- MERRY MAKEWELL DESIGNS

Published on: April 30, 2020

Colour Palette

The Spoonflower design challenge this week is a collaboration with East Fork Pottery.

"East Fork makes and sells a full range of beautiful, durable, ceramic dinnerware... from regional materials. The collection is unfussy and timeless—made to use every day and offered in a dynamic palette of year-round neutrals and fresh, seasonal colours."

The stipulation for the challenge was to create a colour palette featuring at least one of the following two collection colours as the main colour:

I was inspired by a flat lay image of a set of East Fork dishes and created my colour palette from that.

This is the final pattern design that I submitted:

"Scattered Dishes" is available to buy on Spoonflower.

Published on: April 12, 2020

Tea Towel Calendars

Tea towel calendars are now available to buy in my Spoonflower shop. Choose from 4 designs - including a couple of variations on the theme of Birth Month Flowers featuring some gorgeous watercolour illustrations of the various flowers.

For the Birth Month calendar designs I created a more traditional, ordered layout, and a more organic, contemporary layout.

The designs were made to fit a fat quarter of Linen Cotton Canvas, but also fit onto a fat quarter of Lightweight Cotton Twill in case you prefer a lighter-weight material for your tea towels. And if you don't want to sew them up yourself, you can also buy the ready-made tea towels.

Published on: March 30, 2020

Spoonflower Challenge - Papercut Napkins

The challenge over at Spoonflower this week is to create a design featuring a composition of paper cut-outs to be displayed on table napkins.

Instead of creating a brand new design I decided to tweak the teacup design that I created for the Chintz challenge back in November last year where I digitally cut chintzy patterned swatches with a teacup punch. To adapt it for the current brief I removed the foliage from the background and reverted to a solid pattern on the teacups instead of the white heart cut-outs seen in the original design. I also decided to go with a light blue background because I liked how it looked on the napkins.

Head over to Spoonflower to vote! Voting closes on 7th April at 3pm EST.

Published on: March 16, 2020

Spoonflower Challenge - Faux Textured Wallpaper

The latest Spoonflower Design Challenge is Faux Textured Wallpaper. The brief was to "create a repeating design that you can’t help but touch". I had lots of ideas for this, but not necessarily the time or the skill to make them happen. In hindsight I should have saved my Mirror Ball design that I used for the Roller Rink Nostalgia challenge for this challenge. But I didn't, so I had to come up with something else.

I really like my collection of designs inspired by Spanish Tiles. Originally in teal and white, I have tried one or two coloured variations of the Entwined design. A while ago, while learning how to use mask layers in my graphics program, I played around with using textures with that design, so I decided to revisit those experiments for this challenge.

I was originally going to go with a blue and gold colour scheme, featuring blue glitter and gold foil.

But I wasn't completely feeling it, so in the end I opted for this pink and gold version.

The textures that I used here are glitter and gold foil. Did I make the right choice for my challenge entry? Voting is open until 3pm EST / 8pm GMT on 17th March, so if you like what you see, please vote for me.

Published on: February 24, 2020

2019 Review

So this is a little bit late! But it's important to look back at what you've accomplished from time to time to see your progress, but also to help you to decide where to go next.

At the start of 2019 I did not have a regular art or design habit. I decided to enter the Spoonflower design challenge every week as a means to help me get into the habit, but also as a way to improve my design skills. After all practice makes perfect. I managed to enter all but 9 of the 47 challenges, so I'm happy that I achieved my goal.

I had one excellent result, where I placed 45th out of 760 entries with my "Dancing Blossom" design. This also spurred me on to create my first and (so far) only collection.

Some results were pretty good, some were pretty bad - generally I was fairly middle of the table. (I created a spreadsheet to track my progress!). The one thing that I consistently struggled with was time! I almost always found myself starting the actual design process a few hours before the submission deadline and subsequently rushing to complete it. That also left me no time for revisions, which very often showed.

These were my top 10 designs (according to my placement in the Spoonflower design challenges):

Dancing Blossom - Yellow (Limited Palette Challenge)
A Kaleidoscope of Butterflies (Kaleidoscope Challenge)
Let Me Play Among The Stars - (Playmats Challenge)
Lacy Neutral (Neutral Retreat Challenge)
Be Kind (Affirmations Challenge)
Diamania (Pysanky Challenge)
Spanish Trig (Cheater Quilt Challenge)
All The 20s (2020 Tea Towel Calendar Challenge)
Victorian Picture Postcards (Retro Postcards Challenge)
Merboys (Boy Wonder Challenge)

Many of the above designs are also available in my Redbubble and Society 6 shops.

So what's in store for 2020? Well, many of the designs that I created in 2019 used graphics that I had purchased (Diamania, Spanish Trig and Merboys being the exception in the above list). So this year I want to improve my drawing skills and create more designs featuring my own original artwork. I think that that will really help me to discover and hence develop my own unique style.

Published on: January 3, 2020

Mirror Ball

This design was created for the Spoonflower design challenge - Roller Rink Nostalgia. When I thought of the brief I immediately thought roller ball, so that's what I attempted to re-create and I think that I did a pretty decent job!