The Dutch Kiwi

I love surface design, I love maths and I love geography! I know where every country is on a world map, its flag and most of the capital cities. So to combine two of these interests, I created a the Country Hearts Flag Colours Collection . With the Olympic games giving me the idea and inspiration, as I watched the proud athletes carrying their flags.  This stunning colour combination is Venezuela . It's so bright and festive! It took an absolute age but I didn't want to leave any countries out, so there are a total of 195 designs. I hope I got them all, but if I have missed any please let me know! A pillow with the Bahamas design. Don't their flag colours just make you think of beautiful blue water, sun and sandy beaches? The design is a simple heart design in a diamond layout. The hearts are coloured in a spray pain effect using the colours of the flag of the country. I used the flags colour hexcodes and tried to incorporate all the colours of the flag in similar proporti...

I finally bit the bullet and created my first YouTube video. Showcasing my haphazard designing style of trial and error to get it just right! This is the collection of the design, Art Deco inspired for Spoonflowers latest challenge. This is how it turned it out. I'm thinking the largest image in the dark blue and gold effect is my favourite. I quite like the contrast of the white details on the coloured backgrounds, although I designed them specifically for the metallic wallpaper in gold and silver. Video of the designing process We'll soon see how it faired in the design challenge table!

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!

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...

Does anyone actually make any money on Spoonflower? That was my biggest question when I first started. Not surprisingly, I couldn't really find an answer. There are so many variables but I would still like to see how others are doing, so maybe you are interested too! I started my Spoonflower journey in April 2022, so bang on 3 years ago now. So, I'll break down how my sales progressed over the last three years. Let's go year by year and see how it panned out! All numbers will be in US dollars as that is how Spoonflower pays me. Sorry Kiwi's but having to convert it all will be a pain! Sales in 2022 My first sale came on June 27th a whopping $1.10 for a fat quarter of 'Juicy Bright Orange Slices'.

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.