A New Sewing Adventure! Vintage Patterns and On Demand Fabric!

Today my first yard of on demand fabric arrived! A few weeks ago, I participated in a workshop at the Textile Center with Stephen Fraser, co-founder of Spoonflower Fabric. What is Spoonflower? It is a website that allows you to upload your design and create fabric. You can order a fat quarter or yardage.
Check out their website www.spoonflower.com

It was a fabulous rainy day. The highlight for me was learning the 'math' for creating appropriate repeats for the width of fabric I was looking for. The prints are available on a variety of very good quality cottons, linens, silks and blends. It sounds like there may be more offerings this summer available as well.

My yard of fabric is a pencil drawing of some cherries that I colored with COLOR CRAYONS!! It took me not more than 5 minutes to create the design. I spent a little time playing with the types of repeats and scaling it to different types of fabric widths until  I found this layout that I liked. I chose a half drop repeat because I like the secondary pattern created by the tiles.

Spoonflower has had a tremendous impact on the quilting community especially. It has impacted independent retailers... in a good way. You see, Spoonflower has weekly contests. Every week there is a different contest that ANYONE can enter. The design must meet certain criteria or limitations and then the people who frequent the sight vote on their favorite fabrics. The benefit of this is that many quilt fabric manufacturers have found out about Spoonflower and follow the contest winners! Some have found their way to become licensed fabric designers for companies like Windom Fabrics. Michael Miller and Robert Kaufman have had specific contests to 'find their next licensed designer on Spoonflower'. Many other companies follow as well. It is a great place to see the trends of what people are designing and what people are buying.

Designers can sell their designs.. or choose not to. It is personal preference. I hope to enter some contests, just to make myself become more fluent and more disciplined in the world of fabric design.

Remember those vintage patterns I found, the 1946 apron pattern is the one I am going to make with this fabric. I am hoping to cut it out this weekend and maybe have a new post for monday.. Either a progress report.. and or a finished apron! Might have to stop at Glad Creations to get some Rick Rack.. I think the bright turquoise blue would be perfect on this fabric!

Ooh, this is going to be sew much fun! (I know that was very cliche! I couldn't resist!)