Tutorial by Helen Klebesadel: Using SpoonFlower to Design Your own Fabrics

 Wallflower Lady Slippers, watercolor, 15 x 22

by  Helen Klebesadel

SpoonFlower Print on Demand Fabrics

As an artist I am best known for my large-scale highly detailed watercolor paintings with environmental and woman-centered themes.  For a long time I had thought that my Wall Flower series featuring flowers rendered from careful observation, could make a natural transition to fabric.  Encouraged by fiber artists I know I started researching how to bring this vision to reality.  Daunted by the process of figuring out how to put together a portfolio for fabrics I did what any contemporary artist would do…an internet search.  

Two years ago I stumbled on SpoonFlower.com, a print-on-demand company situated in Mebane, North Carolina that is in its Beta phase (test mode).  It has been giving artists the ability to design their own fabrics since 2008.   The company’s mission is to give people who make unique things with fabric greater power to express themselves and to make their work available to others. The company is eco-conscious, with fabrics printed using eco-friendly materials and methods, and has been slowly expanding the line of organic cotton fabrics it has available. Click here for sample packs available of the range of fabrics Spoonflower offers. 

The idea for the company was inspired by a casual comment of the founder's spouse when she mused about how wonderful it would be to print her own fabric.  An idea was born.

Spoonflower has now blossomed into an interactive community of 70,000 individuals participating in an online designers’ community and marketplace where users can create, share, and purchase a huge variety of unique fabric patterns and designs.   Designers can choose whether to make their designs public or not, and whether to make them available for sale once they have proofed designs they are happy with.  Purchasers can order swatches as small as 8x8 inches for $5.00 of any fabric in any design available for sale.

Designers have formed a creative community who follow each others work facilitated by the ability to make comments about each other’s designs on the site, and communicate through the Spoonflower Blog, Flickr Group, and Facebook page. Textile design veterans and amateurs alike can enter the Fabric of the Week contest, which is voted on by Spoonflower users. Winning designs are offered for sale as limited-edition fabrics at Spoonflower's Etsy shop.


DIY Designs on Spoonflower Tutorial:

1) Create an account on Spoonflower.com.  This takes less than 5 minutes.

2) Create a pattern you would like to print. Designers often start with a scan of a painting or drawing or they might compose the image in Photoshop. Illustrator, or another graphic design application they are comfortable with.  Spoonflower shares several free graphic design applications here.

A firm believer in only learning what I need to accomplish my next project, I personally find that Photoshop Elements does everything I need so far.  For other complete novices at digital design there are a series of very useful tutorial on designing and color calibration on the blog Mama Made. 


3) Your design will need be a digital image that should have a resolution of 150dpi (dots per inch). Meaning a 10" x 10" pattern, the width and height of your image should be 1500 pixel by 1500 pixel (150 dots times 10 inch = 1500 dots).

4) Your pattern should be designed in a way that allows seamless repeating (also called “tiling”). For a guide to creating seamless tiled pattern in Illustrator click here, and for the same in Photoshop go here.  (I will share how I create a tiling image using a pattern from my paintings and Photoshop Elements at the end of essay.)

If you don't want your image to be tiled, set up your image to the size and exact dimensions you want it to appear on your fabric. For instance, if you'd just like to order an 8" x 8" swatch, your pattern size must be 8" x 8". Check out Spoonflower's fabric sizes and prices for more information.

Advanced users may find that colors (especially reds and yellows) may become inaccurate when transferring from screen to fabric. For best results, set the color space to 8-bit LAB color. More info can be found here.

5) Once you have it the way you want it save your design as a JPG or TIF (8-bit, uncompressed) format. I recommend TIF for its image quality, but Spoonflower does not accept files larger than 25MB, so you find using a JPG allows you to upload a larger images.

6) Upload you design to Spoonflower and see how it tiles. You can use the Spoonflower preview window to experiment with different layout options and fabric sizes.  You can also use some of the tools Spoonflower provides to tweak your design.

Start with one design and see how it goes.  If you are like me you will become immediately addicted.  I now have over one hundred designs and find myself appraising every new watercolor painting experiment for its potential as a fabric design.

7) Once you are happy with your design you can order a swatch as small as 8x8 inches, for $5.00, to test your design. Once you have proofed you fabric you have the option of making it available for sale on the Spoonflower website or keep it private for your own use or sell it separately.

If you are like me and tend to do a number of designs all at once there is a useful feature that allows you to proof a sampler of a  ‘collection’ of designs all at once with of 1-12 designs costing $20, and 13-24 designs costing $35.

