Browse popular categories
Most recently posted
By Danika Herrick on March 8, 2024
By Courtney Napier on February 12, 2024
By Arlette Hawkins on January 12, 2024
And learn how you can design your own!
Have you heard about our wall hangings? For years, artists and customers alike have been repurposing the unique designs formatted for tea towels as wall hangings. Now you can easily display the unique designs in our Marketplace in any space!
Our wall hangings combine a magnetic framing kit with a hand-sewn fabric tapestry. Our favorite part: the framing kits were developed specifically to fit our finished tea towels, and the magnetic closure allows for easy tapestry installation. This makes our wall hangings the ideal way to update your displayed art with the seasons, or whenever you need a decor refresh.
We caught up with seven Spoonflower artists to talk about their wall hanging designs that will surely spruce up any space. This talented group has tapped into some recent trends that have become popular for wall art with lots of decorative typography, motivating messages, natural beauty, geometric shapes and bold colors.
And if you’re interested in designing your own wall hangings, keep reading for valuable tips from this talented bunch as well as some helpful design guidelines for this new product.
Featured Wall Hanging Design: Hibiscus Black Gold
Location: Australia
For this particular design, I drew the motifs on my iPad Pro and then transferred it to Adobe® Illustrator® to create a repeat pattern. I’m very much a vector girl, and depending on the app I use, I’d vectorise it so that I can play with different colorways.
Being Malaysian, I really wanted to use the hibiscus in my collection. It’s our national flower and growing up, it was always present in my life. When I moved to Melbourne in my mid-20s, I’d feel homesick whenever I saw the flower. I definitely appreciated it more now than I used to.
Creating vector art in programs like Adobe Illustrator will give you the flexibility to resize your art without losing quality! A raster image like a photograph or a scan is made up of pixels and becomes blurry when sized larger than its resolution allows.
Featured Wall Hanging Design: Let’s Have Some Tea
Location: Germany
I had the idea of creating a collection about a garden tea party for some time. I immediately thought of the person hosting the party and realized that this would look lovely as a tea towel or wall hanging for tea party fans!
Keeping with the idea of the garden tea party, I thought about the fine porcelain cups with golden details, the pastries as cupcakes and macarons being served, the perfume of the roses in the garden. At that time, I binge-watched Bridgerton on Netflix and decided that it was the time to design this teacups pattern.
When designing for home decor products like wall hangings, think about who you would make happy by having it at their homes.
Featured Wall Hanging Design: Slow Down
Location: Germany
I usually start with a drawing in my old upcycling sketchbook and then edit my sketches on the computer.
I love my old sketchbook that is about to fall apart! I am intimidated by blank white sheets of paper so I prefer to draw in things like old magazines or books.
My design “Slow Down” is part of a collection of 12 folk art motifs that I originally designed for a postcard publisher. When I needed new tea towels for my home, I quickly repurposed the design. I also love how it looks as a wall hanging!
I am lucky to live in a very green area in Hamburg (Germany). Here I enjoy my small, colorful garden and the incredible diversity that nature brings forth. My ambition is to make the home of my customers even more beautiful with my work and I get a lot of inspiration from nature. I try to see it through my perspective and reproduce it in a modern style.
It’s important to pursue your own personal creative style. Find your way to express yourself! Make designs that first and foremost please you and believe in your work. Everything else will fall into place.
Featured Wall Hanging Design: Life Is Better With Friends
Location: United States
For this design, I was inspired by two things: My great nephew’s enthusiasm for bugs and the idea that kindness is always a good idea. After sketching a tiny thumbnail, I started painting LOTS of paper with acrylic paints. As they were drying, I came back to my thumbnail and continued to sketch and build the bugs and plants with basic shapes.
Once I had my design, I painted a background and started cutting paper and making bugs and leaves. The fun part! Then I played with all the cutouts for a while until I was happy with it. (Also a fun part, just don’t sneeze because your composition will go flying!) Then I used a kid-friendly glue stick to adhere everything in place.
Years ago, my English teacher told us we should write about what we know and what’s important to us. I’ve found this to be super helpful when making art. When designing a tea towel or wall hanging, because they’re often viewed from a distance, I try to keep the designs simple. And I always have a personal connection with the subject, even if it’s silly or when I’m the only one who knows what it is!
