Top 5 Hot Sellers // Love inspired fabric for Valentine’s Day

We are half-way January and blue Monday has come and gone so it is time to focus on the year’s best holiday: Valentine’s Day is around the corner an our loooooove sales are going well. I think everyone is excited to spread some love and we see some new cool Love themes come up in our trend overview. So here is a little top 5 of this years most trending Valentine themed designs on fabric. And of course love is always an option, so no need to limit the use of these designs to one day of the year.

1 // Lollipop Love
This prints was inspired by the naive pop culture trend. We see food and candy pins pop up in fashion and we love these retro style illustrations influence new fashion collections. This designs is a simple illustration of heart shapes lollipops combined with black dots making the design fresh and quirky. Perfect for Valentine. https://www.spoonflower.com/designs/7177070

2 // Monochrome Love Typography
We adore monochromes and this style is still growing strong. A simple black and white print, you cannot go wrong. Small hearts with hand drawn love typography. A cool combo making this print on trend and very useful for gender neutral creations. Create some cool fashion pieces or use this print as wallpaper for your home. I’d love to see this design used in a baby nursery. So cool! https://www.spoonflower.com/designs/6093977

3 // Textured Hearts
This design has been around for a little while. The mint and peach combo is still trending after three years. The textured hearts are matching our inky texture collection. A collection of designs that have been licensed throughout Europe, United Stated and Australia. But it is also available on fabric and wallpaper via Spoonflower. So if you are looking for a more contemporary love themed design, this one might be just what you’ve been looking for. https://www.spoonflower.com/designs/5163891



4 // XOXO Sweet hearts
The monochrome nursery is very popular. And this soft pink xoxo design is perfect for your little girls bedroom and wardrobe. A raw abstract ink print with xoxo and heart shapes. The designs is a basic repeat with minimal shapes making it perfect as a secondary design or for large scale use like curtains and wallpaper. Curious to see some finished results with this one! https://www.spoonflower.com/designs/4867777

5 // Love Hearts
Black and whites with a hint of color are it this year. And this design is perfect for both boys and girls. For your little one or for your own fashion items or home textiles. The pattern is made with hand drawn heart shapes and the random placed shapes make this print playful yet stylish due to it’s color use. You can never go wrong with a strong basic black and white. https://www.spoonflower.com/designs/4845697

Top 5 fabric trends // winter 16/17 // watch out for these cool themes and styles this winter

Every season we reveal our best selling designs and make a fun top 5 of current trends. In this part of the world we are preparing for the colder season and all winter themes are picked up. But down under things are getting warmer, so we always have to contrasting geographical areas fighting for the hot sellers title. So much fun to see those two world join in our shop sales. Here is our Top 5 in fabric trends for this year’s winter season. All fabrics are listed below.

Monochromes & Textures
More and more people begin to realize we need a serene and peaceful place to call home after being overly exposed to so many things each and every day this seems to be a ultimate lifestyle change all around the world. As a designer the prints I love most are the basic, plain, pure shapes. We have been making fabric and print designs for over 8 years now and we have seen the shift from crazy colorful-all-colors-of-the-rainbow-in-one to the pure Scandinavian inspired texture like designs. And we love it. In this time and age our fabric buyers are more conscious and fabric should fit into a multi purpose: gender neutral, age neutral, cross seasonal etc. We love this strong trend since we love working with a clean simple shape and turn it into a strong repeat for fashion and home decoration. Especially the monochromes have been very popular this season. In strong black and white, less saturated natural colors and soft pastels.

Kawaii faces
When we visit japan almost two years ago we were inspired to make a new series of Kawaii style designs. We all know Hello Kitty right? Kawaii means something adorable or cute in Japanese and while I was traveling through this amazing one-of-a-kind quirky country I notice nearly everything ‘graphic design’ related, business logo’s, packaging, public adds, infographics: everything was Kawaii. Cute tiny eyes and a smiley face. So we are so happy to see these eyelashes, tiny faces and smiles pop up in home decoration in this part of the world. Our most popular Kawaii inspired print must be our popsicles and ice-cream design. But we also created some winter themes for this colder season. We mixed it up with a little Scandinavian: less colors. Hopefully we can enjoy those smiley faces for another few years.



Bears & Sloths
We looooove all the typical fall and winter animals. Animals will always be one of the most hot-selling themes and every year there is another animal standing out and trending like no other. This winter it has been the grizzly & polar bear. Bears are popping up everywhere and unfortunately a lot of copies are also going around also. But we have a cool, very unique selection in our shop. When we are preparing for snow, down under they are sewing their new summer pieces. This summer we saw our Sloths picked up all around the world. Now 8 months after releasing the Pura Vida series in our exclusive design presentation every single print artist has their own sloth available. So the sloths probably won’t be here next year but we wanted to celebrate them a little anyway. Next to elephants my personal fav-of-all-time animal. How can you NOT love those quirky creatures?



