More Adventures in Fabric Design

At the moment I'm fascinated with the process of designing patterns which can be printed on fabrics.  I spent a lot of my time in September doing on-line classes trying to learn the basics of  Adobe's IllustratorCC.  It's a program on Adobe's CreativeCloud.  The first month can be a free trial so I was working hard to see what I could accomplish in those 30 days.

I started out by drawing a complex design and using IllustratorCC to trace it.  The program did a great job of tracing but I didn't have the skills needed to color it.  This is not a program you can just jump into casually.  So I went back to the start to learn how to do use the program step-by-step. Watching videos on-line is awesome, but it's important to actually practice using the tools in the program as you learn about them.

After a few days I decided to try creating a basic design that was well within my skill set.  I use a medium Wacom Intuos Pen Tablet, but my "Dancing Circles" designs are simple enough to be done with a mouse.  You can see my first attempt in the printed proofs I got from Spoonflower.com which are shown above.  This design is based on circles inside circles created using the Ellipse tool.  The linear variation was done using a straight line and the Snap To feature with a Grid visible on the Art Board. 

I liked my designs, but on the proofs I discovered my pen had apparently touched my tablet several times, leaving tiny black dots on each of the circle designs. I find errors on the prints that I just don't see when I'm looking at my computer screen.  Clearly there is a good reason Spoonflower won't allow the sale of a design until a proof has been printed and approved by the designer!

So I went back to Illustrator and deleted all the accidental dots.  Then I went back to Spoonflower and used PicMonkey, a program available through Spoonflower.com to apply several different colors in the background and to change the size of my circles on some of the designs. Then I ordered another set of proofs. Here is that proof sheet.

Second Set of Proofs of "Dancing Circles" printed by Spoonflower.com

The tiny black dots are gone!  But this time I found faint halos around the circles with the darkest backgrounds. That didn't occur on the first proofs.  I'm not sure what happened.  But I'm happy with the white background, the light grey background and the light lavender background, which all look great, so those are my finished designs. 

I did learn how to do a lot more things in IllustratorCC by the end of my 30 day trial. I'll make more designs using Illustrator at some point.  At the moment I'm working on a project that just uses Adobe PhotoshopCC. And I have a quilt idea to use the 8x8 inch "Dancing Circle" proofs.

The Dancing Circles designs are available now in my shop at Spoonflower.com.  Even if you aren't planning to make a purchase, stop by and click the Like Heart if you really like a particular fabric!

Adventures in Designing Fabric printed at Spoonflower.com

One of my primary activities in August was trying my hand at designing fabrics. 

Earlier this year I was completely mesmerized watching the How to Design Fabric Work-Along on CreativeBug.com.  This comprehensive work-along features Lizzy House, Heather Ross and Denyse Schmidt.  Each of these well know designers of modern fabrics shares their skill and some of the techniques they use to create fabric lines.  It is totally amazing. 

Lizzy House shows step by step how to create repeats in a design by hand using a linoleum block. Heather Ross does the same in Adobe's Photoshop and Denyse Schmidt uses Adobe's Illustrator.  

Even if you never plan to do any surface designing yourself, most quilters will be fascinated just watching Chapter 5 of the Work-along. In this chapter, the 3 designers talk about how they create  a commercial fabric line. It is really interesting. 

So after watching this fabric design work-along a couple times I decided I had to try it myself!  Spoonflower.com makes printing your own designs totally doable. It is possible to order as little as an 8" swatch or a fat quarter, or multiple yards of fabric.  And they have so many types of fabrics they can print--from Kona® cotton to canvas and knits.  

To try to understand how to create a workable repeat in the fabric I drew out a design and followed along with Lizzie House's directions for creating repeats by hand. I learned a lot but since I wasn't going to hand print fabric I decided to try Photoshop. 

The cut cards used to explore creating repeats by hand

Adobe's Photoshop is a fairly intuitive program. It has a lot of elements which are similar to drawing on by hand. I spent several days watching an intro course on Lynda.com.  I was quite overwhelmed on that first day watching the training videos.  But by day three I was able to start using the program to create and manipulate scanned designs. Thanks to the segment by Heather Ross on making repeats I was able to do my own repeats.  It wasn't easy at first, but with each new design I began to understand how to create artwork than easily could be placed into repeats.  And I learned how to work in Layers in Photoshop to correct problems in the JPEGs of my artwork that Spoonflower. com uses to print the fabric. 

In all, between the designing and getting printed swatches to check for color and problems with the repeats, it took me most of August to create a small line of 5 fabrics which I call "Dogs at the Farmer's Market."  But I had so much fun and learned so much!  And it is such a thrill when the printed fabric arrives from Spoonflower.com! 

For those of you interested in trying to design your own fabrics, on September 1, 2015, Spoonflower.com released The Spoonflower Handbook which is a guidebook to designing and printing surface designs. It's a great resource. I wish it had been available when I started working with my designs.

At the top of this post is a photo of the "mother print" which is the focus fabric of my "Dogs a the Farmer's Market" fabric collection.  And here are the coordinating prints which go with it.

Cherries on a medium blue, cherries on light blue, Blueberries, Sugar Snap peas, Cone Flowers

In my next post Thursday this week,  I'll show you a baby size quilt that can be fussy cut using just 1 single fat quarter of each print in this collection and pieced with coordinating Kona® Cotton Solids.