Tuesday 11 September 2012

Designing fabric



Yesterday I designed this fabric (and some more) on Spoonflower. I thought you might be interested in the design process. The picture above shows the fat quarter view (21 x 18 inch); below is the swatch view (8x8 inch):



To create this fabric I used a set of stacked boxes that we got for one of my sons when he was a baby:



I made a series of photos of the boxes, seen from above:



... and cropped and edited them with Picasa (free photo-editing software):





Then I uploaded the photos to Spoonflower and used their Change Colors tool to do just that:



Spoonflower allows you to view the following layout options for your design: centered; basic repeat; half drop; half brick and mirror repeat (go here and have a look to see what I am talking about). My Stacked designs look great in mirror repeat - or so I think! - because it gives them that log cabin-ness, but basic repeat also looks good:



If you haven't tried Spoonflower yet, do give it a go - it's so much fun! After you have ordered a test swatch you can also put your fabric up for sale, and earn 10% of the sales (Spoonflower gets the rest, because they do everything except designing - printing the fabric, cutting it and sending it to the customer). My Dutch Houses and Calligrammar collections supply me with a nice bit of pocket money every month.

When ordering your design you can choose from 10 different fabrics - among them basic combed cotton, cotton voile, cotton silk, cotton knit and silk crepe de chine. I had a fat quarter of my Colour Pencils design printed on linen-cotton canvas:




.. and used it to make another Rainbow Pencil Roll:


Do let me know if you have designed any fabrics on Spoonflower!

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Yes, it's fun, Spoonflower. I've made designs, but haven't actually taken it any further, but it's a nice toy!