A lovely distraction...

While I've been busy getting things ready to open my Etsy shop, I must admit to a distraction: Spoonflower. Do any of you use it? If you're not familiar, Spoonflower is a site designed for people to print and sell their fabric designs ~ in other words, custom fabric printed on demand (best of all, there's no minimum orders). It's similar to Etsy in some ways, but it's strictly for fabric. I've always had a love affair with fabric and secretly dreamed of designing my own line one day ~ I even have all the names of the designs picked out. (I know, I'm a bit of a dork.)
Anyway, I stumbled across Spoonflower a few months ago and just knew I had to somehow learn to do this. And since it's something I wanted to learn anyway, I figured I might as well start now so one day I could actually be good at fabric design.
So, into Spoonflower I went. After much trial and error, I started putting together designs that actually looked like something you would buy. You can use almost anything for the basis of a design ~ photos, clip art, text, scanned art, whatever. I used my photos for starting points in some designs, but most I put together with an idea, a little imagination and the wonder of digital design tools. All of these you see here I designed in Picnik and iPhoto. You can also use Photoshop and Illustrator or a host of other programs.
From top to bottom are Coral Medley, House Rule, Scattered Pink Flowers and Summer Fun. What you see here are the building blocks of the designs. The actual finished designs look somewhat different, depending on how I chose to display the image on the fabric ~ for example, a simple repeat looks different than a mirrored repeat or a half-drop. When I get them completely finished (I'm waiting on numerous test swatches now), I'll share them with you so you can see the final products. And, when I get it all straight, I'll have a shop under The Pink Home name on Spoonflower, too. Cool, huh?

 

All designs by The Pink Home