My Very First Spoonflower Order

I have had an account with Spoonflower for years, and have always wanted to order some custom fabric from them, but the time never seemed quite right, until now, and now that I've received my order, I must say I LOVE their product! It's exactly what I was hoping for, and the colors and textures from my original image have carried over into fabric beautifully.

For anybody who does not know what Spoonflower is, it's basically one of the most powerful services available to an art quilter who wants to design her own fabric. Anyone with access to a computer and even super basic image editing software can upload an image to their site and have it printed on a variety of fabrics.  The fabric is washable, and the inkjet printing leaves no "feel" on the surface, so it can be used for quilts, clothing, table cloths, whatever you can think of! 

One yard of super bright, crisply detailed fabric.  Enough to cover a dog!

For my first order, I did not go with a repeating pattern but instead just created a yard-of-fabric sized file in Photoshop and dragged various images into it.  Spoonflower takes images that are 150 dpi and a yard of fabric is 36" by 42" - a file that big was pretty unwieldy, but it did manage to upload eventually!

The leafy photograph in the corner of the fabric is destined to be a wholecloth quilt with oil paint stick additions to bring out the quilting.

The polka dots should be useful for a variety of projects - that image I made back when I was in college, by hand-gluing a zillion 1/4" hole punches onto a piece of 8.5" by 11" card stock.  So. Much. Work, but it has continued to be useful ever since!

Most patient dog ever. I do love to torture him.

There are many ways to make a perfectly repeating pattern to print onto fabric, and Julia Rothman has written a superlative tutorial about how you can create your repeat by hand, using paper and simple drawing tools.  Her instructions are clear and easy to follow, and her method requires only minimal computer assistance. 

Most people use either Photoshop or Illustrator to make their patterns, and the methods of doing this vary wildly.  I plan to create a tutorial about the specific way I create repeating patterns in Photoshop, so keep an eye out for that here on the blog in the next month or two. Here are two of the repeats I've created in the past few years:

Penguin fabric I designed for Thing-a-Day a few years ago.

One of my first ever patterns, drawn by hand based on Julia's instructions and colored using Photoshop.

Oh, and I just found out that there's a comparison of different custom-fabric printing services over on True Up that's way more thorough and comprehensive than my "I ordered this and it looked nice" method of judging a product.  Go check it out!

What I'm Working On Lately

For the past couple of weeks, I've been focusing most of my creative energy on a quilt that is destined to be one of my largest to date.  Because I tend to work extremely small, the dimensions (roughly 17 by 22 inches) will seem laughable to most quilt artists, but it seems impossibly gigantic to me after nearly five years of making almost exclusively quilts that are 9.5" by 13" (a size I arrived at because it is half of a dollar-store place mat - more on that in a future post!).

Beads, paint, free-motion stitching, oil paint sticks...

This new quilt is composed of a lot of existing elements that I have created mostly through trying out various techniques and materials.  There are free-motion stitching samples, oil paint stick rubbings, leftover bits from old projects (some of my favorite things to use!), plus beading and hand embroidery.  This is going to be a LUSH quilt! 

triangles filled in with ridiculously sparkly silver paint

Lately, I have been in love with texture, and I have so many new texture-making options available to me! I think this may end up being the primary focus of my quilts for a while as I explore all the possibilities and materials I've discovered lately.

So many textures, hopefully they're coexisting peacefully!

One sad thing about no longer working at a costume shop is that I will no longer be able to raid the trash for extra bits and scraps, such as this string of giant Swarovski crystals fused onto sheer gray ribbon.  We created hundreds upon hundreds of these for the Diamonds Rockette costumes that we made for four years.  Each girl had a lovely, swingy skirt made from these strings of crystals, and the effect when thirty six gorgeous ladies were twirling around in perfect unison was pretty amazing!

Swarovski crystals on a sheer ribbon. These were leftover from working on the Diamonds Rockette costumes.

This quilt is pretty close to being finished, so either there will be more progress photos or it'll end up here as a finished work very soon!