terror | Spoonflower Blog

This is the fifteenth — and final! — post in our series of staff project narratives created for the Spoonflower Staff Quilt Challenge. Voting for this contest opens tomorrow, Thursday, 3/14.

Howdy! Are you looking for a tale of suspense, eerie coincidences and spoooooky sounds? If so, you might be in the wrong place, but if you’re looking for the story of Team Terror’s staff challenge quilt, you’re in the right place.

Our team boasted 3 members from across Spoonflower’s departments. I (Emma) work at the help desk, Jorren works in Operations and Anna is an accountant extraordinaire. I’d heard through the grapevine–the Spoonvine?–that Jorren was known for his pretty excellent doodles and drawings (if you’ve received an order recently, you may have been lucky enough to receive one of his masterpieces on your packslip). The Craft Closet of Terror was hatched when Jorren emailed us this classic horror comic cover from the 1950’s.

Since this is Spoonflower, we decided to create a campy horror-comic cover but with a crafty twist. We started with a few quick sketches and keywords we thought we might want to use:
It was decided that the scariest thing, for a crafter, was the looming pile of unfinished projects hiding somewhere just out of sight. Whether it’s the works-in-progress or the unfinished objects, what could be more terrifying?! We discussed the finer points of naming–would it be Crafts from the Fabric Stash, à la Tales from the Crypt? Which rolls off the tongue better, “Closet of Horror” or “Closet of Terror”?

Jorren pointed out that many of these mid-century horror comic series had a “host”–a little character featured on the front of the who introduced the creeeeepy tale inside. It seemed only appropriate that the “host” of our journey through the terrors of the craft closet be our own fearless leaders, Stephen and Gart, co-founders of Spoonflower.

Since neither Anna nor I can draw worth a hoot, Jorren took over the design process of the front of the front panel of the quilt. He started with a quick sketch (notice the empty circle where our hosts would be–we wanted to be sure that our bosses wouldn’t mind being depicted as a grotesque headless 2-headed monster. If they do, we haven’t heard about it yet!).

Then Jorren started the process of drawing his design on the computer. Using a drawing tablet and a lethal combination of InDesign (for the typography) and Photoshop, Jorren started with the lettering at the top of the quilt.