If you sell it on Spoonflower you will get 10 % of the sale of any of your designs and the same discount in printing your own fabrics.  (If you are like me all your earnings will be spent ordering more fabric).

It generally takes 2 weeks for the fabric to be printed and shipped but it's more than worth the wait! If you have any questions or problems with your order, do not hesitate to email them. Stephen Fraser, one of the site founders, will respond quickly with a detailed and clear answer.

Spoonflower can also be used for more than just textile design. Some designers mass-produce patterns for dolls, stuffed toys, clothing, or DIY kits.  Other, like me, explore its potential as a tool in art making.  The service is still in beta and as the founders explore what is possible new material choices and fabric treatments are sure to continue to appear.

How I Design a Fabric From a Watercolor Painting Using Photoshop Elements

1) Chose a section of a painting and resize it to 150 dpi.  Go to the FILE pull down menu and select ‘Duplicate.’  This will give you a copy of this first image.

 

2) OFFSET the Image 2 using the FILTER menu. You will find the OFFSET in the OTHER category of the FILTER menu.  A box will appear where you can set the degree of offset you want. If your image is 2000 x 3000 dpi you would set the Offset to approximately 1000 x 1500 to quarter the image.  The center of the original image is now at the four corners.

3) Go to the SELECT pull down menu and select ALL.  Go to the EDIT pull down menu and COPY.  Then PASTE the offset Image 2 over the top of Image I.

It will layer to look like Image II.

4) Choose the eraser tool from the Photo Shop Elements toolbar and erase the center and the obvious seams, in an artful way revealing the image in the layer below.   Save the finished image with a new name and without layers.

Final Layered Image 3:

5) Upload to Spoonflower and see how it looks:

If you are happy with the outcome your next step is to order a proof or add it to a collection to proof later.

Check out my fabrics on Spoonflower.com and have fun designing your own fabrics!

Helen Klebesadel

*****


Helen Klebesadel is a TAFA member.  Check out her profile here.   When she joined TAFA, I was intrigued by what she was doing with SpoonFlower, so I asked her if she would be willing to share the process.  She kindly agreed and came up with this wonderful tutorial!  Just think of all the doors that can open through having control over the design process!  Many thanks, Helen!

Helen also wrote a post as part of the series, "TAFA Members Talk".  See it here.

-Rachel Biel

Tutorial by Helen Klebesadel: Using SpoonFlower to Design Your own Fabrics

Print Your Own Fabric with Karma Kraft!

Have you ever wanted to design your own fabric?  I've thought of many ideas that I would have liked to explore, but never really researched it.  I received this email today, introducing Karma Kraft, just such a printing operation.  There is no minimum yardage requirement and the prices and quality seemed fair.  They also offer a variety of fabrics, including organic cotton and silks.  The only downside that I saw is that they are a North Carolina operation (formerly a center for producing textiles in the United States) operating out of China.  I would have been even more excited if they were a US operation...


The email is reprinted below:

_______________________________

New Website Allows Users To Design Their Own Custom Fabrics and Patterns.

KarmaKraft.com proving popular for novice crafters, professional designers and more.

www.karmakraft.com

(Raleigh, North Carolina) – It’s a unique online service that has been used to create custom fabric for innovative clothing, pillows, wall art, handbags & purses, bedding, table linens and even surfboards. KarmaKraft.com is a design-oriented digital fabric printing company that allows anyone to upload their own fabric design online to create digitally printed 58-inch custom fabrics. 

“You design it, we print it,” says KarmaKraft.com founders Susan Lu and Scott Jeffreys - in three simple steps:

1) Upload the design to www.KarmaKraft.com

2) Select the desired material or product you want

3) Purchase as much or as little of the custom fabric as needed

       

What makes KarmaKraft.com different and unique?

KarmaKraft.com eliminates the costly set-up fees and minimums that are imposed by traditional printing methods. KarmaKraft.com also eliminates the need to understand Photoshop or other advanced computer-aided design (CAD) systems to get a design printed. Upcoming designers, homemakers, small business owners, and graphic artists now have the ability to print their own design with no color limitations, on a wide variety of fabric qualities such as cotton, linen, silk and more.

KarmaKraft.com can help anyone from novice crafters to professional designers create their own signature designs. They even offer custom cut and sew services to make items like pillows, pet beds, scarves, tablecloths or personal apparel and more -- all with custom-designed fabric. KarmaKraft.com even offers a “Designer Gallery” under the “Fab Favs” section of the site where designers can post their fabrics designs: http://karmakraft.com/fabfavs.aspx

KarmaKraft.com uses reactive dyes for their cotton, linen and silk qualities and disperse dyes for the polyester. Most digital printing companies just use textile pigment dyes for their product. Printing with reactive and disperse dyes makes the fabric more vivid in color, washable and softer in hand than other digital printing companies offering pigment dyed fabrics.