Featured Wall Hanging Design: Mod Science Navy Wall Hanging
Location: Australia
I spent a long time playing with geometric shapes on Illustrator to see what worked and what didn’t for this design. I love images that create a sense of nostalgia and I’m particularly drawn to mid-century graphics and children’s book art. Even the periodic table can be a source of inspiration to me. It’s so colorful!
I’m certainly a child, and perhaps a nerd, at heart. I’m often looking for ways to incorporate my science background into my designs. Watching my son develop his interest in the natural world has bought me enormous joy, so it’s a privilege to be able to make art that sparks his imagination too.
Creating placement prints for wall hangings and tea towels can be a nice change from creating patterns as there is no need to think about how motifs will repeat. Placing a border around my art board first allows me to design without worrying about straying into the hemming area.
Featured Wall Hanging Design: The Coffee Queen of Hearts
Location: Spain
Before I start sketching my first ideas, I always set up a template with the design’s dimensions. I usually start with some pencil sketches on paper, but since the Procreate iPad app has a very handy symmetry tool, I decided to draw directly on my iPad for this specific design. I wanted to go with something warm and playful for the color palette, and, at the same time, leave a little room at the end of the process to fine-tune the colors.
The main inspiration behind this design is actually a lovely memory, as I originally created this caffeinated queen as an entry for the Kitchen Wisdom Tea Towel Design Challenge. When I was brainstorming for design ideas for that challenge, I remembered drinking my first cup of coffee in my grandma’s kitchen while she was teaching me to play cards.
I found that Spoonflower provides really useful design guides in their Help Center for all of their products, so I always make sure to read them first or use the actual template files provided to get the dimensions and specific formats right even before starting sketching.
Featured Wall Hanging Designs: Monogram Collection
Location: United Kingdom
For wall hanging designs and tea towels, I always start with a sketch including lettering and illustration and then I work on Procreate to create the final design. For my monogram collection, I was doing a 100 Day Project and wanted to experiment with composition, lettering and floral elements.
I created each letter as a central motif and then played with the symmetry options in Procreate to fill the space with flowers and leaves. It was fun to create lots of floral elements and to try to make something different for each letter while also making a collection with all of them at the same time.
I find nature very inspiring so for my monogram series I tried to make something for people who love plants. But other than that, I think that I get my inspiration from retro illustration, cartoons, films, movies and cute characters. I also like to create wall hanging and tea towel designs as a part of some of my pattern collections.
My main tip is to get experimental and try different things. Wall hangings and tea towels offer lots of creative possibilities. You can create illustrations, recipes, calendars, lettering, art for kids… Just choose a theme that inspires you and have fun designing! If you don’t know how to start, I have a Skillshare class called “Spoonflower Projects: Creating Tea Towels With an iPad” that is about designing different types of tea towels in Procreate and uploading them to Spoonflower.
Wall hanging collections could include different motifs that can coordinate with each other to encourage mixing and matching. We love how Spoonflower Ambassador Stephanie Watkins plans to change out her wall decor depending on the season. Each tapestry is unique but they all share a color palette and mood that create a very harmonious gallery wall!
Take things one step further by creating your own unique tag and adding it to each of the designs in your new collection. You can then use that tag as a search term and land shoppers directly on your gallery of wall hangings. Here’s how:
Step 1: Create a unique-to-you tag and apply it to each design in your collection. It is imperative to be sure your tag is not a common search term, otherwise, other artists’ designs will show up in your results. Keep the tag 20 characters or less.
Step 2: Enter your new tag into the search bar and navigate to wall hangings. You now have a custom URL that you can share on your website or on social media.
For Stephanie’s collection above, we’ve added a unique tag: watkinsseasonaldecor
If you’ve ever designed a tea towel for the Spoonflower Marketplace, these instructions will look very familiar to you! Visit our help center for our complete design guide with downloadable templates and helpful tips.
Design Guidelines for Wall Hangings4 comments
I often use Spoonflower to make up my own unique designs. I love that I can browse through all of the designs that other people have made and choose which one I like best. The designs are easy to customize and the end result is a wall hanging that is truly unique. I also love that I can sell my own designs on the website.