We at Spoonflower are beyond thrilled to have one of our favorite "fabric obsessed" bloggers, Kim Kight, making a first stop on her book blog tour here today. In case you're not a regular reader of Kim's wonderful blog True Up–and you should be!–she has a fantastic new book out, A Field Guide to Fabric Design. Divided into sections on design and color, methods of printing, and an overview of the world of fabric design, Field Guide includes plenty of well-illustrated tutorials on how to create repeating designs both by hand and on a computer, how to select and test colors for digital printing, and the differences among print methods and ink chemistries. One of my favorite things about Kim's book is the designer roundtable sections in which she poses questions to professional fabric designers–like, 'Do you follow or ignore trends?' and 'What are your creative obstacles?' and more–and shares their answers. These sections sound like a chat you'd have over a cup of coffee with half a dozen of your best fabric-designing buddies, and I enjoyed the varied perspectives. Plus, it's nice to match a designer's style up with a personality, don't you think?
One other favorite thing about this book is pictures of gorgeous fabrics. LOTS of pictures of gorgeous fabrics. Just like True Up, Field Guide is eye candy for the fabric obsessed and an excellent, solid guide to turning your beautiful fabric visions into reality to boot. I can't recommend it hightly enough.
To kick off her book blog tour, Kim has put together a tutorial especially for Spoonflower readers on how to turn your design into a border print. Given how many times the Spoonflower help staff has been emailed with questions about how to turn files oriented in the traditional way into border print files for skirts, dresses, tea towels, tablecloths, curtains, and the like, I'm thinking this ought to come in mighty handy.
Read on for Kim's border print tutorial, plus a chance to win a copy of her Field Guide to Fabric Design below!
Thank you, Spoonflower, for having me here today!
What’s a Border Print?
Most fabric prints are oriented "with the roll," as shown in the diagram below.
Sometimes, though, you want your print to run with the selvage. These are called “railroaded” prints. Railroaded prints come in handy for seamlessly upholstering sofas, benches, headboards, and the like. Border prints are a type of railroaded print, and have all kinds of uses — pillowcases, skirts, aprons, tablecloths, tote bags, you name it. Typical border prints have motifs running along one or both selvages and a solid color or simpler print filling in the center. But, really, you’re only limited by your imagination here. And, sure, the width of the fabric too.
It is possible to print railroaded prints and border prints with Spoonflower — in fact it’s easier than regular repeating designs because you only have to worry about making the design repeat on one edge. You just have to set up your file a bit differently and beware of large file sizes.
I won’t go into the specifics of how to set up repeats here. If you aren’t already familiar, I hope you’ll check out my book, which has tutorials for creating repeating designs by hand and with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. Repeat tutorials can also be found on Spoonflower’s list of surface design resources.
File Setup for Border Prints
I worked in Photoshop for this design, but these guidelines apply to Illustrator as well.
My design was inspired by vintage air mail envelopes. I designed the crosshatch pattern below first (to reference the inside of security envelopes), and it ended up being 4.717 inches square. I wanted more room than that for the “Air Mail” stripe, so I doubled that figure to 9.434 inches.
Consult the Spoonflower Fabrics Page for printable widths. That will be the width of your file. I chose 42”, the printable width of the quilting cotton.
A Note on Widths and Selling Your Designs in the Spoonflower Shop: Buyers can choose to print your design on any of Spoonflower’s fabrics. You may wish to edit the design’s description and mention that it should only be printed on fabrics of a certain width, or else the design will start repeating itself vertically, and that probably wouldn’t look good.
Another alternative is to design to the width of Spoonflower’s widest fabric (58 inches/145 cm, currently) and make the rightmost edge “cut-offable.” Spoonflower crops designs from the right, so if someone orders your 58” wide design on Spoonflower’s cotton silk (40” printable area), the rightmost 18” would be cut off. (You probably wouldn’t want to do this with double border prints since the right border could be cut off.)
I tiled my security envelope pattern in the 42 x 9.434” space, matching the seams carefully — it ended up being two tiles tall and nine wide, with the ninth copy in each row getting a little cut off. I designed my stripe and resized it to 9.434” wide, rotated it 90 degrees clockwise, and placed it on the left edge of the file.
