Wednesday, September 2, 2009

Spoonflower Swatched Me!

Happy Free Swatch Day, indeed! You can check out my Spoonflower pumpkinbear profile (be friends with me, in case I ever design something for real real!) for these designs that can tile and expand, but here are the scans of my designs on my swatches! Mind you, they look like scans, which on my scanner means lousy, but here they are in my hands, and that's what's important:

Here's a photograph of the rocks at Pebble Beach that's done on organic cotton:
I didn't intend this to tile in any way, which is good because it won't do so neatly, and I can't think of any way within my current Photoshop design skills to rig it, although my Matt could, I'm sure. So for photos, since I don't have a wide-format camera, the biggest I'd probably do is a fat quarter, which for a detailed photograph of what is basically a texture, like this one is, would actually probably be pretty cool.

And here's a scan of buttons, also done on organic cotton:In retrospect I should have done a swatch of something super-saturated with color, because the tone on both my designs is pretty muted, but the color transfer is accurate (I used LAB color, which Spoonflower suggests). Something like this would actually work as a larger print, but there would have to be white space between the buttons so that I could tile them, and I'm thinking that I'd definitely want to use a better background--perhaps a vintage print, or some scans of old book pages?

Anyway, I'm exhausted but done teaching for the week, and now I get to sew.

And watch Mythbusters with the girls, while kittens sleep on us:
The best thing about being a working girl is that I get a real, live weekend again!

1 comment:

milkcan said...

Those are cool! Love the button one especially!

This is the best tutorial I've ever seen on making a repeating pattern, if you're interested:

http://www.designspongeonline.com/2008/05/welcome-julia-and-how-to-make-a-repeat-pattern.html