Spoonflower Swatches — Color Wheels

There are many projects I keep meaning to post about, and then before I get around to actually doing so, I completely forget. Now that I am jobless (temporarily, hopefully), I may try to catch up on some of the forgotten and neglected posts. So, to start with, Spoonflower.

Sometime last November Spoonflower held a 'Buy-1-Get-1-Free' deal on Fat Quarters. So, I got motivated to put together a full set of Sylvanian Family clothes to be printed out. That by itself is unrelevant to this blog, but I also had a swatch of some of the exact same designs printed out at FOD. Spoonflower has a cotton voile and FOD has a polyester voile, so while a direct comparison isn't quite possible, some examination is still useful (and is something I've been meaning to do for awhile). That post will probably come next, however.

Anyway, I figured I may as well print out full fat quarters of a few of my fabric designs while I was at it. I mostly work in Inkscape, and I prefer to work in HSL or CMYK colorspaces, so I made up a set of a few color wheels and had those printed out.

Fat Quarter on Arrival

After Washing and Pressing

Of particular note is the difficulty in getting all the in-between blues and pinks. There's also a fair amount of shift in the lightness of the colors (as compared to what's on my screen). Spoonflower now has a $1 8in sample of colors they've selected to be close to screen colors (they may have had it for awhile, but I only found it after my I'd already received my color wheels), and I ordered that this spring. From that, it looks like a decent range of blues is possible.

Spoonflower Sampler Colors

So while color wheels are traditionally useful, these mostly they just tell me that gradiants will fail horribly. On the other hand, its good to know that my normal adjustments in HSL or CMYK won't work as I expect, and I'll have to mostly stick to the colors I actually have printed out if I want the printed cloth to match my intentions.

Anne of Denmark — Neckline and Collar

I came across an old post by a friend asking what this sort of neckline would be called:

The collar style is unusual enough that I decided to look up general neckline descriptions. The closest appears to be a neckline called either the Elizabethan or the Queen Anne, but the descriptions all concur that the bustline for a Queen Anne is a sweetheart shape, and the bustline of this is more of a scoop neck shape.

Curious about the naming of the neckline, I did a Google image search on the term 'Queen Anne'. This primarily turned up images of Queen Anne of Great Britain (1665-1714) with scooped neckline but no collar. The search also turned up images of Anne Boleyn (1501-1536) with a square neckline, Anne of Austria (1601-1666) with the scooped neckline but the wrong collar, and Anne of Denmark (1574-1619).

Anne Of Great Britain (1665-1714)

Anne Boleyn (1501-1536)

Anne of Austria (1601-1666)

Looking at the Wikipedia article on Anne of Denmark resulted in the following set of images:

I don't know if images of Anne of Denmark were any sort of basis for the Queen Anne neckline, but I do think the first image I showed of the white top is a nice modern interpretation of this 16th century neckline and collar.