Gender Neutral Kids Themes
The past few years there has been a worldwide discussion about gender. This topic made it a little difficult to sell my pink designs as ‘girls print’ and blue designs as ‘boy print. Sometimes we get the most nasty comments on designs in blue or pink. The thing is: if someone is looking for ‘baby boy fabric’ you kinda need to tag designs in a way everyone can find what they need. It does not mean we think blue should only fit boys. As a Dutch designer I can tell you I am quite happy about the gender discussion and when people get better informed they also make better choices so that is why we see an increase in sales in kids designs that are gender neutral. It is getting more and more important to NOT label and we are so happy to see how strongly this effects our sales. That is why we wanted to add it to our top 5 trends this winter. Buying gender neutral is not only a gender conscious decision, it also reduces the footprint for our kids fashion industry and home decoration companies. Why release two lines when you can cover all at once? I love it! We plan on making more and more neutral prints ourselves but keep adding a boy and girl tag every now and then.

Dreams
All night and sky related designs are crazy popular this year. It is so funny to see how all dream themes and sky related prints are trending. Our hot air balloon designs were all sold with an exclusive license this year, we did not manage to add new designs to our fabric shop but our oldies, clouds, moon & stars, they are all picked up and are popping up in small boutiques all around the world. So funny how quick a trend can set! We thought this dream topic was a good one to end this post with. If you are looking for some fresh themes go visit our Spoonflower shop and show us what you make!

Let's celebrate green / 5 reasons why we all adore this color of life and nature

Colors have a strong but also subconscious effect on our everyday lives. During my design studies, studying color was our most demanding and time consuming subject. As a visual artist I was taught how to influence and effect others with my use of the color spectrum and every few months we celebrate one of those colors here on the blog.

Green is the color of life, nature, renewal and energy. When I think about green I think off trees, walks in the forest, balance and harmony is associated with this color. But it also is symbol of growth, harmony, freshness, safety, ambition, fertility, and environment. Green is a color that has to be taken serious, it is mostly used for conscious and environmentally aware businesses but is also has a more negative side to it, green is associated with: greed, finances, banking and most importantly: jealousy. Well, for me the money stuff goed in the ‘negative’ pile. Maybe that is the reason why less commercial products are being sold in green. Black and white, pink and blue are far more popular and green was to be considered a ‘difficult’ color in sales. Thankfully all around the world people are getting more aware of their footprint and how their way of life affects mother nature. Green is no longer taboe but is quite a popular and well selling color.

1 // I love green personality
I personally adore green. All my life green has been my favorite color. I love a bright apple green but also love the pastel minty greens and all shades olive, grass and nature. I just painted my living room wall; another fresh green over the old olive color. If you are a green loving creature like me you might also like to be in touch with nature every once in a while. A walk in the forest keeps my head fresh and organized. You are probably a very compassionate person if you are a green-lover, you enjoy looking at yourself under a microscope and having an in dept relationship with yourself and others around you. Green gives you the energy to love, transform and open up to the world around you but also focus on inner health and being.

2 // Green & branding
Green always had a pretty dusty image. Just like nature. 20 years ago thinking about mother nature was only done by people who were wearing woolen socks and eating fresh veggies every day which was obviously not cool. My mom was one of those uncool people and we were very uncool kids. Our food was not wrapped in fancy packaging and not promoted and branded like candy, veggies were not cool. But, times have changed for the better. We are becoming more aware of our footprints and most of us now read ingredients when food is pre-packed. The green revival! People start caring. At last. Green used to be the color for serious law agencies and eco-products. Now the color has become a trend. Mint and olive are hot selling colors and pop up in new start-up logo’s for interior design, clothing. Green has become a lot more ‘every day’. And now actually sells.



3 // The color of love
Green is the color of the heart chakra. You might think of red when you think about the color of love but it is in fact green that influences acceptance and stimulates healing. Starting with self-acceptance you grow towards loving yourself and others. The deeper meaning of love. The heart chakra can be overly active or out of balance, this will affect relationships with friends and family. Surround yourself with green if you are having heart problems, lung problems or tention in muscles in your upper body. The heart is a place that has to be taken care of. Get yourself a dose of green every once in a while!

