Friday 4 September 2015

August Review

Another month has flown by and it’s September already!  That means it’s time for a look back at some of the things I did in August…

New designs, Spoonflower…
I don’t like to waste things so when I realised that I was running out of space in my current sketchbooks I decided to make myself a new one from spare pages left at the back of some old uni sketchbooks.  I used to like making books but hadn’t done any in a long time, it got me thinking about putting together some different book making tutorials – I’ve added that to my ‘to do’ list!

I used my newly made sketchbook for drawing ideas for Spoonflower’s annual Fabric8 contest.  This year the theme is Botanical Sketchbook, so I took inspiration from my garden and drew some of the plants, flowers and vegetables which I grow…

August review Botanical sketchbook wip 1c hazelfishercreationsAugust review Botanical sketchbook wip 2b hazelfishercreations
Here’s my final fabric design… Unfortunately it was not picked to be one of the 100 semi-finalists (there were close to 800 entries!), but I will still be making it available to buy from my Spoonflower shop in the near future.  (I took advantage of Spoonflower’s Free Swatch Day and ordered a sample.)  I am also planning to create some coordinating designs to form a small collection around this one.  The 8 finalists in the Fabric8 contest have now been chosen.  They are all lovely designs, you can see them here.

August review Botanical sketchbook final fabric design hazelfishercreationsIn August I also entered Spoonflower’s ‘Butterfly Coordinates’ contest – thank you if you voted for my design!  My entry came 78th (with 109 votes) out of 274 designs – you can see all of the other entries here.

Baking…
I baked a banana, blueberry and walnut cake which I shared the recipe for last week.  You can see more recipes I have shared on my blog in the past here.

Knitting
When I was recovering from being unwell in July I started knitting a cardigan.  After a bit of a false start (when I got in a muddle having dropped some stitches only a few rows in and had to start again) it’s going well now.  I’m knitting with Sublime Extra Fine Merino Wool DK which is a gorgeous soft yarn.  I would usually avoid wool because I’ve found it irritates my skin, but this yarn is so soft – hopefully it will feel good to wear too!

August review knitting cardigan hazelfishercreations
I’m using this Drops pattern, which I’ve pinned to my Knit and Crochet board on Pinterest along with other knitting and crochet patterns and tutorials…

Other things…
A few months ago I wrote about trialling Adobe Illustrator and wanting to try Serif’s DrawPlus X8, well I now have the full DrawPlus program and have been really happy with it so far.  Learning how to do new things is so exciting and satisfying too – there were a few things I wanted to be able to do with DrawPlus but I wasn’t sure if I could.  It doesn’t work in exactly the same way as Illustrator but I have worked out how to convert my scanned line drawings to vectors and draw scalloped circles!

Well, I think that’s about it for August!  August was a bit of a disrupted month work wise, but I'm starting to get back into a more normal routine again now it's September, so hopefully you'll soon be seeing more new designs and craft projects / tutorials I have planned to do on my blog.

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