In the middle of working on some new designs, I decided I had to have a cute knit print. And wouldn’t you know it, I couldn’t find a boy one that I liked at any of my usual sources, so I headed over to Spoonflower.
I decided I wanted a bicycle print (just for ease of searching – I started with a vague idea of something geometric and quickly got overwhelmed), and began searching the 12 pages of bicycles that came up. This one was too small, this one too big, colors were off on this one, these bikes were too sleek and modern when I wanted vintage…on and on. And by this point I HAD to have bicycles.
There’s a dangerous combination in being too picky (which I will fully admit I am) and being allowed to design whatever you want – and Spoonflower has the payments from my Paypal acount to prove how effective they are at exploiting this dangerous combination.
At any rate, I now have the perfect fabric for my project (and I do love their organic knit cotton – not too thick and not too thin) which you will get to see later this month. And in case anyone else happens to want repeating vintage bikes in navy blue and gray, you can find my fabric here. Â Keep in mind that the organic knit is not bleached white like the preview picture, so it’s navy and gray on an off-white background, like my photo at the top of this post. But of course the beauty of Spoonflower is that you can order your design on many fabrics, so if you get the regular woven cottons they are bleached white.
Carol Pack Urban
How do you go about designing fabric?
Melissa
I use Adobe Illustrator, the same software I use for my PDF patterns. I start with a drawn image, which I scan, then import into Illustrator and digitize. That’s the short version, anyway 🙂