spoonflower update and what I made!

To everyone who's asked -- yes, Spoonflower have been totally awesome about trying to work out the problem, and are re-doing my fabric and trying to find a way to prevent this from happening again. It's all part of being in beta, I guess! And while I was unhappy about the problems, I am totally happy with the way they have handled it. Fingers crossed the new yard of the monster fabric will be suitable for Emily clothes! In the meantime, I was able to use the unwashed Milk & Cheese fabric and some bits of the Monsters that I....un-squared? Intentionally skewed? back out of shape to accomplish what we wanted to do for Heroes Con, and here is a peek:



Okay, I'll let you see them for real:



Pencil cases and (refillable) Moleskine jackets for the large and small cahier notebooks (my favorites, notebooks included)! A look at one open:



Whoops, that's my own with graph paper! Anyway, we will have a very small number of these for sale at our table, and only 3 or so Monster items in the whole batch (the "or so" meaning, depending on if Emily successfully snags one for herself). So if you're interested, stop on by!

For those of you interested in the process, a few notes: I was slightly wrong about the skewed fabric being totally fine for something like this. It was totally possible to work with it, but omg did I have trouble NOT following the grain when I was sewing! It was giving me conniptions to sew what seemed to be such crooked lines. But other than that, the fabric worked beautifully for these. Here are the prototypes I made while working out my pattern:



#1 - the hedgehog fabric: I decided I hated how it looked with binding around the edges. It works fine, I just didn't like it.
#2 - not pictured: actually, I threw this one out. It was close, but not quite there.
#3 - the frog fabric: this was the one I made once I was sure the pattern was what I wanted, I like this one a lot.
#4 - the robots! Here's the final prototype, after playing with it a bit I decided to add an elastic strap (like the full-size Moleskines) to keep it closed. This one I loved. And in fact, this one is the one I'm using right now.
And finally, the prototype pencil case: no changes from this one, although there was an earlier version that didn't work right. And now I have a matching frog set!

Anyway, that's it, time to pack and get ready to get out of here in the a.m. Have a good weekend!