Spoons & Flowers

Congratulations to Heather Dutton of hang tight studio! Her Fleur de Cuillère won out over an inspiring field of entrants in our Spoons-and-Flowers-themed fabric design contest.

One of the cool things about the Spoonflower community, as most of you know, is how many amazingly talented amateurs use our site to create fabric and try out ideas. Anyone who can put together a digital design can create fabric using Spoonflower, and many of the efforts we see — even from people trying this for the first time — are really fun and creative. [Anyone remember Kim's flower and bees fabric? It was her first effort at creating digital art.] But in my mind what makes our community even more cool is that we also have professional textile designers mixing it up elbow-to-elbow with the amateurs. I mention this because in glancing at Heather Dutton's web site, it appears that she is a professional who also does this sort of thing for companies like Pottery Barn and Starbucks as well as for fun. It makes me happy to see designers of many experience levels inspiring and sharing with one another.

At any rate, you can buy Heather's Fleur de Cuillère fabric for the next six days only from our Etsy shop. And thanks to all seventy of the designers who participated in this theme! You all rock.

It's Thursday morning and as I sit here typing and taking slow sips of much-needed coffee, exhaustion mingles with astonishment. As you may remember, over the past month or so we ran two holiday-themed Fabric Of the Week contests and got quite a few entries — enough to challenge the primitive logistics of running our little contest. So — just to give ourselves a bit of a break – we decided that the next design theme should be obscure. If it's a really narrow theme, went our thinking, we'll get only a few entries and that will make next week into an easy one. So as a theme we chose fabric designs that included "spoons and flowers." Narrow, right? Well we got seventy entries (in four days). Creativity thrives on adversity, does it not? You folks are amazing. And I am really tired.

Because we had seventy entries this week and didn't want to turn 'Spoons and Flowers' into a four-week contest, we've done things a bit differently this time around. Regular voters know that we usually print samples of all the competing fabrics and photograph them for the voting. This time we did not. When you click on the voting link this week instead of photos you'll see digital versions of the designs rendered as they would look in repeat on a fat quarter of fabric (21" x 18"). There are seven pages of designs with 10 designs per page (and lots of good ones on the back pages, so keep going until the end). You can cast up to three votes per page, but you don't have to cast any votes on a page unless you see a design or designs you really love. We gave you three votes per page in case all your favorite designs end up on one page of the poll.

At the close of voting next week (Tuesday), we will take the top fifteen vote-getting designs, print them on fabric, photograph them and post them for voting in a final round in which you will have only one vote (on Thursday). That's how we'll come up with the winner.

In the meantime, thanks and congratulations to the amazing folks who put their creativity to work on the task of creating fabric designs that use both spoons and flowers. Take a look through the entries — there is some really lovely work.

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