I was approached a while back by a lovely lady who really liked my ‘Love Birds’ print (over on my Folksy shop) and wanted it on fabric. I wasn’t able to print it myself and so began an exciting discovery of places that print fabric and how you go about it. Its been a massive learning curve, but very enjoyable and something I am very interested in exploring in the future.
I had no idea about ’tiling’ or how to put together a repeat, and so I armed myself with a great book ‘A Field Guide To Fabric Design’ by Kimberly Kight and learnt from there. It was a very useful book and I can heartily recommend it. Not being particularly techy I started by playing with photocopies and from there realised that I needed something to fill in the big spaces, a second ‘pattern’ was created and added. I’m sure it’s much easier to do it digitally, but I needed to physically play with it.
This is a picture of the very reduced photocopy of the print, so I could play with the pattern.
This shows a tracing paper overlay (told you it was low tech!) with the additional pattern added. The grid helped with placing the pattern.
After looking at many UK companies, we went with ‘Spoonflower’ from the States, mainly due to choice of Fabrics and usability of their site. I’ve only had a fat quarter sample of the fabric done so far, but I’m pretty pleased with how it turned out.
I also had a test of their wall decals done, I don’t think this design would work, but its inspired me to try some others. I couldn’t resist having a play with it though..
