Happy Dance! New iPhone 6 Cover

I started a new job in December so I was the happy recipient of a new work iPhone 6 (as opposed to my lovely old iPhone 4 that I still use for personal stuff). I decided I really needed a sweet cover for it so I auditioned several of my Llama Land patterns for the job. And the winner was...

This time around, I decided to use Zazzle which I've used for print products in the past (wedding invites). I think the colors turned out really true to the original.

Here's the front/side. The colors usually get a little wonky on the edges. Isn't that a cute beagle face!?

I'm always really nervous the picture won't be crisp, but this really turned out perfect. I paid about $32 for it with their New Years coupon code (usually retails for $40), so it was well worth the price!

I'm also awaiting a custom case that I ordered for my mom for Christmas. Christmas you say? Wasn't that like two weeks ago? YES OMG! She has a Nexus 5, which I discovered not many companies sell custom cases for, gggrrrr. So I ordered from Case-Custom. They manufacture the cases in China and there was a major shipping issue so despite having ordered it on December 6, it has still not arrived on January 10... ridiculous.

Anyways, rant over, new phone case yay!

Llama Llama Llama

In the progression of my pattern design dabbling, I decided the next step was to try to put together a coordinated collection of patterns.

Since I started out with the Fancy Camel, the obvious next step was a llama I doodled a few months ago. I started a Pinterest board, and found lots of textiles, carvings and artwork from South America for inspiration. I did a page of hand-drawn doodles and got started...

Lots of colors, lots going on... it was a pretty great starting point. Unfortunately I had to do the whole thing twice because of my Illustrator novice, but then came the llamas!

I ended up making five different patterns total and varied them up with different colors from the same color schemes and some similar hand-drawn shapes.

My husband declared the this one looked like Christmas trees so at least its seasonally appropriate? Finally here's the whole shebang together:

My very favorites were the circles. Particularly the dark blue and white (obviously my favorites colors if you've ever seen this blog or my closet before).

All in all, it was more good practice figuring out what worked and what didn't work. I think the biggest lesson for me from this was really to take my time. As previously confessed, I have a tendency to rush something on to the page and call it "good enough," but never actually be happy with it.

I'm not saying all of these patterns turned out perfectly, but I really learned that taking my time with layout, spacing, colors, etc. really brought out a better result... (I know, I know, duh). I was overall please with the result and proud how far of come since some of my early self-taught efforts :)