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About

 Hi I'm Nina,


A surface designer originally from the Netherlands, now happily living in beautiful New Zealand. Welcome to my little corner of the internet where I share my journey into the colorful world of surface pattern design!

I had so many questions when I first started on my surface design journey, particularly about Spoonflower. So, I thought I would share what I have learned (and am still learning!) along the way. I knew of Spoonflower because I love sewing. Then what started as a creative outlet quickly turned into an adventure in pattern making, tutorial watching and often just wondering.



I design on my iPad using Procreate, often surrounded by the natural beauty and inspiration that New Zealand has to offer. I love both bright colours and muted understated design. I have yet to narrow down my style as I seem to like giving everything a go.

This blog is where I share my creative processes, lessons learned, successes, finances and the occasional flop because let’s be honest, learning something new is rarely straight forward! Whether you’re a fellow designer, considering giving surface design a go, or just curious if you can actually make money on Spoonflower, I’m so glad you’re here.



I'd love to see your designs, blogs and pretty much anything creative. You can find me on social media and of course on Spoonflower too, check out my contact page.

Thanks for stopping by! 

Nina

Popular posts from this blog

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

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 proud of right? At least those who don't make it to the end won't see the worst performers fi...
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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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