For tea towel season (they make great gifts!), I’ve turned the chairs from my Take a Seat fabric into the Lovely Chairs Tea Towel, available now at Spoonflower.
As a fan of art, design and architecture, I love chairs – chairs from all eras (but especially mid-century) have such great lines, even in simple silhouettes like these.
I’m pleased to announce that my entry in Spoonflower’s “Grandma’s Kitchen” tea towel design challenge made the top 10 this week! This was such a fun theme to work on — starting with going through recipe cards with my mom to pick out a few family favorites.
We settled on my grandmother’s sugar cookie recipe, for which she was mildly famous (at least within our extended family). She used to press the cookies flat with the cut-glass bottom of a drinking glass before baking them, leaving a pretty flower pattern on the cookies. When she passed away, each of her kids got one of the glasses so they could carry on the tradition. Pretty cool.
Of course, my grandmother knew her recipes so well she never had to write anything down, so this recipe card is actually written in my mom’s handwriting, and carries the marks of many years of vanilla extract and buttery fingers.
I decided to play against the vintage scanned recipe card with more modern accents, like a stylized drinking glass and cookies and simplified lace doilies in the background.
You can buy the Grandma’s Sugar Cookies fabric at Spoonflower, or have Roostery sew up a set of their Orpington Tea Towels (it prints the right way round, even though the preview may be sideways).
If you’d like to give the recipe a try, here’s the slightly modified version (replacing shortening with butter) we made this week to celebrate:
Sugar Cookies
Makes: 6 dozen cookies
2 c. butter
1 c. granulated sugar
1 c. powdered sugar
2 eggs, slightly beaten
1 tsp. vanilla
1 tsp. baking soda
1 tsp. cream of tartar
4 c. flour
Last week’s Spoonflower theme was Prohibition Cocktails – it turns out that America’s ban on alcohol in the 1920s gave rise to some clever mixed drinks, most of them designed to conceal the less-than-ideal flavor of bathtub gin.
After considering the Whiskey Sour (with fun-to-draw cherry garnish), the Sidecar (with its whiff of Jazz Age elegance) and the Gin Rickey (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s drink of choice), I settled on the Bee’s Knees, because it sounded good (gin, honey and lemon juice), and because I like to draw bees. (Nobody said artists were entirely logical creatures.)
I studied up on Art Deco style, picked the honey-est yellows and dug out some vintage-looking fonts, then ran the whole thing through the excellent Mister Retro Permanent Press filter to give it a vintage printed look.
The end result was The Bee’s Knees Tea Towel, available now at Spoonflower and Roostery.
My design just squeaked into the top 25 in Spoonflower’s contest, coming in at #24.
Judy at Sleeping Dog Quilts was nice enough to blog about this quilt she made with my Matisse’s Seaweed fabric back in March. I’m just now catching up on my own blog posts, but it’s actually a great summer quilt, so maybe this is the perfect time to share it after all.
I like how she took pieces of my cheater quilt panel and mixed it up with other Hawaiian fabrics!
Photo: Judy Tucker / Sleeping Dog Quilts
Casey Dumadag (@littlecaycam on Instagram) shared a photo the other day of the adorable baby shoes she made from my Rhinoce-Roses Tiny fabric. Casey had asked me to scale down my original Rhinoce-Roses fabric to baby-size for this project, and it worked out beautifully.
Both fabrics are available at Spoonflower, and at least 10% of proceeds from sales of these two fabrics goes to the International Rhino Foundation, a nonprofit which works to help save the world’s rhinos through conservation and research. And speaking of babies, IRF is currently fundraising to support the birth of a new Sumatran Rhino calf at their sanctuary in Indonesia – you can read all about it on their blog and even host your own “baby shower” for Ratu the mama rhino.
I finally set up some Lellobird Pinterest boards yesterday (more to come; stay tuned), one of which features all manner of arrows (signs, patterns, graffiti, etc.) which I found when researching a design project and thought might be useful to someone else.
Today, Pinterest sent me a “we found some more pins you might be interested in” email about the Arrows board – and it included one of my fabrics, pinned to someone else’s board. The internet really is a smaller world than we think sometimes…
I’m so pleased that the members of Berkeley Parents Network chose my design for their new logo last month! BPN has provided me with all manner of parenting advice, handyman recommendations and other essentials over the years, so I’m happy to be able to give back.
Here’s the official announcement from BPN: “The winning logo, designed by Jeni Paltiel, took the
lead early on, and received nearly twice as many votes as its nearest competitors for peoples’ first choice. It was also the top vote-getter for second and third choices.” Thanks, everyone!
And here’s my designer-y thinking behind the design: The slightly irregular circles are reminiscent of blobs of paint, representing kids and parenting (and our own imperfections!). The different colored circles overlap to symbolize the network/community/connections that BPN fosters. The blue and yellow circles subtly hint at the Berkeley connection without screaming “Cal!” Overall, I was going for a look that was fun and friendly, but not too little-kid-like. I hand-drew the letters “B-P-N,” and the words “Berkeley Parents Network” are in Ostrich Sans by The League of Movable Type, a free/open source font.
Look for the new logo on the revamped BPN website when it launches later this year.