I’ve been doing a bit less of sewing lately, and a bit more of designing on the computer. After finishing my online class on Processing (I told you I would do this again), I saw the announcement of a design fabric contest on Spoonflower. Fabric 8 takes place once a year and his done conjointly with Robert Kaufman Fabrics. This year’s theme is Cosmic Voyage. I decided to take the challenge. You can see what I’ve submitted here. This image below represents a fabric piece of 18″ x 36″.

Today, the semi-finalists were announced. I wish I could ask you to go vote for me. Unfortunately, I didn’t make it in the 100 semi-finalists selected by Robert Kaufman (you can go voting here though). Still, I wanted to share with you what I submitted.

For the first step, we had to submit only one fabric design on the theme. The 8 finalists will later present a collection of four fabrics, including their first design. So, I though of doing a cheater quilt to show off different design in one print. I now realized that this might not have been the best idea. I’ll explain later why. When sketching some ideas, I thought of joining some blocks to form a space ship. When playing with different shapes, I found that it worked out quite well using pentagons for the blocks. Here was my initial sketch.

The idea was to use the other pentagons as windows on different things you can encounter in the immensity of the cosmos: nebula, galaxy, solar system, planet with craters. I put a lot of work and learned a lot from doing the 4 different designs for the pentagons. This is the part I would like to show. Most blocks have a geometric texture to them and a lot of it was done using Processing. The color palette was inspired by the colors in a picture of a nebula. So, here they are:

My favorite one is definitely the nebula made out of random triangles. But all together in one print, it might be too much. I think that the biggest problem was the scale. I had to make the pentagons big enough to see the details in each design. But at this size, the space ship just feels like it lacks details compared to the rest. Maybe, I should have drop my original idea and only focus on one print or at least drop the space ship. At some point, I had to submit my design. I’m still happy with what I have accomplished. And I will probably rework on some of the designs or at least use some elements from them in future projects…

Sorry for those who prefer to read some more sewing and quilting related projects. But don’t worry, I’ll have a project to share with you in the coming days!