Guest Designers

It is past time for me to share a pattern from another guest designer. I first became aware of Belgium designer Gerard Van Kerckhoven when he shared several of his designs in Facebook groups in which we are both members. Like me, Gerard is often inspired by pictures of actual buildings. For this design, Gerard used an ad for a 1916 Sears catalog home.

It has been almost a year since I last shared a pattern from a guest designer. I really enjoy working with other designers and wish that more were interested in sharing their patterns. I understand their hesitation, though. First, it is a lot of work to design a pattern to share or sell. I have made as many as 15 drafts of a building before being happy with the design. Also, when you know you are going to share a design you have to measure and be precise – you can’t just make a little change with your scissors and move on. You have to go back and revise your pattern for every little change – sometimes over and over again! Lastly, most designers I meet that don’t have their own blog or sell their patterns are only interested in making their pattern once for their own village and then moving on to the next building. Cheryl and I have spent most of this month working on the pattern and the models for Moss Lodge.

I am so excited about this post! This week I am honored to be able to share the pattern for Meg Danforth’s Lafayette Square.

What is so exciting this time is that 1) it’s a Victorian, which are always my favorite, 2) Meg makes gorgeously detailed buildings, and 3) Meg is a ringer with Inkscape and makes her own SVGs! Plus Meg has done all of the hard work of sizing the pattern to fit with the Tim Holtz Village dies.

If you would like to be a guest designer Just reach out to me to work out the details. While finished SVGs make me extra happy, I would also be willing to convert PDFs or (gulp) – hand drawn patterns. Those take me the longest to make and share, however! My main requirement is that you allow me to share the finished files for free on my blog for a minimum of a month.

While we are waiting for Steven to design the promised last 4 buildings in his North Pole series, I have started converting the other patterns he has sent me. Steven Leeds designs traditional Putz buildings using CAD and cuts them out of chipboard. He was posting his patterns in PDF form in a Facebook group we both belong to, and people began to ask for his files in SVG format. I volunteered to convert them so they would work in Cricut Design Space, and since Facebook wouldn’t allow me to share SVGs, host the files on my site. I started with the North Pole series as they were the newest, and Steven was very open to feedback on how to design with CAD so that the patterns were easily converted to SVGs. The other set of files Steven sent me (17 in total!) he designed more than two years ago and they are proving to be a bit more challenging. Steven didn’t name this set, so I have called them Glitter Town.