Lotta Prints

I got my copy of Lotta Jandsdotter's Lotta Prints in the mail yesterday and I'm so inspired now!  I already had a copy of her Simple Sewing  in my possession and, while it is an equally lovely, approachable book, I was deep in the throes of projects from Amy Karol's Bend-the-Rules Sewing at the time and didn't want to switch inspiration just then.  Lotta Prints, though!  It's one of those must.do.this.now kind of books.  Her instructions are crystal clear and the photos taken by her best friend, Jenny Hallengren, show the connection between Lotta's designs and what she sees around her. I've already run out to buy several bottles of fabric paint and some cheap stencil brushes to work on some stencil designs (hopefully!) this afternoon.  Or maybe some potato prints with the girls...

When will Spoonflower be open?

We're getting this question a lot, as you can imagine. Here's the latest:

Updated on 6-03-2008: We're working our way through the beta wait-list. Over 1,000 people have already received invitations to try out the beta site, and a few hundred are left on the list as of this writing. Unless we get completely slammed by an unexpected PR event ("Please don't throw me in the brier patch!") everyone currently on the list should have received an invitation within the next week or so. Until we're fully up and running, however, we will continue to send invitations only to people who've added their email addresses to the wait list. Sign up for list here.

In the second week of May we will start to email invitations to create Spoonflower accounts to a small number of beta-testers. Because such a large number of people are interested in participating in the beta (thanks everyone!) we'll expand the number of invitations we send slowly over a period of two months or so. At the end of two or three months we hope to be able to take the wrapper off the web site and open registrations to everyone, but we'll have to see how things go. Thanks for being patient, and thank you again for all the encouragement. We're looking forward to hearing your suggestions and ideas.

Jamtartbaby

I really don't know if my liking for fabric designs that don't look "digital"--while still being digitally printed--is more because I do not myself know how to maneuver in Photoshop and the like, or if I am just genuinely drawn to designs that look...well, drawn.  One way or another, I sure like these little pillows from Jamtartbaby. I keep wondering how I can inspire my daughters to work up their own fabric designs to print on Spoonflower once we're live, and simple designs like these might be something they could appreciate and relate to.

PataPri

I was feeling a bit groggy this morning after a night alone caring for our three daughters.  (Stephen's gone fishing with friends this weekend.)  But I got a nice little jolt of excitement along with my Earl Grey when I stumbled on PataPri.  A resident of Chicago by way of Japan, Yuko Uemura has just recently begun selling her own fabric designs in honor of her shop's one-year anniversary.  Her fruit, animal, and other nature-inspired designs are silk-screened onto 100% linen and are fresh and simple in colors like aqua, orange, olive, and gold.  You can buy these little treasures for projects of your own--Yuko generously allows others to sell items made from her fabrics--or you can purchase her tea towels, accent pillow covers, and tablecloths.  Get the yardage while it lasts!  According to her blog, these fabrics will only be available for a limited time.

Daisy Janie

Jan DiCintio at Daisy Janie is a creative multitasker.  She designs fabric, makes handbags, paints, designs home furnishings, and on top of all that, runs Scoutie Girl, a blog that features other indie artists and crafters.  Her original fabric designs, available through both her website and her Etsy shop, strike me as kinda Marimekko-esque, but are definitely all her own.   I was curious about how her fine art skills might mesh with her fabric design process.  She told me:

I basically start with a doodle or sketch that I either scan into or recreate in my graphic design software. From there, I manipulate the heck out of it – pulling pieces out, putting pieces in – until I have about 10-20 separate elements I’ve created based upon that initial sketch. It’s like putting a puzzle together once I have the basic pieces of my design, with a lot of layering, scaling, embellishing, experimenting and tweaking to create a cohesive, balanced finished repeat.

The first photo is her Kate fabric with its doodle inspiration for comparison, plus two more that are my personal favorites.  Nice, no?  I hope to see these rolling off the Spoonflower printers in the near future!

Fabulous cushions, a print-a-day, and a Spoonflower update

Thanks to the keen eye of our friend Kim at the fabulous new fabric blog True Up, you can admire some stunning pillows made from digitally printed fabric (available through the French company Bonjour Mon Coussin) while planning your own future projects using Spoonflower. Kim at True Up points out that it is a mistake to get too hung up on learning how to create repeats & use special software to design patterns. There are an infinite number of cool, uncomplicated projects you can concoct without knowing the first thing about Photoshop & its ilk.

While we're on the subject of creating repeats, be sure to check out a-print-a-day, a blog a by Yasmine, a San Francisco designer who has set herself the challenge of  "creating a surface print every day."

