My First 15 Spoonflower Sample Swatches

My first swatch samples have arrived from Spoonflower. First off, what an amazing turn around! I ordered the sampler Monday night, it was printed and shipped on Wednesday, and I received it in the mail on Saturday afternoon.

I am also very pleased by the sharpness of the images. The files are all .tif format, 600 pixels/inch, sized around 3725 x 3725 pixels resulting in 39.7 MB which is close to their 40MB size limit. There is slight fuzziness in some views on the Spoonflower site, but the focus on the fabric itself is dead-on perfect!

I smoothed the piece of fabric out on my work table under an Ott light, and proceeded to cut around each individual design with pinking shears.

The individual 8x8 inch swatches are separated by a white unprinted margin marked with blue guidelines and numbers that Spoonflower assigns for identification purposes.

Seven of the swatches could not be improved upon and are now available for purchase at my Spoonflower shop. The rest will be re-worked for various reasons. My unexpected favorite has got to be Impossible Dream in large (top photo) and small:

Three in my Perfect Square Collection also made the cut including Blue Dorje:

and another pleasant surprise, Orange Dorje:

Stay tuned for some Orange Dorje companion fabric! This next one needs to be re-worked because a slight pencil line is visible:

I either need to play it up more or eliminate it entirely. Back to the drawing board!

Beyond Perfect

Initially I was excited by Perfect Square (Yellow) No. 1 pictured above because it was my first application of "Cutout" in Photoshop. You can see how the character of the original drawing was transformed by enlarging the example below:


After discovering how nicely Perfect Square (Yellow) No.2 reacted when half-brick repeated, I decided that my first version, application of "Cutout" not withstanding, was boring and set out to improve on it. The attempt to retrofit the original design became a lesson in how not to make a successful pattern, and demonstrated how much I still have to learn to become truly proficient in photoshop.

I have since decided that the success of Perfect Square (Yellow) No.2 is due, to a large extent, to its asymmetrical nature. But I made the choice to mess about with No. 1 by attacking it at the center:

Sensing a problem, I carried the project forward by partially obscuring the big misty blue blob in the center and repeated like so:

I was stuck. So I decided to invert the colors in an attempt to achieve novelty. (If you've seen my Spoonflower shop banner you will realize I have traveled this road before! )

At this point I had completely worked myself into the proverbial corner. My one last resort to save the project was to bump up the orange:

The more I consider this exercise of pattern design for fabric, the more I realize how exponentially explosive the possibilities can become. I have a whole Tumblr full of images to play around with, and I can cull through my digital collage posts on this site for more inspiration. Plus my collage activities now have a new focus.

New Year Inspiration: The Perfect Square

The new year has begun with a satisfying new tangent for me: fabric design at Spoonflower. Pattern has obsessed me off and on throughout my life. I dabbled in batik, silk screening and quilting in the 80's before getting involved with beads, jewelry making, and collage. Now the combination of design manipulation in Photoshop with the print-on-demand capabilities of Spoonflower is making me fall in love with pattern all over again.

There are a few publicly viewable designs in my Spoonflower shop but you need to click on designs not for sale to view them. Once I get a dozen or so uploaded that please me I will order swatches to proof them and then make them available to the public. The one called Perfect Square (Yellow) No. 2 is my favorite so far.

It started last June as a marker drawing which is shown above. I scanned it into photoshop where I created an eight-inch square design by repeating the graphic in two sizes on a gridded yellow background.

The options for layout in Spoonflower include basic repeat, half-drop,

half-brick,

and mirrored. I like the half-brick repeat the best so that is what I have specified to be printed on Spoonflower.

AnitaNH Designs at Spoonflower

I have just opened a Spoonflower fabric shop! I have been talking about using my drawings as fabric designs for a while and I finally got the ball rolling. I have added a couple of designs just to see how the system works. I have to order a swatch of each of the designs to proof them before they can be offered for sale. 15 designs printed at once are much more cost effective than one at a time so I need to work up more designs. You can check my progress here: