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
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
A key step in fabric design is being able to create a seamless repeat. In this tutorial I’ll walk through a method to create a seamless repeat using Photoshop Elements (the steps are quite similar if you’re using Photoshop).
I started with this photo of a rooster (taken on a recent trip to Hawaii). Note how the background is different in each of the 4 corners — this is what needs to be fixed to create the seamless repeat. The photo on the right shows the photo in repeat, with the edges very distinct from one tile to the next.
1. Open your file in Photoshop Elements. Crop the image and make any adjustments you’d like to the photo. The photo will be one tile of your repeat pattern. It’s good for peace of mind to always create a duplicate layer just in case you mess up the photo too much and want to start over.
2. Note the size of your image in pixels (Image –>Resize –>Image Size). For my photo, the image size is 1000 pixels by 750 pixels.
3. In this step, we’ll “cut” the photo in half both horizontally and vertically. This will show us where the edges and corners are mismatched and need fixing. From the menu, choose Filter–>Other–>Offset. In the pop-up box, divide the width of your image, in pixels, by 2 and type the number in the Horizontal offset box. Then divide your image’s height by 2 and type the number in the Vertical offset box.
The result shows the photo “cut” up and pasted back together, and there are two clear lines through the middle vertically and horizontally where the photo doesn’t blend seamlessly.
4. In this step we’ll fix these edges. There are several different tools in Photoshop Elements you can use to make these edits, depending on your photo and your preferences. There’s the clone stamp tool, smudge tool, and paint brush tool. I used the healing brush tool. Using a series of small fixes, I blended the two sides of each edge to remove the harsh transition.
In this photo, the edges all occur in the photo’s background, so there aren’t any really distinct features. If you’re working with an image where there are distinct lines across the edges, these need to be fixed carefully so that the repeat ends up seamless. Here’s the photo (or tile) after all the edges were cleaned up.
6. At this point, if you’re done with your image, or if you just want to see how it looks in a repeat, the next step is to define the repeat pattern. Do this from the menu: Edit–>Define Pattern, and save it with any name you’d like. Then, create a new blank file in Photoshop Elements. Make sure it’s large enough to show at least 2 tiles both horizontally and vertically. From the menu, choose Edit–>Fill Layer. In the pop-up (shown below on the right) in the Contents section, choose to use Pattern from the drop-down list, and then select your new pattern from the Custom Pattern list, then click OK.
This tile creates the following repeat pattern, and the tile edges are pretty much gone.
Color On Cloth 