I chose colors from my Spoonflower Color Map, and was unsurprised that once I put in the RGB codes in my color picker, the screen colors looked vastly different than the fabric colors. If I’d gone with the colors I had been playing with on the screen, I’d have ended up with a purply pink and a lavender-blue. I can’t stress enough the importance of using the Color Map! Hint: cut individual swatches out of the chart so you can see the colors next to each other, away from the “noise” of the other swatches.
If you have two or more repeating patterns within your border print, as I do here, the height of your file will be the least common multiple of the individual pattern’s widths (that is, the width before they are rotated 90 degrees). Grade school math coming in handy! For example, if you have a 10” tossed floral for the background and a 18” row of flowers for the border, the height of the file would be 90”. You can see how this could lead to huge file sizes — be careful, because 40MB is Spoonflower’s limit on file size.
Upload your design as usual, resize if necessary (I changed mine to 300 dpi) and choose the “basic” repeat. You’re done!
Printed Selvages!
Incidentally, this technique can also be used for adding selvage information to your fabric. To illustrate the purpose of the book, I designed a mini-collection of fabrics that had “Your Name Here” in the selvage, on the headers, bolt ends etc., and printed them with Spoonflower for photography in the book. Keep in mind that the print doesn’t end up in the actual selvage of the fabric — maybe an inch or two in — but it’s still nice to have that information on there.
Thanks so much, Kim, and we wish you the best of luck on your blog tour!
If you'd like to win a copy of A Field Guide to Fabric Design, please just leave a comment on this post. Entires for this giveaway will close tomorrow, Thursday, 12/1 at noon EST. Good luck! THIS GIVEAWAY IS NOW CLOSED AND WE'LL BE ANNOUNCING A WINNER SHORTLY. THANKS, EVERYONE!
Oh, and speaking of giveaways closing, entries for the giveaway of Samarra Khaja's fabrics from last week have now closed, and we've selected a winner. We'll be contacting winner Lea Vollmer shortly to share the good news!
Oooh, this looks like it could answer a whole bunch of questions for me!Please?Pretty please?
Congrats Lea 😀
so, um, pretty much every spoonflower-addict wants this book, right? count me in!!
Any information that Kim has gleaned through her experience and taken the time to document sounds valuable to me.
Kim’s site is so wonderful…I can’t wait to see her book!
Oh the book looks so interesting! I love when people know how to plainly lay everything out and explain the basics without patronizing or losing the reader. Sign me up 🙂
Wow, this book looks wonderful. Thank you for posting the tutorial. I just added her blog to the blogs I follow.
There is so much to learn. Thank you for including me in the giveaway.
Karen
I really, really want this book!!!! Thanks for the giveaway.
neat! I love it when the sample images themselves (like the ones above) are pretty rather than just some random thing thrown in… ‘air mail’ fabric sounds great ;o) If the book is all this good, that’s exciting!
I have been waiting for this book, and it looks like it won’t disappoint! The above examples are really useful (and cute). I just found one more thing to go on the wish list.
That looks like a fabulous book!
So interesting–I did not know the term for ‘Railroaded’ fabric. I am loving the stitch sampler fabric design!
I got a copy of this book as an early Christmas present – it is a fantastic book! I will be using it a lot! (I wouldn’t mind winning a copy for my mom though – I gave her the quick “this is how Spoonflower and fabric printing works” tutorial this weekend!)
The book sounds wonderful!! A new item for my Christmas list!!
I’m planning on buying this for myself soon, but winning it means I can buy more fabric from Spoonflower, right?
What a great looking book! And I’ve been dying to design some border prints, they can make the simplest dress or skirt really pop.
I love it that she’s done the hard work of figuring out these things for us!
I’d like a chance to win please. Thank you!
Kim Kight has launched many careers in the world of fabric via her True Up postings. Thank you. Here’s wishing you every success on tour as you launch your book. Congratulations!
Kim Kight has launched many careers in the world of fabric via her fabulous TRUE UP postings. Thank you. Here’s wishing you every success on tour as you launch your book. Congratulations!
Kim Kight has launched many careers in the world of fabric via her fabulous TRUE UP postings. Thank you. Here’s wishing you every success on tour as you launch your book. Congratulations!
