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Creating a Fabric Tea Towel: Entering the Spoonflower Tea Towel Design Challenges

The idea of seeing your design on a tea towel has always been something magical for me. Tea towels can be a lovely gift for someone you love or an uplifting accessory in your kitchen to brighten up your day.

A great way to get your design on a tea towel is to enter one of the design challenges organised by Spoonflower.com. For this, it’s not necessary to create a technical repeat. You can also create a pattern concept following the Spoonflower guidelines.

In 2020 I have entered three tea towel design challenges:

  • The 2021 Tea Towel Calendar Design Challenge

  • The ABCs of… Tea Towel Design Challenge

  • The Backyard Winter Birds Tea Towel Design Challenge

As I love hand-drawn designs, I create the illustrations in Adobe Illustrator, using the template provided by Spoonflower. Some of the texture effects I tend to draw in the app Procreate and then load it into Adobe Illustrator. This process allows me to recolour and resize without any loss of quality.

2021 Calendar Design

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The calendar 2021 bird design is a compilation of some elements I created for a clip art-set in 2019 and some new icons. I have chosen bright and bold colours with the idea to create an uplifting and confident atmosphere for 2021.

ABCs of… Tea Towel Design

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For the ocean ABC tea towel challenge, I have created an ocean design for kids (or adults who like cute characters ;-)). With this design, I would like to show the beauty and fascinating diversity of the underwater world in the hope that people protect what it’s known and loved for.

To get to know more about each illustrated element read blog post “Get to know the sealife creatures on the ABC tea towel design printed by Spoonflower”

Backyard Winter Birds Tea Towel Design

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For the backyard winter birds challenge, I have chosen to illustrate some typical Swiss birds and to create a background which is soft and calming to achieve a European winter feeling.

When uploading your design to Spoonflower make sure you add the tag “sfteatowel”. With this tag, your design is then rotated accordingly in the product preview. The tea towel designs described here are all available on Spoonflower, eco-printed on lovely cotton-linen canvas fabric.

If you would like to get in contact or you would like to be informed about my latest illustrations and fabric designs, send me an email or sign up here to receive the newsletter .

Ps: The designs mentioned in this blog post are available on Spoonflower.

Priska Kranz