Spoonflower faux suede

Spoonflower 
Faux
Suede








                

A couple of months ago Spoonflower introduced faux suede to its line up of fabrics.  Faux suede is luxurious to the touch and surface designs and solids print well on it.  This picture shows solid color coordinates available in my "Remembering Braniff" collection on Spoonflower.

My childhood home is not far from the Will Rogers World Airport in Oklahoma City.  My father retired from the Federal Aviation Agency located at the airport.  Aviation was a big deal in our house and in the USA at large during the 1960s as we set our sites on even the moon.

In the mid 1960s I looked up in the sky and saw a lemon yellow plane landing at the airport.  It was so pretty against the blue sky.  It was a Braniff jet ( anyone remember Braniff?) and it signaled "The End of the Plain Plane,"  Braniff's advertising slogan.  Each plane was painted a bright solid color.  (There was even a lavender plane until it was discovered that lavender combined with white or black was considered  "bad fortune"  in Mexico and South America, where Braniff also flew.)

But it was the "Lord of the Bright Colors," Italian designer, Emilio Pucci, who put Braniff in the headlines both on the fashion runway and the airport runway for it was Pucci who designed the uniforms for Braniff's "air hostesses."  The uniforms were the latest in mod and chic. He even designed bubble helmets for the "air hostesses" to echo the space gear that astronauts wore into space.  Pucci's signature was all over everything -- his bright colors, his complex patterns utilizing geometrics and marbling patterns.  

So an Italian created what I remember as the "mod" style in the USA -- bright colors and an escape from the restraints of the 1950s.

For further information on Spoonflower's faux suede and other offerings can be found here.


And be sure and check out my Spoonflower "Remembering Braniff" collection.

Little Toy Airplanes

During Spoonflower's recent 2 for 1 fat quarter sale, I  kind of went nuts buying fat quarters of some of my favorite designs on Spoonflower.  One design I purchased a fat quarter of was "Little Toy Airplanes."  This design was created by a Spoonflower designer by the name of Tara McGowan.  She has many wonderful designs in her Spoonflower shop, artreedesigns. 

In addition to her fabric designs, Tara also writes and illustrates children's books.  One of her books, "It's a Full Moon Tonight," is illustrated with illustrations from Tara's fabric design.  It's a wonderful children's book.  My youngest grandson is going to receive a pillow made with "Little Toy Airplanes" printed on Spoonflower Kona cotton and the book, "It's a Full Moon Tonight," as a holiday gift.

Here are a couple of pictures of the pillow and the book:

The reverse side of the pillow is a section of a baby blanket of my youngest grandson's.  The colors coordinated with "Little Toy Airplanes" which was a happy accident.

My "Make Me Laugh" Throw Pillow

There are two designers on Spoonflower: Amy_G and Whimzwhirled.  Each designer has her own distinctive style and they both produced designs that made me laugh out loud.  So I decided to sew a "Make Me Laugh" Pillow.

For one side, I chose a fat quarter of Amy_G's "Flying Tin Cans brought to you by Can-Do Airlines!"  printed on Spoonflower Kona cotton.  Here's a pic:

For the other side of my "Make Me Laugh" Pillow I chose Whimzwhirled's "Pick Me" design in a fat quarter of Spoonflower Kona cotton.

Look at that frog.

Lots of talented designers on Spoonflower.  Take a look.

Aviation

Spoonflower is having a contest I can relate to.  Some contests don't appeal to me, but then there are others like the Extinct Animals contest or the Cake Collage contest that I find exciting.  There is an upcoming contest about aviation which I knew immediately I wanted to enter.  I have an old picture of my great grandfather's showing him and other relatives standing next to an airplane that had landed in my great grandfather's pasture in Cowley County, Kansas.  The picture is from the first or second decade of the 1900s because my grandmother saw it when she was a young girl and she was born in 1900.  I created a design using that picture and the pillow shown above is what I made from the fat quarter of "Look What Fell from the Sky."  The designs can be viewed in my "Carson" collection on Spoonflower.  

I made this video about a year ago built around the photograph featured in my "Aviation" design.