Southwest Baby Fabric for Carousel Designs at Spoonflower!

'Native Southwest Baby'
 © 2015 Patty Rybolt Designs. All Rights Reserved.

Spoonflower teamed up with Carousel Designs for their Southwest Baby Bedding Design Challenge last week! Designers were to create a southwest-inspired fabric design to be used in a baby bedding collection.
I chose to design a sophisticated geometric pattern with a soft palette that could appeal to parents for their baby boys or girls. The hand drawn elements are composed to feel like traditional native american designs on blankets and rugs. I think this pattern would be great for babies, teens or in any grown-up space!

Voting opened last Thursday, March 26, 2015, and continues until this Thursday April 2nd 2015. Vote Here!

Nana's Vintage Kitchen!

This week's design challenge at Spoonflower was to create a 'spoon-themed' design.
I started my research by opening my kitchen drawers and began sketching what I found.

Nana's Vintage Kitchen ©2015 Patty Rybolt Designs

Designing my pattern with only spoons seemed a little boring so I incorporated some drawings that I originally did for MATS4A last fall of the cool gadgets that I had inherited from my Nana. (My daughter Hanna especially likes the hand-mixer).

I assembled all of my drawings in photoshop and made an organized collection of the items using only their grey outline. I felt that there were so many shapes that the color palette had to be simple. I chose the smoky blue/green color because it worked well with the grey and really made the white pop. Plus I liked it! I've learned from the MATS (Make Art That Sells) classes that I've taken from Lilla Rogers over the past year and a half that I should be designing something that I would buy!

Voting opens on Thursday, March 12th. Please Vote Here!

Suzani by the Sea!

Coral, mint, black and white...

'Suzani by the Sea' ©2015 Patty Rybolt Designs. All Rights Reserved.

Spoonflower's challenge this week was to create a design using all four colors in this restricted palette,

restricted palette

no less, no more. The only restriction was the color, the design concept this week was left wide open, so I chose to make a Suzani* type print.

I had drawn hundreds of these elements for MATS 4A this fall and was looking for a way to make a design for Spoonflower using my sketches, so I opened my sketches in Photoshop and added my new palette. Then built my layered elements into designed motifs and created my pattern.

(*Suzani is an embroidered and decorative tribal textile made in Tajikistan, Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan and other Central Asian countries. Popular design motifs can include the sun, flowers, leaves, vines and an occasional bird or two.)

Voting opens on Thursday, March 5th and continues until Thursday, March 12th, 2015. Click Here To Vote!