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
Watercolor Coneflowers is my quilt for the Fall 2012 Blogger’s Quilt Festival. It’s a small art quilt that I’ve been working on to donate to the Alzheimer’s Art Quilt Initiative (which has already raised over $773,000 to raise awareness of Alzheimer’s and fund research). Both of my parents suffered from Alzheimer’s, and you can read more about why I support AAQI here. Continue reading
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
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
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
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
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
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
A plaid, or Tartan, pattern consists of criss-crossing bands of different color threads in the lengthwise (warp) and crosswise (weft) orientations. The distinctive diagonal lines in plaids are created by weaving in a twill pattern. To create a plaid effect in Photoshop Elements we need to be able to mimic the twill weaving pattern. Continue reading
Color On Cloth 