The KarmaKraft.com custom fabrics range from $20 - $32 per yard and there is no minimum order requirement. KarmaKraft.com’s professional cutting and sewing services range from $10 - $18.

For more information go to: www.KarmaKraft.com

Print Your Own Fabric with Karma Kraft!

Bark Cloth – Sustainable Production in Uganda by Karin Zetterqvist

Message holder made of bark cloth from Uganda

Bark cloth is a unique, non-woven fabric produced from the bark of Ficus Natalensins, a rare and novel fig tree species peculiar to Uganda and locally known as Mutuba.

Since the 13th century, bark cloth has been produced in the Buganda Kingdom, and used commercially, ritually and ceremonially by the Baganda, an ethnic group found in central Uganda. Ranging in texture from the coarse and thick to the finest and light, bark cloth, as an article of clothing was worn sarong style and wrap-around by Baganda men and women respectively.

The bark cloth was used to pay land rates and fines by the peasants to their chiefs, who in turn selected the best for presentation to the king’s courtiers. Other rituals and ceremonies where bark cloth used to play a central role include the initiation of twins into the clan and their protection, child naming ceremonies, payment of dowry and during marriage ceremonies, succession rituals and last funeral rites to identify the heirs, widows, orphans and so on.

Only the best of the cloth, fine and light to touch, a rich garnet red with a shiny sheen, was presented to the king for use as clothing and during coronations, royal weddings and other functions.

A Masterpiece of Indigenous Textile Production Skills

Bark removal of the Mutuba fig tree.

Harvest of bark to be used in Ugandan bark cloth.

Banana leaves offer tree protection

The art of making bark cloth, passed from father to son, involves stripping the particular fig tree trunk of its bark by ringing down. A straight cut is then made and the bark is then carefully stripped off the tree.

The bark is then steamed, spread out on big logs 2-3 meters long and carefully beaten with mallets. As the bark is beaten it gets wider, longer and finer. A piece of bark measuring 75 by 150 cm can produce cloth measuring up to 4 m by 1.8 m.

The stripped part of the tree is wrapped in layers of fresh banana leaves and with careful nurturing a single tree can produce up to 400 sq m of cloth in a period of about 40 years. In this way it is not only a natural fabric, but also eco-friendly.

African Ethnic Designs

Bark cloth bag with coloured raffia decoration

Bark cloth purse with raffia decoration

Business cards case made of bark cloth

Bark cloth coin purse (Uganda)

Today the applications, to which bark cloth is put, are endless. Royal Bark Cloth Designs (RBCD) - with the price winning designer Sara Katebalirwe - is working with village community women using bark and other natural fibres specific to Uganda to make various and beautiful novel products. Aesthetic yet functional, the designs are applied mostly by hand.

The design applications, as well as being aesthetic, also give cover to the cloth, to minimize abrasion/friction, thus giving the product a longer life. The best design application so far in terms of bark protection is the raffia couching.


Preserving the Bark Cloth Production Skills
Uganda’s bark cloth was named as part of the world’s collective heritage recognized by UNESCO November 2005. The global body declared the “art of bark cloth making in Uganda a masterpiece of oral and intangible heritage of humanity.”

Watatu (meaning three in Swahili) is a web shop, owned by three friends (two Tanzanians and one Swede), where you can find more of the products from Royal Bark Cloth Designs. Promoting the bark cloth and its use internationally will assist to preserve the bark cloth production skills.


Written by
Karin Zetterqvist
Watatu Textil
www.watatu.com
©Watatu


Sources:
"Bark Cloth" by Royal Bark Cloth Designs


Karin wrote another article for this blog on Kanga and Kitenge cloths, traditional fabrics used as garments in Tanzania. She is a member of our Fiber Focus Group. Visit her page.


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Bark Cloth – Sustainable Production in Uganda by Karin Zetterqvist

Fabric: The Search for the Perfect Piece Transforms Paducah During the AQS Show

Beautiful Batiks from Indonesia, A Favorite Among Quilters

If you are a quilter, you most probably have a stash of fabric that's taking over part of your house and your life. Quilters need a selection to pick from and that elusive perfect color or design ever calls us to adding to our stash, "just in case"... For some, it can actually become a disease, an urge to have and collect more than could ever possibly be used in a lifetime. Most artists struggle with this need to have supplies on hand, "Oh, I will use it someday..." which competes with the reality of storage demands and the ever-present war against clutter.

