Monthly Archives: December 2015

December Update!

I’ve updated the blog pattern pages with images and links of recently published patterns, including Revetment, Breakwater, and others on the Shawl page; Coast Oak Cowl on the Cowl page; Coast Oak Hat on the (yes, you guessed it) Hat page, and Spa Cloths 4, 5, 6 on the For the Home page.

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The Coast Oak Cowl and Hat, shown above, just came out yesterday, and are worked in the lovely Kismet Fiber Works Sleek DK.

I have a ton of patterns (9!) nearly ready for publication; all I need to do on most is photography.  You can get a sneak peek by browsing through the test threads in my Ravelry group here.  Most are hats (6), most are unisex, and all are great for gift giving!

On that note, the Indie GAL is still going strong — check out the group here.

kc logoMany of my designs are now available in the Knit Companion formatting in the Create2Thrive Shop.  Check out the my patterns here.

What’s in the works? I’m doing a gradient shawlette with Lorna’s Laces Shepherd Sock for TNNA in early January.  I’ve finished up a couple third-party designs.  I’ll be doing a design for the Indie Untangled  Where We Knit yarn club — you can sign up here.  I’m excited to be working with Christine from Skeinny Dipping for the club.

Chandelier …

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Process: Advent Calendar Noel Image

Hello! I just wanted to introduce myself in case you hadn't met me before.  I'm Adriana Hernandez-Bergstrom!  I go by Adriprints on my work, and  you can find me really easily with that moniker.  I'm the founder of the Finch & Foxglove art collective, and I did the first illustration on our digital Advent Calendar.

I am a really process-oriented person and I love learning how others get to the images they do.  I hope you can learn a little bit from my process too!

The "Noel Peppermint Bark" illustration started off as a doodle that I did in August or September.  I was at my mom's house playing around with an old watercolor set that I had left at her house in case all my luggage was lost.  In my mind, I was working on a tropical-Christmas kind of theme...



In between then and now, our group came up with a wonderful color palette for our advent calendar.  We looked at vintage Christmas postcards to get us started.  These colors were rich and wonderful, but not really tropical... and I really wanted to use the "Noel" lettering.  So I traced the lettering in Adobe Illustrator with the pen tool, used a color from our palette, and started working on composition with the other illustration assets that matched the palette a bit better.  I had created these assets or icons a few weeks ago by painting in watered down gouache.  They were extras from the greeting card project I did in October, and I did a direct "live trace" using Adobe Illustrator to capture them...


Once I had a composition that I liked, I brought each element separately into Photoshop, converted them to Vector Smart Objects and began to add texture and depth...


I really wanted a rich feeling like chocolate in the background, and at first I tried mint + chocolate with the lettering...


But, as you can see it looked a bit too cold in this version.  It read like mold or marble or something unappetizing.  So, next I tried peppermint, and that is what you see in the final image.  A little bit tastier, I think!



This is just one of the many illustrations in our wonderful digital advent calendar.  Follow along on our Finch & Foxglove Advent Calendar page!