Once Again

I went ahead and entered another Spoonflower contest. The theme this time was Rococo, and I'd already been messing around with 18th century styled designs, so I didn't make a new design specifically for the contest. Some time back I had visited my library and browsed through several fabric textile books. These included (among others) Printed Textiles: English and American Cottons and Linens 1700-1850 by Florence M. Montgomery and Americas Printed and Painted Fabrics by Florence H. Petti. I think the former of these two, Printed Textiles[GoogleBooks, Abebooks, B&N, Amazon], contained a nice selection of chintz and block-printed fabrics.

Anyway, I'd been working on some micro print designs for my Sylvanian Families at the time I visited the library, and so I used some of the stylistic features from a couple 1760-1780 block prints. Simplified, of course, for a smaller scale, and I arbitrarily picked some colors. I ended up with this fabric, the coloring of which makes me think of 'Hawaiian shirts'. When I saw the upcoming contest theme was Rococo, I decided to enter my design (on a marginally larger scale to show up better on the contest viewer). Yes, the styling is a little late for Rococo, and the coloring is very modern, but I have felt past contest entries always seemed overly loose with the theme anyway.

Well, after having looked through the contest entries, at least my entry has some relation to the 18th century. (I thought some of the other entries were interesting or pretty, but almost none of them made me think Rococo or 18th century. Of course, if I didn't have such a fascination of chintz, and I hadn't read through as many books on 18th century textiles as I have, I'd probably think better of at least some of the designs.) Look through the entries yourself and vote.