Some friends had a baby recently and I knew it was a great excuse to make a quilt. I’d created a fabric design of interlocking blocks which could be personalized with the baby’s name, so I used that–Samuel Addison–as well as other words with significance to the parents, like Hoosier, baseball, Sox and clown, in creating the fabric design.
Here’s a portion of the printed fabric.
Each week Spoonflower sponsors a fabric design contest using different themes. (Spoonflower is an on-demand fabric printing company where you can upload your own designs and have them printed on fabric. You can also look at other people’s designs and buy those on fabric. It’s quite fun and addicting to design fabrics.)
The most recent contest was to design a Hawaiian Cheater Quilt. A Hawaiian Quilt traditionally is a radially symmetrical applique pattern, often in a botanical design using strong colors on a white background. Here’s an example from the International Quilt Study Center in Lincoln, Nebraska. Continue reading
Most printed commercial fabrics today are made using some form of screen printing technique. This requires a separate screen for each color which will be printed. More colors mean more screens and higher manufacturing costs. To keep costs down, designs may be color reduced to use fewer colors in the final manufacturing set up.
Printed commercial fabrics will often show the colors used in the printing process as numbered circles along the selvage of the fabric. Shown below are two colorways of the same design from Timeless Treasures. Each fabric was printed using the same screens, but 8 different colors, and the end results are different, with more contrast in the first fabric.
The design process for a commercial fabric might start with a hand-drawn or hand-painted design which is then scanned into a computer where the design and its repeat are finished. However, scanning an image is likely to result in thousands of colors–way too many for screen printing. A big part of the computer side of the design process is to reduce the number of colors to a manageable number–often less than a dozen–without sacrificing the quality of the original artwork. Once the “color reduction” is done, it’s a simple matter to change the colors to generate different colorways of the same design.
Digital printing technology allows anyone to print on fabric with virtually an unlimited number of colors. For many situations, there’s absolutely no need to color reduce a design before printing it with either your own inkjet printer or through one of the on-demand printing services (see here for some places to print your fabric).
Even though digital printers print with a huge range of colors, there are still some situations when color reducing a design is useful.
Color matching–When printing fabric on an inkjet printer, the colors you see on your computer screen are not always the colors you get on your fabric out of the printer. This can be frustrating and expensive.
A way to minimize this issue is to create your design using colors which you know how they will print on fabric. Most of the on-demand printing services offer color swatches and the corresponding digital file so you can see the printed color on fabric compared to the color on your computer screen–here’s an example of Spoonflower’s color guide. If you’re printing on your own inkjet, you can create and print your own color guide. When you use colors in your design from your color guide, you can be confident how the colors will print on fabric.
When you start your design with a photo or a scanned image, you might have colors in your design that you aren’t sure how they will look printed on fabric. Using Photoshop Elements (or other digital editing tools) you can replace colors in the design with known colors from your color guide. However a photo or scanned image might have thousands of colors, so to make color replacement manageable, the design first needs to be color reduced to a much smaller number of colors.
Colorways and color palettes—Two more reasons to color reduce a design are to create the design in different colorways or to create designs using a common color palette. I used these techniques in creating the designs for my Echinacea collection.
I started with the ‘focus fabric’ shown below. This design was color reduced to 64 colors.
Using Photoshop, I selected from the 64 colors in the design to create separate color palettes of blues, pinks and oranges. Then I replaced all the colors in the design with the blues to get the blue version of the coneflowers (below). Using this version of the design (now with about 10 colors rather than 64) I replaced the blues with pinks and then with oranges to get the different colorways.
I used the same color palettes to create the stripe fabrics to coordinate with the floral prints. You can see more fabric designs using these colors here.
In upcoming posts I’ll discuss how to use Photoshop Elements to color reduce a design. An example is below–the original photo is on the left, the color reduced design is in the middle, and a recolored version is on the right (zoom in to see the differences).
Spoonflower has a fabric design contest coming soon with a theme of black and white — the designs can only use black and white, no shades of gray allowed.
I’ve been playing with some of my photos of coneflowers, and converting them to look like pencil drawings.
Here are a couple of draft designs, both representing a fat quarter of fabric–22 inches by 18 inches. This was my first attempt, but I think it’s a bit too busy, and some of the areas are too dark.
Here’s another version, with some of the elements taken out, and some of the lines lightened up a bit. I like this one better, but I’ll probably rearrange the flowers a bit more.
I’ve also been working on a larger drawing to use in a quilt. Here’s what I have so far. My plan is to print this on white fabric and then add thread painting to get sort of a watercolor effect.
If you want to look at some great botanical art, check out Science-art.com and search on any keyword, such as coneflower.
Spoonflower and Michael Miller Fabrics got together to sponsor a fabric design contest, called Project Selvage. The challenge was to design a fabric for baby boys. The winner of the contest will earn a contract with Michael Miller to produce a collection. The designs were due to Spoonflower by March 24. I’m not sure, but it seems that there may have been over 1000 designs submitted (you can look through all these designs here.) From these many designs Spoonflower and Michael Miller will select 75 semifinalists, which will be announced March 31, and then voting will start in order to narrow the field to 10 finalists.
I wanted to design something for this contest, but though I came up with dozens of possibilities, none seemed the least bit unique. I was toying with the idea of blocks, and I remembered a couple quilts I made with an Escher-like pattern of blocks, which create an optical illusion. Here’s one of the small quilts.
I thought this might be an idea I could work with, so I went to Adobe Illustrator and started drawing the shapes for the blocks. I came up with this repeat pattern pretty quickly.
I liked the pattern, but thought it needed more, so I went into Photoshop and started adding letters on the blocks to make words, and then more words…I wanted to make sure I used all the letters in the alphabet. I made a few other changes–changed the green block face to red and added a background. Here’s the final entry, shown as a fat quarter.
This was a lot of fun to play with, but I’m not sure how this will do in the contest–this is definitely a large-scale design so it works for some things, but not for others, such as baby clothing.
I figured out how to make it more sell-able through Spoonflower if it doesn’t do well in the contest. Since there are so many blocks in the pattern, it’s easy enough for me to personalize the fabric design by adding a name into the pattern. The example below shows the pattern for “Michael” (white letters on red blocks).
Good luck to everyone who entered the contest–there are a lot of amazing “baby boy” designs.
My father used to play with my brother and me in the yard. Mother would come out and say, “You’re tearing up the grass”; “We’re not raising grass,” Dad would reply. “We’re raising boys”.
Harmon Killebrew
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
Marshall McLuhan
Color On Cloth 