In this earlier post I talked about creating the fabric I used in my quilt Urban Sunset. My original plan was to use the fabric as-is and create several whole cloth quilts. However, the more I looked at the printed fabrics (shown below), the more I thought I’d need to cut them up.
I wanted this fabric to be the majority of the quilt, and I decided to use circles since I was looking for an abstract sunset over a city. Continue reading
When I created this fabric design for a conte
st at Spoonflower, I knew I wanted to expand on the idea and design some fabric to make a quilt. In an earlier post, I talked about my initial efforts.
I created the designs in Photoshop, using a custom brush that I’d made from a photograph of bricks. 
I used a limited color palette, and used multiple layers in Photoshop to keep each of the colors in its own layer. I did this so I’d be able to rearrange the order of the layers to get different effects with the colors. I also used more than one layer for each of the colors, again to be able to control the depth of the colors. Continue reading
In a recent post I showed how I created “Urban Sunset”–a repeat design for a fabric design contest. I really liked the design and thought I’d try t
o create a non-repeating design that I could print on fabric and then turn into a whole cloth quilt. My plan is to create a design that’s about a yard wide so I can have it printed at Spoonflower on a full yard of fabric.
Here’s the ‘brick’ brush I created in Photoshop. It’s slightly different from my earlier post in that I cleaned up the edges a bit. I used only this brush in all the designs.
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In a previous post I talked about simulating the look of a Tartan plaid using Photoshop Elements. The same technique can be used to create a digital version of other weave patterns. I won’t go through all the steps which were covered in the earlier post, but the basic steps are:
Houndstooth is a popular pattern lately, and easy enough to create digitally. Continue reading
Recently Spoonflower and the Textile Center in Minneapolis, MN sponsored a design contest called Urban Sightings. The aim was to design a fabric using, as inspiration, photos taken of the neighborhood around the Textile Center .
There were six photos, and I used the five below as my inspiration.
I used the photo of bricks to create a brush in Photoshop. Continue reading
Traditional batik designs are created by placing hot wax patterns on fabric, and then dyeing the fabric. The wax resists the dye and keeps the fabric beneath the wax the original color. Dharma Trading has a colorful and fun explanation of creating batiks here.
The batik effect is easy to simulate in Photoshop, and the resulting image can be printed on fabric or used anywhere you need a seamless repeating pattern. Continue reading
I entered another of Spoonflower’s weekly fabric contests. This one called for a one-yard image that included four distinct coordinating fabric designs, including at least one stripe pattern and one dot pattern. I’m not sure why I enter these contests…but it’s fun working on the designs and I’m learning a lot about Photoshop and Illustrator and repeat pattern design in the process.
I thought I’d try to use the ten colors in the Pantone Spring 2012 fashion color trends as my palette, since it’s trendy and these are not colors I’d normally pick (especially Sweet Lilac). A floral theme seemed to fit well with the spring colors, so I started gathering some of my photos of daisy-like flowers. Continue reading
One of Spoonflower’s recent weekly fabric design contests was to design a fabric using a recipe as part of the design. I’m not much of a cook (my husband does most of the cooking, though I’ve mastered the NY Times No-Knead Bread), so I don’t have any go-to recipes.
As I thought about this contest, I remembered my grandmother’s hand-written cookbook from the 1930’s. Gockoo (as we called her) wrote her recipes in a journal and added ones she found in newspapers or magazines, or ones she got from friends. I found her recipe for apple crisp pudding and thought it would make a nice nostalgic print, especially since there were only a handful of ingredients in the recipe. Continue reading
In this earlier post I showed how to create a tartan plaid pattern in Photoshop. That 
method simulates the weave characteristic of a real tartan plaid, with the distinct diagonal twill pattern, like the one shown here.
As an alternative, here’s a really quick way to create a seamless plaid in Photoshop Elements. Continue reading
In a previous post I talked about the improvisational approach I took to create a quilt from two silk scarves I bought while on vacation in Kauai.
That previous post showed some of the different layouts I’d tried–b
oth on the computer and on my design wall–for all the pieces I’d sewn together. The picture on the right shows nearly the final design. Just a few more pieces were added for the final quilt.
The completed quilt top is pictured below. Continue reading
Color On Cloth 