The Dutch Kiwi

I was so excited to see the Palm Springs design challenge! I love Palm Springs! We travelled as a family in December 2024 through to January 2025. As the name The Dutch Kiwi suggests, I am Dutch but live in New Zealand. I had not been back to the Netherlands in way too long, so it was time for a visit with a USA stop on the way. The first stop...Palm Springs of course!!! We flew into Los Angeles arriving at the crack of dawn. Since we arrived so early we decided it wasn't worth waiting around for a motel or paying for two nights to check in extra early. We grabbed the rental car and made our way from LAX to Palm Springs, with many stops to make sure we stayed awake...which was much harder than I had imagined. But it is a 12 hour flight from Auckland, New Zealand to Los Angeles, so we were running a little low on sleep! Palm Springs was the perfect place to relax and enjoy the warmth which was plenty warm enough for me even in winter. When we arrived much too early, the motel was ki...

In very exciting news, I received my first Top 10 placing in a Spoonflower Design Challenge!!! I am so excited to have reached the Top 10! At times it has felt like it would never happen, so if you are in the same boat...keep goin! This is the winning design, with a previous  post and video  about it too. I just love the symmetry and repeating design on a full wall. With the close up shot you can see the gold effect of this design. The image below shows the same design with the gold effect printed on Silver Metallic Wallpaper. You can see that on the silver base the true colours are retained but you have the metallic look.  It is also available in the same blue but with a white print to be used on metallic wallpaper. If placed onto the gold metallic wallpaper the blue background turns into a deep dark green, I'll add an image below. As you can see, the colour change is quite dramatic! But hey, I still like it in green too! With the combination on the gold effect, whi...

As 'The Dutch Kiwi' off course I had to design my share of the cute little birds that give New Zealander's the 'Kiwi' nickname. Fun fact, in NZ we call the green fruit known overseas as a kiwi, kiwifruit. That's right no spaces one word. I guess that way there is no confusing the fruit with the birds, not sure how we differentiate the people and birds though! These graphic style Kiwi come in a few different colours but this one is my favourite. I really do love a navy and warm yellow combo. This one is called  (L) Kiwi Birds in rows Black Blue Yellow . This design is one of my first and is called  Geometric Kiwi Small in Aqua Blue . I still love the simplicity of it and a more subtle nod to our little feathered friends. I think it would look great as a wallpaper too, one of those designs that looks like a simple diamond design until you get closer. Last but not least is  Kiwi Honeycomb Block Print Dark Blue , this is one of my top performing designs in a d...

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!

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...