaper now and wall decals.

Paper stitched butterflies

Spring is in the air today as we rapidly approach the Spring Equinox. The sun is out after a long hibernation and winged, flying things were in the garden when I hung some washing out earlier.


I'm working on a new project involving bits of maps with some fabric embellishments to make them into a selection of butterflies. If it all comes together in the next 48 hrs I shall reveal the result here.