Straight repeats Stripe repeat Plaid repeat Houndstooth design This same teacher has an easy to understand Intro to Illustrator series starting here. She is a fashion teacher (with an interest in designing fashions for Second Life (!)) so the lessons are geared toward textile people.
This tutorial on Digital Arts shows step-by-step how to create a repeating pattern in Illustrator. I know how to do it manually on paper and in Photoshop, but the Illustrator method has eluded me till now.
Nanette from Rummage made this simple, beautiful fabric wreath by tying fabric scraps around a base (wire maybe?). What a fun way to experiment with color and pattern combinations — no futzing with a seam ripper if you don’t like the results! I love the clothespin family she added too. And Brooke of Inchmark Journal [...]
Furoshiki from furoshiki.com This article in CRAFT calls Furoshiki “wrap that’s as good as the gift.” That pretty much says it all! Furoshiki is the Japanese tradition of wrapping things in fabric (a little history here). You can buy some pretty neat cloths made specifically for this purpose here, but of course you can always [...]
As more independent designers produce their own fabric with digital printing technology and old-fashioned hand printing, they’ll need a way to present collections to buyers. Daisy Janie makes her own fabric, and true DIY spirit, she’s made her own swatch book … and shared how she did it. Definitely one to bookmark! P.S. Here are [...]
Tula Pink is sharing more of her design process. In this post she shows step-by-step how she takes a design from a sketch on graph paper to finished Illustrator file. (I’m guessing it’s Adobe Illustrator, though she doesn’t say that.) She answers some other readers’ questions too.
Reds, pinks, oranges, and yellows in my newly decluttered stash. If you have realized you have a fabric clutter problem, it’s time to do something about it. As Peter Walsh stresses in It’s All Too Much, decluttering is not about getting new shelves or fancy color-coded containers. It’s about prioritizing your and your family’s favorite [...]
Lotta Jansdotter shows Etsy and the rest of us how to print onto fabric with stencils and yams (via the CRAFT blog). I like the nice bit about idea cultivation at the end. Related: Scientific American Mind article on How to Unleash Your Creativity (via Three Buttons).
I said in my intro post that I wouldn’t be focusing on crafting/sewing projects unless it helps us think about fabric in a new way. The following definitely qualified — I find that “no-sew” tends to mean “use glue or staples as a shoddy substitute for sewing” but these are truly no-need-for-sewing projects. Nousnous offers [...]
A vintage quilt square in need of some TLC The following was written by Nan Jaeger on the Revival Fabrics blog. She gave open permission to reprint the article, and it’s a topic that I’ve had brewing for a while, so I was happy someone did the work for me! Vintage fabric care is important. [...]
In this classic post, the Happy Zombie shows an extremely easy way to fold fabric for storage. Just fold selvedge to selvedge, then roll it around a narrow quilting ruler. It’s one of those things about which Brini Maxwell and say, “Why didn’t you think of that?” Her before/after pictures. I could only hope to [...]
Surface pattern designer extraordinaire Julia Rothman is guest-blogging at Design*Sponge this week. Today she shared her method for hand-drawing repeating patterns. Just draw, cut, reassemble, and fill in the blank space! Well, not “just”; there’s much more to making attractive patterns (technical drawing skills, artistic voice, and color savvy to begin with), but if you’ve [...]
This week I received this book from Giant Robot — I wish I could remember the blog on which I first heard about it so I could give proper credit. It’s a lovely little book with an English title on the cover but (sparse) Japanese text within. Not much text, though, can be found in [...]
In my last post I worried about the possibility of my fabric getting eaten by moths. Rose commented, “do moths eat cotton?” I thought, hmm, do they? I just assumed, and you know what assuming does to u and me. So a simple google search later I have this answer courtesy the Ohio State University [...]
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