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HELLO 2020! I have a couple things I'm putting up in the house that are specifically for this year. Yes, calendars! Both print calendars (wall and daily) and calendar tea towels (at quilt shops or spoonflower).
I have been creating artwork for the Seize the Day line of calendars with Sellers Publishing for 10 years! My first ones were for 2011 but that means I was working on artwork in 2009 to get in for printing in 2010 to sell for 2011. I just finished up my artwork for the 2021 calendars and got it all sent in last week. You can probably understand why I sometimes get confused about what day it is or even what year it is!
There has been a lovely correlation for the past few years between my fabric lines and my calendar artwork and covers. It hasn't been intentional to make a cover that is an upcoming or existing fabric line, but the two often overlap and compliment each other. I'm so pleased that Painted Meadow is being used to sew with now and still in shops while those perky coneflowers and big fat bumble bees are buzzing around my calendar for 2020.
The first page of the calendar gives a grid of September-December of the previous year, so you can start using it early to transition into the new year. Since I have my calendar from the year before up till December 31st, I skip over using this and I usually feel that this page is a little forgotten in my studio. So maybe if I share it here it will have more life and space to shine.
The desk calendar has tear off pages for the days of the week (Saturday and Sunday share a page) with a variety of quotes and images. I save my pages to write notes on the back. I'd like to say I find all those quotes myself but I don't. The folks at Sellers Publishing find lots of great sayings and sentiments to fill your days with inspiration. I find ones for the wall calendars and a few daily but they put in a lot of effort to fill those pages with daily optimism. Thank you Sellers Publishing!
Side note: where to buy Seize the Day- Barnes and Noble often carries them, I spot them in places like student bookstores on college campuses and sometimes office supply places. I'm curious...would you buy this at a quilt store if they carried them?
And then there are calendar tea towels! I started doing these through the spoonflower competitions each year. As the competition draws close I update the previous designs to the calendar grid and year of the new year coming and I work on a new idea. This year I decided to work with the quilt theme and I created "Sewing Up the Year" tea towel.
Here it is in the Love Patchwork and Quilting Holiday Gift Guide. It makes a nice gift for the quilters in your life. I will be updating this towel each year to reflect the calendar for the coming year (usually around October or November)
A few more tea towels in my shop- calendar themed. There are non-calendar as well and you can check the tea towel collections on my shop page. All of the spoonflower tea towels fit on a fat quarter of linen cotton canvas. You can also get towels that are finished (hemmed and hang tag on corner in back) from roostery.com
A new item this year has been the calendar tea towel for MODA FABRICS. I designed one for 2020 that used the drawing lines from a few of my collections to make a lacy illustration of florals around the calendar grid.
I keep mine folded over a glass door on an antique cupboard in my office. I like to see the contrast of how the linear flowers go with the prints from my collections. Here it is with scarves from Painted Meadow and Abby Rose.
These tea towels with MODA FABRICS are exclusive to MODA and quilt shops. Give some love to your local quilt shop- we need and love them! I know my local shop was carrying them but they have sold out so if you are a shop owner and have these in stock, please comment and let us know so we can send folks your way!
I hope you are as excited for 2020 as I am. It already promises to be filled with lots of activities and shows- which is even more reason why I've got to start getting it entered in my calendar!
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 Each year spoonflower.com has a calendar tea towel challenge. This year I thought it would be fun to make one that coordinates with Dandi Annie, my new line with Moda that is shipping to stores soon (November!) So here it is with dandelion seeds floating off to bring wishes to you and a great 2019 ahead! This is sized for a fat quarter of Cotton Linen Canvas and I'll be sampling it soon to make it available in the marketplace. Check out spoonflower here! Wouldn't it be great color fun for the kitchen to make cloth napkins or placemats from Dandi Annie? There is a cute pattern for a Pocketed Table Runner at the Moda Bakeshop blog by Heather Long of @Coffe_and_Quilts using Dandi Annie. Check it out and get started with some kitchen goodness sewing! Bakeshop Runner   And if you don't want to sew a tea towel yourself, you can get one already made for you at Roostery! I think I'm going to order one since I have a big list of sewing projects :) and I think I'd like it ready-made this time. Check out the Special Edition Spoonflower Tea Towel!
I love totes! If you are a quilter I'm guessing you do too. Or you do even if you are not a quilter. I've made three totes with Dear Mum fabrics and I get comments constantly when I use them!  For Quilt Market I made these totes using a free pattern that is on Amy Sinabaldi's blog Nana company. I love the large size of the totes and find these are my go-to bags to transport quilts in when I am taking one to show at a guild meeting or work on binding in the car while I wait to pick up carpool. They came together quickly and although I learned I need to work on fitting my inside linings better, I'm pretty happy with them! And if you are wondering about the labels on these- I ordered a swatch of fabric from spoonflower.com with my etsy shop logo on them so I could make labels.  This next tote is one of my very favorites! I made it at Sew Together Stitching Lounge in Los Angeles and I really hope Victoria, the owner, makes a pattern to sell of this. It uses Soft and Stable by Annie and I LOVE LOVE LOVE the straps. It is jute webbing that is used in upholstery. This tote was made in a couple hours. I love a project like that! Those cute toes...that is my daughter!