4 // Green ease
Studies have shown that people that were out in nature regularly are less stressed and are more in harmony with themselves and others. It made them more alive and grounded. Imagine getting out of that gym and doing some exercises outside, in a park. This environment is way more effective. Recently a study showed that kids with an ADHD ‘label’ benefit from a day in the park or playing in a forest. Not very surprisingly: when kids get in contact with nature they get more balanced. What a shock! (I am being sarcastic here…) We are so used to bringing our kids to school where they sit down in a classroom all day and well, of course they will have a break but those school playgrounds lack of green. Imagine those little ones focussing on the little leaves and moss, pine needles and twigs, climbing in trees and jumping over tiny streams of water. They will be so much more focussed after a nature break.

5 // Girls & boys
This year mint green has been our crazy hotselling color in prints that were licensed but also trending color on fabric and wallpaper. Mint green is a delecate gender neutral color and we love how this soft shade pops up in fashion and interiors all around the world. Green used to be one of the most difficult colors in sales but mint will be on trend staying strong for at least another few seasons.

Freshtastic Little Smilemakers Fabric: Memphis Style Abstracts // August selection

Every month we upload new work to our Spoonflower shop and over the past 5 years our portfolio has grown from zero to over 3000 designs to choose from. Behind the scenes we can search within our portfolio but we noticed customers have a hard time finding what they want sometimes. With our monthly Freshtastic Fabric post we feature new fabric that was added to our shop. We include some direct links to these new designs and color versions. Hopefully we can filter on trend designs and make the process of selecting prints a little easier.

For our August post we selected some of our new abstracts. I love making designs with a little raw edge. For these series of designs we used large brushes, ink and paint rollers and turned those abstract spots and strokes into beautiful series for the summer season. Colorful raw Memphis Style inspired abstract fabric designs for cool kids clothes and fun items to color your home. Hopefully you like them as much as I do and we hope to se some finished creations pop up in our feeds.

Lemons
What is your favorite fruit? I personally love all sorts of fruit prints. I have had my cherry fase, some apple years and of course with my wodka fase came the lime. For this summer we have made some fun fruit prints like these lemons to match our memphis Style inspired collection. We made them in three colors that are now also available in different scales: mint, pink and yellow.

Strokes & Circles
The base of these designs are either large brush strokes or circles. Together with these tiny spots and beige rain drop shapes they form a nice matching collection for cool abstract clothes for your kids or fun colorful summer decoration for your interior. Here are the links to these 5 matching prints: Sand Raindrops, White Circles, Black Circles, Sand Strokes, Yellow Strokes.

Summer Rain
All sky related designs have been trending the past year so for our memphis collection we also included some abstract raindrops. We have made them in colorful summer colors, beige blue, pastel pink, blue and pink, and winter color schemes as well. You can mix and match with other prints of this collection, the dot details are similar to other fabric.

Dots
Some new colorful dots are also added to the fabric collection. We have made some fresh summer color schemes to mix and match with these Memphis Series but you can also mix and match then with our summer animals and other abstracts we have made for the warmer season. You can find the link here, from top to bottom: Lilac, Blue, Peach, Black, Yellow, Mint. Hope you like these new additions to the shop!

Fabric Feature Friday: Little Chief Apparel

Little Smilemakers Studio sells around 2000 designs on fabric all over the world. From Spoonflower to Robert Kaufman and small online fabric shops in Europe our fabric travels fast. Every first Friday of each month we feature one of our fabric customers. From small start up businesses in home decor to stay at home mommies who create cute little fashion for there kids. Some just pop out.

This Friday we would like to share this great Etsy shop: Little Chief Apparel. A children's clothing brand started by a young mother in Minnesota. She asked us to create some new color schemes around fall and here is the result of her creative input. We especially love the cute orange triangle series and the purple geometric cross fabric, leggings, shirts and head bands, our most popular prints on fabric but in our most recent colors. A great refreshing combo! And we love their fun colorful photography to sell these creative results. We are proud to see they create such gorgeous items with our fabric. Hopefully there is a lot more to come!

Want to get your hands on one of these? Check Little Chief Apparel's online shop.

Spoonflower // New sport lycra fabric

Spoonflower has introduced a new type of fabric which is now available in the shop. Sport Lycra is 88% polyester and 12% Lycra® fiber, with the durability and quality you need to make workout apparel that stands up to many workouts and washings. This fabric offers great color, is breathable and quick drying with a great stretch and a beautiful sheen.

So if you would like to make your own pair of yoga leggings, cute swim wear for your little ones or breathable gym fashion check out the new fabric and order your favorite Little Smilemakers design! We are very curious to see what you will create with this new stretchy fabric. Looking forward to seeing all result. You can post your final diy projects on our Facebook page of tag #littlesmilemakers on instagram.