This week’s Spoonflower design contest is to create a Mod wallpaper design, using only 3 colors (plus black or white optional). When I was a teen, I had one wall of my bedroom papered with an op art design (much like this one by Alberto Biasi), and though I’m not sure it fits in the Modernist Subculture, I decided to go with an op art inspiration for my design.
I started 
by creating a simple grid of circles. Then, using the Adobe Illustrator distort options, I played with different options.
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.
Spoonflower’s weekly design contest theme is “Sailing” and I immediately knew I wanted to use the Notan design I wrote about in this post.
That design used 4 different sail boat-inspired patterns (on the left below), combined Nolan-style into the 16 blocks on the right.
Another week, another Spoonflower fabric design contest. The theme for this contest is Painted Eggs.
I thought I’d create a bunch of 3-dimensional eggs and ‘paint’ them with some of my other fabric designs.
First, here’s how I created a 3d egg in Adobe Illustrator (version CS5).
Another week, another Spoonflower fabric design contest. The theme for this contest is Australian Animals. So many great options it was hard to pick — kangaroos, wombats, koala bears, emu, platypus, Tasmanian devils… I googled Australian art and was inspired by the Aboriginal dot paintings. I thought I’d try a modern take on the dot paintings using kangaroos and geckos.
I’ll go through the technique I used in Adobe Illustrator to create the multicolored animals. 
I started by drawing outlines of a gecko and a kangaroo. I wanted to keep the outlines pretty simple since there would be a lot of detail inside each animal.
When I was in 7th grade my science fair project was on snowflakes, and I learned how to capture snowflakes in a plastic solution on glass slides and then photograph them. My inspiration was Wilson Bentley’s work. So, when Spoonflower’s weekly contest was to create a snowflake design, I knew I’d have to design something.
Unfortunately, I don’t have any of my snowflake photos any more, so I looked around the web for inspiration. You can see many more beautiful snow flakes like these at SnowCrystals.com.
I’ve been working on a snowflake design for another Spoonflower contest. When I thought I was all done with it, I realized that it would look better as a half-brick repeat rather than a straight repeat. It took me a while to rework it into a half-brick repeat, so I thought I’d show the basic steps in this post, and then cover the details in another post.
A half-brick repeat is similar to a half-drop repeat which I covered in this post. The picture below shows the difference between a straight repeat (on the left) where the stars are lined up on top of each other, and a half-brick (on the right) where each row of stars is offset from the rows above and below.
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
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 desi
gns. 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
We have friends visiting from out of town, and the two middle-school-aged kids like to do art projects. I thought it would be fun to show them how to do repeat patterns using their own drawings. They can use their repeat patterns as wallpaper for their computer or phone screens.
The steps are pretty simple, leaving lots of time and energy for creativity. Continue reading
Color On Cloth 