Spoonflower and Robert Kaufman Fabrics are sponsoring a fabric design contest with the theme being “Geek Chic”. As a chemical engineer in a previous life, I have a lot of practical experience with geeky things, so I had tons of design ideas to start with.
I thought I’d do something with chemical symbols, but I couldn’t come up with anything that seemed like an interesting design. I drew a number of geeky accoutrements, including the ties, test tube, sneaker and glasses below.
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.
Color On Cloth 