Rolls of complimenting colors allow a quilter
to have a nice selection without purchasing too much fabric.

At almost $10 a yard in most specialty stores, purchasing fabric can be a serious financial investment. So, a quilter will go glassy eyed when they see fabric on sale. And, when you have a large gathering of quilters such as the AQS Show in Paducah, a whole city will transform itself to try to meet this need and reinvent itself in fabric opportunities. Paducah is known as "Quilt City, USA" and local businesses join in the fun, hoping to attract visiting quilters in for their non-fabric wares.

"How about a coffee and cookie, dear Quilter?"

The show itself is hosted in the Convention Center which is located right on the river, downtown, within walking distance from the Quilt Museum and the downtown businesses. Half of the space at the Convention Center is dedicated to vendors who come with their wares from all over the world. Then, AQS sponsors other sites around town for satellite vendors.

The Finkel's Building downtown on Kentucky Avenue,
normally empty, becomes a satellite space for AQS during the Quilt Show.

Non-AQS businesses and groups also set up vending opportunities. The Rotary Club of Paducah/McCracken County hosts an annual show of antique quilts and also rents vendor spaces.

The guys at the door collect $5 per visitor, money that is used to fund educational and scholarship programs.

Inside, quilters become inspired by the quilts they see.

Inspiration leads to temptation.... "Hmmm.... I think I need some more fabric for my stash..." Vendors are there to supply the need. "What to get? What to get? ..."

Fabric makes the quilting world go around.

And, for those who don't want to go to the trouble of making it, there are plenty of lovely finished quilts available...



Oh, and quilters also need their tools: scissors, thimbles, thread, templates, batting, rulers, glues, special paint sticks, and on and on. Every year there are new inventions that help expand the quilter's universe of possibilities.

Quilting templates, a coveted accessory for some.

Many of these things are not easily accessible in most towns or cities. You can find almost everything online, but that's never the same as seeing something right in front of your face where you can size it and touch it. And, of course, there are all those one of a kind pieces that you will not see on the internet, things that can be incorporated into a quilt, or that you just have to have.

Vintage lace and doilies.

Informal vendors also have wares to sell. The streets are filled with tents and people trying to get in on the action.

When else will Paducah fill up with 30,000 women or more, all with big bags they just might fill?

Charter buses take the quilters to the different points in the city that have vendors or exhibited quilts. Parking, of course, becomes difficult downtown. A couple of fun modes of transport include the trolley or you can go by horse and buggy!

Paducah's trolley.

Horse and buggy, a fun way to see Paducah's downtown.

Others just enjoy being outside and seeing the city come alive. I ran into my friend, Stefanie Graves of Cowango, working on a watercolor down by the gazebo.

Stefanie Graves talking to a visiting quilter.

One of the best things about this invasion of quilters and vendors in Paducah is that most of the people that come are really, really nice. (Note emphasis on Most...) This kind visitor took a photo of Stefanie and me. She modelled Stefanie's hat...

Me with Stefanie Graves.

Well, I had done my rounds and it was time to get back to work. Yep. I'm a vendor, too, hoping like everyone else that some green dollars will make there way into my grubby hands... My niche is a small but special one in the quilting world. I sell ethnic textiles online and in my permanent booth at English's Antiques at 212 Broadway, downtown Paducah.

Rachel Biel Taibi of Rayela Art

You can find the links to my stores on the third column of this blog. Rayela Art has stores on Etsy, eBay and 1,000 Markets. They are a bit depleted right now as I pulled a lot out for the show, but will be restocking soon.

I find it fascinating to see what people do with their hoards of fabric. I have my own stash that keeps growing and am committed to also using it up, making new pieces as time goes on. I always push myself to learn something new, to push the boundaries of what I have seen and translate it into something that becomes mine. Sometimes it works and sometimes it's an "Now what have I done?" experience. I am definitely inspired by cultural textiles, but also by contemporary fiber artists. The possibilites seem limitless...

Today is the last day of the show here in Paducah. Life will resume its normal pace and we will all play with our new fabric and supplies. We are all grateful for those of you who have been here and hope to see you again next year. And, for those of you who have not been to Paducah, do visit us sometime! It's a great community with wonderful galleries and year round, we are

"Quilt City, USA"!!!

