What is Blender Bonanza?
If you've spent any time selling on Spoonflower, you'll know that blender patterns are the unsung heroes of the platform. Simple, versatile, endlessly useful, they're the coordinates that quilters and sewists reach for again and again to pull a project together. And yet they're often the last thing designers think to create.
Blender Bonanza is an annual challenge hosted by Erin Kendal of the Power Seller Academy, a membership community for Spoonflower sellers that is packed with expertise, strategy and genuine encouragement. Erin is one of those rare people who combines deep platform knowledge with a real passion for helping other designers grow. I'd known of her for years before I finally took the leap and joined her community, and the Blender Bonanza challenge was what pushed me over the edge.
The premise is simple: fourteen prompts, fourteen blender patterns, created alongside a community of designers all exploring the same brief in their own way. What actually happens is something much richer than that.
Why I Joined
This wasn't actually my first encounter with Erin or her community. Back in 2024, I'd joined the Power Seller Academy during an earlier attempt to launch Jo Froud Design Studio, but the timing wasn't right. Dolly and Fred (my children's prints and stationery business) still needed most of my attention, and with everything pulling in different directions, I never got the most out of the membership. I quietly stepped away, but I kept following Erin on Instagram, and her emails kept coming into my inbox.
Fast forward to early 2026, and I had finally decided to close Dolly and Fred for good. Getting my patterns onto Spoonflower was my sole creative focus, and right at the moment I was wondering what my next steps should be, Erin's Blender Bonanza email landed.
I already knew I wanted to rejoin the membership. But the annual payment wasn't something I could commit to straight away, so I did what felt right. I waited patiently for the monthly membership to open up, and in the meantime, I used everything Erin generously shared as part of the free challenge to dive as deep as I possibly could. Sometimes the timing of things is just right.
The Process
I approached the challenge the same way I approach everything - methodically. One prompt at a time, sketch to finished pattern, before moving on to the next. For most of the designs I started in my sketchbook with fineliners, making marks and building up the motif by hand before vectorising and moving into repeat. There's something grounding about starting with pen on paper, even when the final destination is a digital file.
Some of the prompts were completely new territory, things I'd never heard of, let alone illustrated. That discomfort was good for me. Others slotted naturally into collections I was already developing, Harbour Light and Coastal Curiosities both found unexpected companions in the challenge prompts, which felt like a lovely creative gift.
It's worth saying that I never stopped creating patterns during the years Dolly and Fred took centre stage. But those patterns were bright, bold motifs for children's stationery, a very different creative register. The Blender Bonanza challenge felt like the moment my design work grew up. Quieter, more considered, more me.
The colour exploration was the part I loved most. I aimed for twelve colourways per pattern, often anchoring each one with my signature Chalk Cliff tone, either as the background or the motif colour. For the first half of the challenge, I worked intuitively. For the second half, I discovered Erin's incredible compiled document of 2026 trending paint colours from major brands, including Sherwin-Williams and Benjamin Moore, and that became my colour go-to. Suddenly, I wasn't just making beautiful patterns; I was making market-ready ones.
The Designs
Fourteen prompts. Up to twelve colourways each. Over one hundred new patterns were added to my Spoonflower shop in one focused creative sprint, and honestly, I'm still a little amazed I pulled that off.
The designs range from delicate lace-inspired textures to bold geometric structures, from classic ticking stripes to more historically styled patterns that I genuinely surprised myself with. The textural boho geometric was one of my favourites; there was something about the balance of structure meeting fluidity that felt like a real creative breakthrough. It was also through this challenge that I properly learned how to layer and build texture into a pattern, a skill that has quietly found its way into almost everything I've created since.
The ticking stripe became something of an unexpected muse. Simple, timeless, endlessly versatile, I've used variations of it as coordinate prints in several collections since the challenge, including Harbour Light and Puffin Play. Some challenges give you finished products. This one gave me building blocks.
All fourteen base designs are available in multiple colourways exclusively on Spoonflower. A handful have since found a second home as coordinates within my pattern collections here on the studio site, and a few are quietly waiting to become the starting point for something new entirely.
What I Learned
Blender Bonanza arrived at exactly the right moment. I was relaunching my studio, rebuilding my creative confidence, and trying to find my rhythm again after years of divided focus. The challenge gave me all three: a structure to work within, a community to work alongside, and a creative kickstart that I genuinely needed.
The biggest lesson was about texture. I've always loved working with it, but the challenge pushed me to new levels, proving that even the simplest blender pattern can be filled with interest and depth when you layer thoughtfully. That understanding has quietly transformed how I work. I now think about blenders differently, not as an afterthought but as an essential part of a collection's story, and sometimes as a small, joyful creative outlet on a day when time is short.
If you're on the fence about joining the challenge, here's my honest advice: do it. The community that gets behind Blender Bonanza is genuinely lovely, the pressure is low, and there's no expectation to complete every single prompt. But if you do follow through, the patterns you create in that one month of intensity will keep working for you in the months and years ahead.
The most important step is always the action itself. As someone wise once said, it doesn't matter that the frog has decided to jump off the lily pad. What matters is that he actually jumps.
Go Find Erin
I wouldn't have written this post without Erin Kendal and the Power Seller Academy. If you're a Spoonflower seller, whether you're just starting out or you've been on the platform for years, I cannot recommend her community highly enough. She has a wealth of knowledge, a genuine passion for helping designers grow, and a way of making the whole thing feel both achievable and exciting.
You can find Erin and the Power Seller Academy here. If Blender Bonanza comes around again next year, keep your eyes on her Instagram and your inbox; you'll want to be ready when it does.
With love,
Jo x
