By now I’ve got quite a collection of fabric swatches of my designs I made for Spoonflower. The swatches are only about 20×20 cm, so there’s not that much you can do with it. In the past I’ve made baby shoes with them and this thread on Flickr has lots of cool ideas what to do with them.

A while back I saw this great tutorial over at How about orange on how to make little origami boxes with fabric. I thought they looked great, but she uses a special product to stiffen the fabric, and I didn’t really know where to get a similar product here in Hasselt.
But this week after talking to a colleague who also wanted to make something with hardened fabric and who was looking for an inexpensive product to do this, I discovered that you can easily harden fabric with a simple mixture of flour and water. Simply boil 2 cups of water and add about 3-4 table spoons of flower, stir it well, make sure there are no lumps and let the mixture boil for a few minutes. Then let it cool before using it. I brushed it on both sides of the fabric and let it dry. The fabric becomes almost like paper. And if for some reason you’re not happy with the result you could simply wash the fabric and it’s as good as new again…

Another great thing to make with small fabric samples are these wonderful pyramid pouches. I was looking at the blogs of some of my Belgian customers this week, and I discovered this great tutorial by eloleo for Het Leuvens Stiksel for this little pyramid pouch (this is about the same tutorial in English).

The fabrics used in the boxes are Carnivale and Blocked, and the fabric in the pyramid pouch is my Diamonds & Hearts design. All are available for sale on Spoonflower.

After months and months of us Spoonflower designers talking about our wish list for how we want our SF profile to look, Spoonflower surprised us this week with a major upgrade of the profile page
The old page was ok, but not always very practical. But the new profile page layout is a huge improvement! I love the way we can sort our designs by collections now. And the banner gives just a little more personality to our page… So a big thanks for the Spoonflower team who made this possible!

Last weekend we went away on a little weekend break to England. My mom booked a trip to Broadstairs just across the Channel. She wanted to visit the brand new Turner Contemporary Gallery in Margate, but we stayed in nearby Broadstairs. It’s a charming little town with a beautiful beach and lot’s of wonderful little restaurants and shops.
I really loved it, it’s such a difference from the beach towns in Belgium, where the beach is just one long straight line from the French border to the Dutch border and it’s lined with lot’s of ugly big apartment blocks. And the weather was totally amazing, having breakfast outside in the sunshine with a beautiful view of the sea, it almost felt like being at the Mediterranean.

I made a few really nice panorama pictures of both Broadstairs’ main beach and Botany Bay beach, I only wish I could get some kind of panorama viewer or a lightbox thing work on this blog, so you would be able to view the pictures larger without having to click to a new page every time, but so far It doesn’t seem to work like I would like it to…

It was about time to give this blog a little update. My old theme was already a few years old new and it was still from before I started with my ‘zesti designs. Hope you like the fresh new theme. It’s not completely finished, so it’s possible you’ll see some minor things change in the next few days…

That strange guy in the right top corner is Tlaloc, the Aztec god of rain, as you may remember from my entry for the Spoonflower rain contest. He didn’t do very well in the contest, I think he kind of got lost amongst the huge amount of entries, but I still like him and I think he makes a good mascot to watch over my work, crying some colorful raindrops and nurturing my stuff…

Well, not me. This time the honor goes to Patty Sloniger, with her wonderful Backyard Baby collection. I’m absolutely thrilled for her.

But the Project Selvage Competition was an amazing experience, I’ve had so much fun creating this collection and being in the finals, and I’ve been blown away with all the support and the encouraging messages I received. It has given me the determination to go on with this and hopefully someday I will be able to get a collection of fabrics produced by a wonderful company like Michael Miller Fabrics…

Thanks so much for your votes and support!

Yes, this is it! My Dragon Dreams collection is completely ready now. I’ve just sent in my 5 extra designs to complete my collection for the competition, just in time for the deadline. And fnow everybody can vote to pick the winner of Project Selvage. So exciting, yay

I have to admit I found it hard to make a stripe design for the collection, but I’m extremely happy how my stripes turned out. Simple but with a little hint of whimsicality.

You can vote now on the Spoonflower contest page. The winner will be announced next thursday.