The Dutch Kiwi

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Showing posts from September, 2025

Autumn Pheasant Scene - Top 100

I am excited to announce that my Autumn Pheasant Scene made the top 100 in the Spoonflower Autumn Hunt Club design challenge. It came in 73rd with 110 votes and 179 favourites. I loved drawing this design. I am a sucker for bold graphic style designs with bit of texture to add depth. It's always tough trying to decide when enough is enough. I can get caught in a trap of adding more and more details or elements, only to remove them later. Often I find less is definitely more! Autumn colours are not my usual choice but I really enjoyed working with them. That is why I love design challenges! Always pushing me outside my comfort zone and forcing me to try new things. I hope you like it too!

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.

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...

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!