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
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
The October challenge for the Fast Friday Fabric Challenge group is Notan. Here’s the challenge description: Notan is a Japanese concept that utilizes black and white to demonstrate the contrast of positive and negative space. Often done as pen-and-ink
drawings, Notan can easily be adapted to fabric with stunning results. This
technique can help us evaluate our own skills with balancing the
positive/negative space in our quilts.
Notan is traditionally done in ink on paper, but is now often do
ne as a cut paper collage using the “expansion of the square” technique. This star cutout is a simple example — a star shape is cut from the black square and then flipped outward and placed on the negative white space, creating a positive/negative mirror image.
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.
Color On Cloth 