Category Archives: On-demand fabric printing

Turtle Tee

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Another week, another Spoonflower design contest.  This one is in partnership with the publishers of the series of books called One-Yard Wonders — sewing books with projects you can make with one yard of fabric.  They’re putting together a new book aimed at projects to make for children.  The contest was to design a girl’s tee shirt with the theme “Under the Sea”, and the winning design will be in the new book.  The pattern for the tee shirt was provided.

With Under the Sea as the theme, I immediately though about doing a version of a Hawaiian shirt, using the turtles that I’ve used in a quilt design and in a chevron pattern for another contest. Continue reading →

Creating the Quilt Top for “Urban Sunset”

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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 →

Pointy Pink Plaid and Illustrator CS6’s New Pattern Function

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I’ve been learning to use Adobe Illustrator to create repeating designs for fabric (here’s an example, and another one).  There’s a new version of Illustrator (CS6) which has a new feature allowing you to easily create repeat patterns.  I’ve been wanting to try it, and as luck would have it, Spoonflower.com announced a contest to create an Arrow-themed fabric design using the new version of Illustrator.  Perfect excuse to try it out, and I learned some important things about how the pattern function works in Illustrator.  (You can see my final design here and vote for your favorites in the contest here.) Continue reading →

Creating the Fabric Designs for “Urban Sunset”

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When I created this fabric design for a contest 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 →

Turtles on the Beach — Another Fabric Design

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Spoonflower’s contest this week is to design a one-yard zigzag cheater quilt.

I immediately thought of the turtle I’ve used in a few other designs.  This post shows a Hawaiian design I made using the turtle.  I figured it would be a fun motif to use in a zigzag design.

One of the things I love about creating designs to print on fabric is that I can make them much more complex than I could if I were to create a quilt using traditional methods of piecing and appliqueing fabric. Continue reading →

Painted Daisies, Take 2

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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 →

Painted Daisies, Take 1

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Another week, another fabric design challenge…  Spoonflower and Robert Kaufman Fabrics are sponsoring the Fabric8 contest.  The challenge is to create a modern fabric design that evokes the style of pen & ink drawings colored with watercolor paints.  This isn’t my usual style, so I thought it would be a good challenge to tackle to stretch myself.

When I think of modern fabrics, I think of bright colors and bold styles–again, not exactly what I’d picture for pen and ink drawings colored with watercolors.  So, anyway, here’s my interpretation of the theme. Continue reading →

Urban Sunset Revisited

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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 to 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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Urban Sunset — Making a Seamless Repeat in Photoshop

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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 →

Sam’s Baby Quilt

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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.

Continue reading →