jerseymurmurs

The Spoonflower design challenge for this week was "Scandinavian". This is a simple repeating design drawn in the Procreate app using a white "pencil" and a black background. I took inspiration from a wall hanging in a Carl Larsson watercolor. Larsson was a Swedish painter who often painted the rooms in his house and his 8 children.

Many of the interiors depicted in his paintings were the work of his wife and fellow-painter Karin Bergöö Larsson (apparently, even though they both had the same training in painting and met as students, once they were married Carl "refused" to let her paint). So, she worked as an interior designer and developed a new and modern swedish style for interiors (that lives on today in Ikea). She designed and wove many of the textiles used in her house, did embroidery, and designed clothes for herself and her children. Her textile designs and colors were new: "Pre-modern in character they introduced a new abstract style in tapestry. Her bold compositions were executed in vibrant colours; her embroidery frequently used stylised plants. In black and white linen she reinterpreted Japanese motifs." [Victoria and Albert Museum exhibition catalogue, quoted at Carl Larsson Gården] The wall-hanging that inspired me in one of his paintings was probably designed and woven by her.

The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC, identifies her as "the first designer of what would become known as Swedish Modern." According to a book about Karin by Marge Thorell "His paintings of their home made her interior designs famous." Interesting information about her here and here.

One of Karin's lovely weavings (source):

Celebrate the beauty and bounty of the “Garden State” with the 2019 New Jersey Full Moon Calendar that features a Jersey Jam landscape and a Moonstruck Moon (moonstruck: "affected in mind or health by the light of the moon"). This unique "tea towel" calendar combines the traditional Native American Indian “Full Moon” names (e.g., the Snow Moon, the Hunger Moon) with the unique attributes of New Jersey — and shows all the phases (new, waxing, full, waning) of the moon for each month. February's full moon is the “Goldfinch Moon” (the state bird). April is the Jersey Fresh Moon (the Jersey Fresh program helps keep the state's farming tradition alive & thriving). August is the "Corn Silk Moon" -- when that sweet Jersey corn is at its peak!

I was not pleased when I saw this week's Spoonflower design challenge -- "sloths" -- but decided I would work with it and I actually had fun and was surprised that my final design ended up being something I love -- a houndstooth pattern. You just never know.

I looked at some photos of sloths and drew one in the Procreate app.

Then I took my "bow tie black and white" design and put several screen grabs of it behind the sloth. I used Adobe Capture to quickly turn the bow ties into line art and placed the art using Photoshop's new Project Para that lets you design repeats to produce this:

When I tiled the design into a half-brick layout, I saw the rhythm of the houndstooth!

Bottoms up! I had fun with this Spoonflower design challenge for a large-scale black and white wallpaper design as black and white is my favorite combo. A good black and white combination excites the eye... Here I combined two of the glass silhouettes that I've used in some of my Modern Prayer Flags.