Variations on a Fabric

A while ago, Spoonflower had a contest to create a Hawaiian ‘cheater’ quilt design, and I wrote about my design here and about the wall quilt I made from the fabric here.

Here’s the original design, using the turtles and flowers of Kauai.
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The Day My Quilt Bled and Almost Dyed

We’ve had this quilt on our bed for about 5 years.  I think it’s the third quilt I ever made, done all in my hand-dyed fabrics, and I’m quite attached to it.  I’m still amazed that I took on this project when I had minimal sewing/quilting skills and was sewing on a cheap Singer sewing machine.
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What’s for Dinner? How to Create a Half-drop Repeat in Illustrator

In this earlier post I showed how easy it is to create a seamless repeat in Illustrator.  Using a design I created for another contest on Spoonflower, I’ll show how quickly a design can be converted to a half-drop repeat.

First, here’s a comparison of a straight repeat (on the left) and a half-drop repeat (on the right).  The diagonal movement in the half-drop repeat is created by shifting each repeat unit (one star in the example)  vertically by 50 percent compared to its neighbor.

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Painted Daisies, Take 2

I played around some more with my Painted Daisies design, done for the Fabric8 Contest at Spoonflower.  Here was the previous version.

While I like the colors, the design seems boring.  I decided to try adding lots more layers of daisies to fill in all the spaces.  I made this first attempt by duplicating the layer and moving it–just to see if the idea might work. Continue reading →