 Do you have a tiny dancer who is performing in the Nutcracker? My daughter used to do ballet and she was in the Nutcracker twice. The Nutcracker Ballet is a lovely holiday tradition. I've taken my "Clara's Nutcracker Ballet" print from spoonflower and made four tea towels that fit on one yard of linen cotton canvas. You can make four tea towels (all the same design or one each of the four combined on one yard) on each yard of fabric to help celebrate your holiday traditions and add some ballet cheer to your holiday kitchen! Dance on!
Visit my spoonflower links for my Nutcracker collection and Tea Towels collections.  Sweet Watercolor Blooms tea towels by Robin Pickens on www.spoonflower.com Every year spoonflower.com has a calendar tea towel challenge for the upcoming year. I love seeing the wonderful solutions that all the designers come up with! I love my kitchen and I love a cheery, colorful tea towel hanging from a cupboard handle, folded as a set on the counter, or hanging on the wall as decoration. I usually try to do a set of 4 coordinating tea towels that I will gang up on one yard of linen cotton canvas (or you can order them individually as a fat quarter). This year I've been playing more with watercolor paint and I decided to try a painterly, fun, garden look for my towels.
Each year I update the ones I designed from previous years to reflect the coming calendar year. I'm almost done with those changes...got one more set to go! Also if you want a tutorial on how to do mitered corners (that is how I finish off mine) then check out my instructions from a prior year: http://www.robinpickens.com/blog/fun-floral-tea-towels-mitered-corner-tutorial Tea towels make lovely hostess gifts. AND, if you don't like to sew, pop on over to www.roostery.com (a sister company of spoonflower's) and order some that are already hemmed up for you. Take a look at the "Spoonflower special edition tea towels" category.  Color and more color...I love to play with different color ways and see how different a design looks in each! Here is my Deco Garden tea towel in gray and green colors. I've got my sample swatch on the way and I will be ordering this one and the citrus palette for my kitchen. I couldn't resist one more color grouping. I was thinking of a kitchen, two houses ago, where I had my cobalt blue kitchenmaid mixer on the counter and lots of warm orange and gold colors in the decorating. The jewel tone towel would have been the right choice for that kitchen. If you'd like to see these and more, check out my spoonflower shop!   I love old mason jars. The beautiful aqua blue of the glass reminds me of sea-glass and retro kitchens. When spoonflower.com had a competition with the theme of "spoons" I thought it would be fun to have the colorful plastic ones waiting for a bowl of ice cream at an afternoon party, displayed in lovely mason jars. Since then I created a set of tea towels using the party spoons and mason jars that fits an assorted four designs on one yard of linen cotton canvas. I recently updated the calendar tea towel for 2017.
You can find the group of four together on my spoonflower shop link here or find them individually and see other tea towel designs in my tea towel collections page. Thanks for visiting my spoonflower shop! http://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/robinpickenswww.spoonflower.com/profiles/robinpickens  It's that time of year on spoonflower.com when the calendar tea towel competition happens. I love this challenge because there are so many amazing and lovely designs submitted- yummy visual treats to see!
This year I decided to use my Deco Garden motif to make a citrus palette towel to ring in 2017 on a cheery, happy note. Designs on spoonflower can also be ordered through their sister site Roostery.com in an already made tea towel. Now I just have to get this sampled, but I couldn't wait to share!  Getting ready for the Halloween season and I decided it was time to make up my Sugar Skull Calaveras pillows! I ordered this fabric from spoonflower.com a year ago but it sat in my "to do" pile. I'm guessing you have one of those too? It was silly that I waited so long because I had three new skull pillows within an hour and a half! I included everything you need to make the pillows easily on one yard length of linen cotton canvas.  The repeat pattern can be used when doubled over to make an 18" square pillow and the long horizontal images make 14x28" pillows. I used Moda's Bella Solid Charcoal fabric on the back which matches perfectly with the gray. You could make your pillow double-sided with the images and make one horizontal pillow but I wanted them in a couple rooms so the charcoal backing was a better choice for me. I haven't made up the single skulls yet but they will be a cute chair accent pillow. I'm going to back the one with roses with a red fabric. My spoonflower shop offers my skulls design along with some other repeat coordinates from this group. You can find this specific design at http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/3623628-calaveras-pillows-01-by-robinpickens   This week's theme on spoonflower #SFWeeklyDesigns is CATS and DONUTS. Hmmmm. So the thing that kept popping in my head was decorating the sweet little delights to look like charming kitty faces. Chocolate chips for eyes? Licorice for whiskers? Coconut for fur? I can see it! But what I could really see was a frisky dog friend with a sweet tooth getting really excited by those donuts. I may or may not have been influenced by the dog we were dog-sitting this past weekend (it was a loud weekend around here!). I was definitely influenced by my dog Charlie who likes to eat anything he can get down from a counter.
This design exists as two repeats. The larger cat donuts alone and the smaller donuts with Otis the bad dog. Both are on spoonflower. Click here for Cat Donuts or Bad Dog Otis! |
About ROBINDesigner of colorful florals for Moda fabrics. Modern to transitional quilt designer. Illustrator, sewist, crafter. I am proud to be a designer for Moda Fabrics!
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Check the March 6, 2017 Episode!
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