Last but not least I am happy to report that the behind-the-scenes work on the beta version of Spoonflower is going swimmingly. Look for the excitement to begin sometime in early May, although at least some beta testers will be hearing from me before then. Thanks to all of you for the support and excitement you've shown so far, including the lovely folks at (the much admired) Wee Wonderfuls, who are welcome to "stalk" us anytime.
   

Democratizing fabric design

Kim Kight, the fabulous fabric blogger (flogger?) over at True Up ("All Fabric, All the Time"), gave Spoonflower a lovely and thoughtful shout-out today.  She talks about the democratizing power of digital production technology, which represents many of same advances for textile design that it does for  industries like book publishing, photography, music, and video. Apart from giving many, many more creative people access to the tools to realize their visions, a sometimes overlooked aspect of digital production is its lower environmental impact. This is especially true in the case of textile production, which in its conventional form is highly wasteful and highly polluting. But the most pleasing bit of the post was being compared to Etsy, a site that may actually be the best Internet business ever.

Your first print!

Last week we had our first chance to mess about with a printer and one of the designs uploaded to our Spoonflower Flickr pool (an Indian maid created by okiegirl97). I've photographed the swatches we printed and added those photos to the pool as well, although it's hard to tell much from a photo like this one. As soon as we can, we'll print more swatches and send them out.

Swatch portraits

Am I the last person in the crafting world to catch wind of this project? Thanks to the folks at the Purl Bee for the tutorial on this one.  I've been so bogged down lately in complicated projects for which I can't seem to find the time that I kinda need some instant crafting gratification this week.  There's also a Flickr photo pool here if you want to view even more fabric loveliness.

Sugar City Journal

Did you ever run across someone so talented that it boggles your mind to think they're the same species as you?  This is how I feel about Lynne and Melissa at Sugar City Journal.  Check out this absolutely stunning little girl's dress made out of turquoise linen.  And then check out all the posts on their blog labeled sewing.  Do you think if we all begged them long enough they would publish the patterns that they're making up themselves? I'm totally blown away.

Another thing custom fabric could be good for...

  SpoonFlower_Logo-4x copy 
  Originally uploaded by salutor

...printing your own artfully designed fabric labels to go inside the gorgeous items you have made with your artfully designed custom fabric! You could size them however big or small you wanted, include washing instructions, a website address, anything!  I'll bet quite a few would fit onto a yard, and a rotary cutter would make short work of cutting them apart.  How to finish edges, though--hmmm....

Designing fabric without a computer

So I have to admit here that I'm not the most tech savvy girl around.  As a sewist--not to be confused with a sewer, right?--I love the idea of designing my own fabric but am intimidated by the prospect of learning my way around Photoshop and Illustrator software.  This is why I was intrigued when Marcy at Oonaballoona sent me a photo and told me about her method of creating the fabric she wanted.    Here is her canvas, along with an explanation of her process:

The canvas (which is huge... 5 by 5 feet) had been painted over many, many times in a vain attempt to come up with something I liked.  My husband liked the 10th attempt so much he wouldn't let me paint over it, but as I couldn't stand to look at it, I decided covering it in fabric would keep us both happy.  I actually wanted a specific piece of Ikea fabric with a sort of organic cityscape on it, but when I got there I found it had been discontinued.  I couldn't find another ready made scene that I liked, so I decided to create my own. I picked a few patterns I liked (one form Ikea, one from Urban Outfitters) dug through the scrap bin and came up with my treehouse scene.  I started by putting the background together, then did a freehand of the birds & branches on velvet & leather.  I quilted the freehand shapes onto the background with my trusty featherweight 221 (handled the entire job with just a regular foot, LOVE that machine), and with my heavy duty staple gun secured it to the canvas.

Marcy says she'd like to do more of these and condense them down into a smaller repeating pattern--with copyright-free background fabrics, of course!

Cool Bunny

Just posted a fish print in the Spoonflower Flickr pool and ran across this cool bunny from Giant Dwarf Design [her blog is pillow vs. pin cushion].

And in Spoonflower news:
We ran our first sample fabric yesterday using a dear reader's design. I'll post photos soon. It looks fabulous. Over the next few weeks we'll be running more samples, so if you have requests please email me.

More inspiration

About 6 months ago or so, I had the privilege of attending a lecture given by Kaffe Fassett, sponsored by our wonderful local quilt shop, Thimble Pleasures.  I remember a lot of gorgeous slides of some of his quilts and knitting projects, and I also remember a question someone asked from the audience.  The question was, "Where do you find inspiration?"  He sort of chuckled and said, "Everywhere!  Just look around you at all the color combinations that pop up in the world!"  (I'm paraphrasing here.)  To illustrate his point, his next slide was of an enormous pile of colored grain sacks at a railroad depot in Portugal (or some random place like that).  They were all chalky pinks, reds, blues, greens, and yellows--a really beautiful pile of just grain sacks!