Fabric: The Search for the Perfect Piece Transforms Paducah During the AQS Show

Karoda's Quilted Poetry: The Design Element of Words

Words on Fabric, Postcard by Karoda

by Karoda (aka Karen R. Davis)

I never thought of myself as a visual artist until a few years ago. My first calling was that of a poet which I embraced at a young age, but after years of dealing with pulmonary disease as an adult, I found myself in a space of not being able to hear the poems inside of me. Hearing is essential to a poet. Instead I started dreaming in images and seeing inspiration in quilt designs in architecture, from reading literature, etc. What I was dreaming and seeing intuitively I knew to be quilts. Much of where I started in 2003, when I jump-started this journey for the 2nd time, felt like learning to walk when I really wanted to just dance (similar to those teen-age years when I wanted to grow up too fast). I often was side tracked by responding to the work of other quilters and what I liked…I wanted to try every technique and not miss any of the fun. I worked small, not wanting to commit in size to a technique that I hadn’t mastered or enjoyed. I still have much of those small studies around wondering what I’m going to do with them.

Words, dye and circular quilting as design elements.

Juanita Yeager, my quilt guru, had planted the idea of doing “series” work and keeping a journal and working a bit larger. I begin to pay attention more closely to my body, thoughts, and emotions and what I responded to with passion. Quilts with text, particularly hand writing, excited me. After seeing the quilts of Angela Moll, it still didn’t strike me to do it in my own work. The turning points started at the end of 2007 when poet Estella Majozo invited me to be a part of the Artist-In-Revolution Poet’s series, a community arts project conducted from her downtown studio. I had the month of December and although it had been many, many years since I did a public reading, I didn’t have any new work to share and was somewhat reluctant, but that experience showed itself to be the fire I needed to begin my second series work, aptly named Poetry Series. I immediately started writing my poems onto my hand dyed cloth in hues of red, green, yellow. The colours where chosen to align with the African American cultural flag except for the yellow which is the colour for spirit based on the flag Rastafarians made world famous. These colours communicate vibrancy and life to me. Drawing upon my culture and heritage, making the collective meaningful in a well integrated way personally, has been a preoccupation since my early teen years and something I committed to developing as I matured and this is being interjected to what I do visually.

Superimposing layers of dye and letters, with an applique focal point.

I wanted this series to come from the deepest part of my interior and in order to make sure I stay in that space, I answer questions I pose to myself around why and what for each step in the process for The Poetry Series. Allowing some words to show through and others not, I ask myself why and what does it mean to me…when stamping on the circles, I repeat the questions, and so on for the following layers. I know that it will never be possible for the viewer to know all of my answers or most of them, but that is not why I do it. I have to answer the questions as a way of getting and staying in the interior space I want these quilts to emerge out of.

"Answer the questions..." Words exploring design.

The second fire for The Poetry Series came while attending a workshop with Leslie Morgan and Claire Benn in Ohio where I learned how to print and write using dye paints and how to evaluate my work to achieve more complexity in the layers I put on my fabrics. The third fire came when I took a very basic intro class in casual lettering with Laurie Doctor. In the workshop with Morgan/Benn I was working with freedom and a wide range of motion in writing and with Doctor it was more about focus and control...opposite skills that provide me a wider range in selecting how to place my poems on the cloth.

Words in the background, giving form to pattern.

My daughter asked me what was the point of writing for it not to be legible. I’m not interested in the poem being completely legible or read in its entirety. For me, that would be a book. I’m interesting in my handwriting being used as an original design element and the viewer seeing the writing as a clue for the quilt’s foundation and as part of the mystery in it. Handwriting is so personal. People can identify you by it. Handwriting is a very intimate and experts in the field can infer personality traits by examining an individual’s handwritten marks.

"Handwriting is very intimate."
-Karoda

Also, the making of these quilts is the embodiment of Sankofa, a concept that translates into knowing where you’ve been in order to progress forward. As I read and re-write my poem onto fabric, it becomes an act of breaking open the seal on my present and future in merging the literary and the visual.

Word and quilting swirl.

So far, I have 3 studies and one completed quilt and two laying on the cutting table that need a binding, and fabrics on the design wall being auditioned for the next one. While working on this series, I’ve concluded that constructing poems and constructing quilts is very similar…weighing the pauses, periods, and words in a poem, its rhythm and texture, and evaluating the effectiveness and intent of a poem is no different from weighing the hues and values of colour, the spaces, shapes and lines, the rhythm and texture, and the effectiveness and intent of a quilt. I don’t know or want to know where this will lead, but I know I’m committed to writing on my cloth and using my poems as a foundation for a long time to come because it feels like the me I love the most.

Bringing the elements together in color and quilting.

***the quilts in the Poetry Series can be viewed at my website and I have documented my journey in my blog.




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Karoda has been an active member in our Fiber Focus Group. Clicking on her slide show will take you to her page there.

Karoda's Quilted Poetry: The Design Element of Words