Fabric Design lessons

>> Thursday, January 26, 2012

Fabric collection in progress: Vintage Roses
As I seem to have really taken to fabric design, I've invested in some fabric design books to help me learn some new techniques. I'll post more of them as I go along, but to start out I recommend Kim Kight's A Field Guide to Fabric Design. I've been following Kim's blog True Up blog since it started, and have always found it to be a source of fabric and sewing inspiration. So her new book came just at the right time for me as I was starting out with fabric design:



This book is small enough to not be intimidating, while being full of great tutorials and inspiration. The first thing I needed help with was how to design repeats in Photoshop and Illustrator and this book has nice clear tutorials on this. It also covers hand printing and digital printing, and even covers topics related to selling your designs. The best part for me was to have a book that's up-to-date and full of the kind of fabrics I love and sew with myself.

As I'm spending a lot of time on Spoonflower lately, I happened across Kim's guest post where she gives a bonus tutorial for her book's Blog Tour launch. So today I used her tutorial to add a printed selvedge to my fabric and I love the effect.

I'm still working on the collection of fabrics that started with the one at the top of this post, I decided to create some vintage inspired fabrics that I would want myself. When you love vintage fabric it can be hard sometimes to find the yardage or style you want for your projects, so this is the perfect solution. I'm looking forward to being able to print these designs in any fabric and order as much as I need!

4 comments:

LeeAnn January 26, 2012  

That is a beautiful print you have started! Last week I started sewing a quilt that is many years into the making. I have been collecting vintage feed sacks and 2 years ago was gifted a whole bag full of scraps! All these pieces are the "negatives" of sacks that were used for other projects like children's clothing. I am in love with all these designs and colors.

Rachel January 27, 2012  

Thanks so much for sharing this, the book looks great, will look it up! as for your pattern of roses design, it's absolutely beautiful, I would wear It!!

AMCSviatko January 28, 2012  

You will be exploring the concent of creating some of these in 1/12th scale, won't you?

Doing so has been on my list for far too long so I reckon it's time I gave up and just encouraged other (more talented) people to do it instead :-)

Claire Louise Milne January 28, 2012  

Absolutely! Thank you for the compliment :) I have already created dollhouse wallpaper that I'll be trying out myself soon (and of coursing sharing pics) and I'm thinking of a yard of fabric that will have a few tiny dollhouse scale prints.

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