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Showing posts from June, 2025

Palm Springs Design Challenge

I was so excited to see the Palm Springs design challenge! I love Palm Springs! We travelled as a family in December 2024 through to January 2025. As the name The Dutch Kiwi suggests, I am Dutch but live in New Zealand. I had not been back to the Netherlands in way too long, so it was time for a visit with a USA stop on the way. The first stop...Palm Springs of course!!! We flew into Los Angeles arriving at the crack of dawn. Since we arrived so early we decided it wasn't worth waiting around for a motel or paying for two nights to check in extra early. We grabbed the rental car and made our way from LAX to Palm Springs, with many stops to make sure we stayed awake...which was much harder than I had imagined. But it is a 12 hour flight from Auckland, New Zealand to Los Angeles, so we were running a little low on sleep! Palm Springs was the perfect place to relax and enjoy the warmth which was plenty warm enough for me even in winter. When we arrived much too early, the motel was ki...
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Welcome to my Spoonflower Journey

Welcome! I am starting this blog to share my journey into surface design in April of 2022, predominantly focusing on Spoonflower. I had so many questions when I first started that I struggled to find answers for. The most pressing question was, does anyone actually make any money selling designs on Spoonflower? So in the interests of transparency and sharing information I am planning to document how my earnings are progressing (slowly!) since my start in Spoonflower.
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My Spoonflower Design Challenge Results

Update: There is a new number 1! You can check it out here:  Art Deco Scallops Dots Circles Blue So in the interests of honesty and sharing, here are my top 5 and bottom 5 design challenge entries. With the exception of 5, including the very first as a rather disappointed me deleted them long ago. I have never placed in the top 10 but am proud to have made to top 100 four times...so far! I have a total of 61 design challenge entries over the last three years. So I feel another spreadsheet coming on! The simplest way to decide the rankings would be placings, but I don't think getting 50th out of 100 designs is quite the same as getting 50th out of 1000. So, I will have to crack out the math and give each design a ranking. Luckily as much as I love surface design, I also LOVE math! I have not used the vote counts to decide rankings and I will follow up with a post with a full table of all results. Let's get straight into it! Top 5 Design Placings Why not start with what I am prou...
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Are Spoonflower Design Challenges Worth it?

Without beating around the bush...YES!! The design challenges are definitely worth it. Even if it can be humbling to see a design you thought would do really well...well flop. There is still so much to gain from joining in the challenges. At the end of this post you will see a table showing all my design entries in order from best to worst performing over the past three years. I have used the placing and total entries for the challenge to give each design a rank. The higher the rank the better the design faired. Similar to a percentage or percentile if a design's rank is 60 it means it scored higher than 60% of all designs. For any fellow math lovers who want the calculations, the top design Serene Soft Green Cream Waves placed 27th out of 1298. So the calculation I used was 100-(27/1298*100) = 97.92. Now moving right along!
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