I just received the fabric swatches of each of the designs I made for the Echinacea collection–very exciting! Up to this point, the designs only existed on my computer monitor, but now I have them in real fabric. Here’s a photo of the fabric with the 24 swatches (it definitely looks better in person).
To get an idea of the difference between seeing the design on a computer monitor and the design printed on fabric, here’s a picture that includes the digital design on the left and a photo of the actual fabric on the right. I tried to get the colors of the photo as close as possible to the actual fabric colors, but the fabric background is a bit bluer than this photo shows. You can see all the digital designs on my fabric page.
After seeing the fabric, I made a few minor adjustments to some of the designs. I’m not sure how the blue flowers in the upper left swatch got so gigantic, but I changed the size to an 8 inch by 8 inch repeat — the same repeat size as the other flowers. I also changed the size of the multi-colored flowers (row 4, second from left) to also be 8 by 8 inches — this swatch shows it at 12 by 12 inches. I modified the stripe colors in the pink, blue and orange striped fabrics in row 2. In each of these samples I didn’t think there was quite enough contrast between the stripes. I think this was mostly an issue of some of the colors being “out of gamut” for the printers that Spoonflower uses — basically the colors I saw on my computer monitor weren’t printed the same way by Spoonflower. This photo below shows this issue with the orange stripe design. On the left is the original design with an arrow pointing to some of the bright orange that was out of gamut. In the middle is the fabric with the arrow pointing to the same part of the fabric, but the orange color is not as vibrant and the contrast between the stripes is too low. On the right is the design with the corrected colors — the orange is a bit darker now and there’s more contrast.
Color On Cloth 
Actually, for a collection, I think it would be helpful to have a couple of flowers in the larger motif like the blue echinacea in the upper left corner. Other than the blue and the multicolored larger flowers, you don’t really have any large patterns, and for many quilt designers, a larger pattern would help. Just my two cents.
Oh, but the entire group is lovely; thanks for sharing your work and the comparisons.
Thanks for your comments about the pattern size–I totally understand the need for different scales. I wish Spoonflower would allow us to offer different repeat sizes, since once I’ve made a design, it’s easy for me to scale it up or down. I’ll have to check with them to see if this is possible.