So sort of in the same spirit, I recommend taking a look at the little floral vignettes that illustrator and children's author, Jeremy Tankard has his little animal guys living among.  I can't stop looking at them in my copy of Grumpy Bird.  And imagining how I might take pencil and watercolors to paper and try something similar applied to cotton one of these days....

Design inspiration

I've been stewing for the past week about fabric design, as in how the heck do I come up with my own?  I definitely know what I like, but there are just so many ways to go when I consider the prospect of making up something from scratch.  I have a good friend who's been running a vintage thrift shop here in Chapel Hill, Time After TIme, for the last 30 years.  When I told her about Spoonflower, she told me about a customer of hers, a fabric designer, who used to come in every few months or so to buy up enormous stacks of '30's era print dresses.  The condition of the dress didn't matter--holes, tears, and armpit stains were all fine.  This customer was buying them to copy their prints.  Huh.  Research on the whole issue of vintage print copyright has led me to understand that this is a pretty common practice.  Amy Butler did it, right? 

I do love me some vintage prints and, as friend to someone who can give me access to LOTS of them, I could have all the inspiration I needed pretty easily.  But is this a legitimate thing to do?  I still can't decide...

Looking for sample images

While we work on building the web site I thought it might be fun to set up a gallery on the photo-sharing site Flickr where folks following our progress can upload some of the images they would like to print on Spoonflower once we're live. A Flickr gallery gives us a chance to share designs, but it will also provide a pool of images we can draw from as we print sample fabric.

If we decide to pull your design from the Flickr pool to print as a sample, I'll email you first to ask your permission. I'll also send you a swatch so you can see how it looked.

You can visit the Flickr gallery for Spoonflower here. If you're already a member of Flickr it's quite easy to add an image to the pool. If you're not on Flickr already, it's free to join.

(For tips on preparing images for upload, see my previous post here.)

Japanese fabrics and books

Lately, I've found myself utterly smitten with Japanese fabrics, especially the nature and children's prints I'm seeing on sites like reprodepot and Purlsoho.  Sooooo tempting, though starting prices at around $18 per yard mean this stuff is not an entirely guilt-free splurge.  Still, I love the interesting color ways, the dainty but sophisticated florals, the interpretation of natural motifs...

Imagine my delight at discovering that there are also Japanese children's sewing pattern books available on Etsy!  I picked up a few recently from Lemon Squeezey and Chocolate Swirl and have been obsessing over the beautiful photos inside.  The patterns do seem special to me, though the ladies at my local sewing shop laughed at me for trying to slog through instructions written in Japanese.  "What's wrong with Simplicity?" they demanded.  Nothing, of course.  But the diagrams are generally very clear, the books are lovely, and with 20 inspiring patterns in each one, isn't this a better way to go, centimeter conversion and all?  I think so. 

My first attempt was a layered skirt from this book for my oldest daughter out of some brown Kaffe Fassett prints that I already had and it came out pretty well.  Of course, the first time she wore it was to a kids' museum where she got "washable" (actually NOT) black paint on it.  Sigh.  Best not to become attached to your children's handmade clothes, no?  Here she is modelling it.  You can't see it under her blouse, but the front waistband is pleated and the back has a bit of elastic for better fit.  Next, a version in an actual Japanese print!

Play pod

Okay, I know this is utterly unrelated to surface design, but how cool is this fabric play pod? And as the mother of three girls who can spend a whole happy day playing with a large box, why didn't I think of it first?  According to Small magazine, this pod--actually called Squareplay by it's designers at Slovenian Oloop Design--will be available later this year for purchase.  I, for one, can't wait!

All Over Print

It's an overcast day in Chapel Hill today and the ground is soggy from the past 24 hours of steady rain.  This makes me sluggish and lazy.  So here I am on the floor, sipping tea in my pajamas and cruising around online and I find All Over Print, which perfectly suits my mood.   Ayelet Iontef is a fabric designer and her blog is a visual feast, just loaded with photos of luscious textiles and faraway places.

Ayelet has posted today about the traditional Indian art of block-printing fabric.  I have seen these intricately hand-carved blocks in--of all places--our local gourmet foods market lately where they're used to adorn a high-end tea counter.  (Wonder if they'd sell them....)  Click here to view a slide show of the entire block-printing process, starting with a chunk of wood and a roll of plain cotton.