I’ve got to give a shout out to Kim Kight for posting the Connecting Threads design contest on TrueUp back in August. Because I’m a dedicated reader of TrueUp I saw the post and ended up winning that contest. So thank you Kim!
I hope the book is wildly popular and makes it’s way into every designers hands. 🙂
Would love a chance to win – thank you!
Enter Me! Looks like a great book
This book is exactly what I need…many thanks for the chance to win!
I would love to own this book! Thanks for the opportunity 🙂
Wow, that is some book! I can’t wait to get a copy of it, so I can figure out how to do all the stuff in my head!
Please enter me in the contest! This book looks simply wonderful!
I’ve learned so much from her site. So want to learn more from her book!
I’d love to win!
Also, just an FYI, your entry cut-off is confusing, today is Wednesday but tomorrow is 12/1, so hopefully you meant Thursday! 🙂
I would love to win this book, so much great information!
You have such great giveaways! I’d love a copy of this book!
I love fabric more than shoes … which is saying a lot! I would LOVE to win a copy of this book!
I could really use this book! Here’s hoping I win, cause if I don’t it will take me awhile to get this book. It does seem like the answer to a beginners prayers.
This book is already on my Christmas list but if i win then Santa can bring me something else!
Great tutorial too, thank you.
It looks like it would be a fabulous read. Please pick me 🙂
I am really looking forward to reading this book! I have only just begun to try to get a handle on the differences between my screen colors and the fabric colors. I’ve been very surprised in some of my swatches that “100% pure red” on the screen came out as orange. I use a different paint program from most (Corel Photo-Paint 12), so I made myself a swatch of its default color palette so I have a better idea of what I’m actually getting. I hope it arrives soon.
I was so excited about this book when I first heard about it, but this post has made me ultra-psyched to get–or perhaps win?–a copy!
Great tutorial – thanks for sharing!
This book came into my work a couple weeks ago, and so I can honestly say I LOVE this book and the chance to win my own copy is so awesome! Kim, you’ve done a great job providing a guide for modern fabric designers! As a self-taught fabric designer, this book taught me how to properly do repeats in illustrator! Your tutorial here is pretty dang cool too. I really appreciate the work you put into this book… the designer Q & A’s were especially fun to read. And thanks to SF for the awesome giveaway!
This could be a very helpful tool in avoiding the problems of computer aided fabric design.
So cool!
New to all this but book looks great and will check out the blog too.
I will buy this book even if I don’t win it….but I’d really love to win it and use the money to order more Spoonflower fabric of my designs.
oh wow, I’d been wondering about all that..thanks so much!
so cool, thanks for this info. I would also love the book.
Wonderful post… I need to read it over. Am I still in time for the competition?
I love Kim’s blog, and I can’t wait to read her book!
great explainations! enter me!
Great looking book! Thank for a wonderful giveaway!
I am an avid Follower/Reader of True Up’s blog. It’s the place to be for fabric line updates and pictures, great sales and more. I’m sure her book is just as thorough and would love to win a copy.
This was such an informative blog post. Thank you! I can’t wait to see the book in person.
I have been lusting after this book for ages. Please put my name in the hat!
Great tutorial here, and I’d love the chance to win the book. Thanks
I´d love to win that book and start learning on fabric design!! Thank you!
I study costuming at university and I’m just starting with my own textile design, this would be a huge help!! I may just have to eat noodles for a couple weeks so I can buy it, Thanks!
Looks like an interesting book!
Enter me please!
This book will give me a head start on NEXT YEAR’s resolutions…. crossing my fingers!
jlwhite (at) sasktel (dot) net
Looks like another lovely fabric design book. Bravo Kim.
I’m tossing my hat in the ring, as this book seems most excellent.
This books sound really cool. Good luck to everyone!
^_^
I agree with many others, this book would be a great addition to my collection! More inspiration and guidance on my OH SO MANY projects!
would love to win this book, great resource!
This is such a great tutorial! I just ordered my first self designed fabric (nothing fancy, just labels for my quilts) and can’t wait to do more.
Getting my comment in under the wire… great tute!
This would be a great addition to my library!!
Can’t wait to get my hands on this book by a fellow Austinite!
Thank you so much for the tutorial, I’m definitely going to check out the book!
Great tutorial on border prints, thanks.