Mini Spoonflower Tutorial: Two ways to see your designs as finished goods
Spoonflower recently rolled out some cool new changes to their website and the ways you can look at designs. Instead of only seeing a swatch or a fat quarter, you can now see your designs mocked up as sheets, curtains, pillows, tablecloths and more. And it’s now built in to the site; you just have to know where to click. I made this mini video tutorial (10 min) to show you two ways you can look at these new mockups, both as a shopper and as a designer. I think they are both great ways to help you visualize the scale and impact of your designs. If you don’t see the video thumbnail here, click Read More > below.
Want to learn more about designing fabrics for Spoonflower? Try out my online intro class! It’s free and will walk you through a design from idea to upload.
Learning New Things (e fare limonata)
I spend a lot of time applying for things: grants, scholarships, projects, exhibitions, sales, training sessions, residencies. As an independent artist, I don’t work unless I find the opportunities, so I am always on the look out for something. About half the time (at least) you apply and get a “no thank you”. That’s pretty much expected.
This summer, I had a lot of “no thank yous” that all happened at once. It’s not anything that I am failing at, it just happened that the things I was proposing and the things that appealed to the grantors/jurors/evaluators weren’t on the same page. Evaluation panels are funny that way and really change with the personality of the people sitting on the panel and what fires up their excitement and enthusiasm.
I try not to overbook myself by applying to too many things that overlap, because you never know when you will have the opposite problem – a whole lot of YES – and there is only one of me to go around. So that meant that I had a whole lot of time on my hands this summer set aside for projects that weren’t going to happen.
So I decided to learn something new.
I started by brushing up my origami skills. This is related to one of the things-i-applied-to-but-didn’t-get. I subscribed to a YouTube channel of a designer I like who writes great tutorials and I practiced. I’ve talked about my long love of origami before on the blog, but I don’t practice enough. So I’m trying to fold something new at least once a week and trying to memorize a few simple ones.
Next, I decided to learn Italian. A friend had been talking about the app DuoLingo and I thought I’d give it […]
Artist vs Big Giant Company (with a happy ending)
If you follow a bunch of other artists and crafters on social media like I do, you will have seen stories about big giant companies (like Target and Anthropologie) using artists’ work without their permission. I have a friend who this happened to and it’s rotten. (I think hers had an ok resolution, but she isn’t allowed to talk about it.) My story is a little different and it starts with a video game.
You may or may not be a fan of video games. For the most part, I am not, although I love board games. Recently, a company called Niantic came out with a phone based game inspired by the Harry Potter Universe. It’s called Wizards Unite. In the game, you are a wizard helping to capture some magical creatures set loose in the real world and you find them by walking around and looking for them with your phone. If this sounds familiar, this game is based on the same platform as PokemonGo, which was all the rage just a few years ago. Like I said, I am not in to video games, but I am on board with anything Harry Potter inspired so I had to check it out. My husband and I have a fun time walking the dogs after dinner and exploring our local park for signs of magical beasts. There are lots of fire breathing chickens and baby hippogryphs there, in case you were wondering.
In the game there are “Greenhouses”, which are tied to geographic elements in the real world like a piece of public art, a neighborhood sign “Welcome to Northeast Park” or a sculpture or statue. They are spots to get a little spell energy or harvest potion ingredients.
On site installation of utility […]
Selling your Designs on Spoonflower at Craft Industry Alliance Journal
I wrote an article for the Craft Industry Alliance Journal about selling your designs on Spoonflower. The Journal is usually available only to members, but they decided to make this story available to the public. Yay! Read here about how you should think about TACOS when you are creating your designs, and let me know if you have questions! I’ll do a follow up post here on the blog to answer them.
Wiksten Shift: I thought it would be cute…
I don’t have a lot of time to sew purely for myself. A lot of my business is sewing for other reasons: making items to sell or creating pieces for exhibitions. A few weekends ago, I ended up with some free time and nothing pressing on my agenda. I wandered up to Knit & Bolt, my neighborhood fabric store, and I bought a copy of the Wiksten Shift Dress pattern.
I’d been seeing this one all over Instagram and the craft blogs. It’s a super simple shape and I could have probably drafted the pattern myself, but I like to support indie pattern designers and I honestly didn’t want to think that hard. I just wanted to spend an afternoon making a simple dress.
I had a perfect piece of fabric: a blue/green woven that I had bought to make a dress for my sister’s wedding. I ended up not having enough fabric for the dress I wanted to make for that event, so I used something else and this green went in the stash. It’s a cool weave that has blue threads in the warp and green threads in the weft so it changes color a little as it moves and it is super soft.
The pattern has a yoke on the back and I thought it would be fun to use a contrasting fabric for that and I found a scrap of this print that I designed and printed at Spoonflower on some cotton sateen. The colors were perfect together.
Since this was a new-to-me pattern designer, I remeasured myself and checked their size chart and decided based on my measurements that I should make a size 10. So I got it all sewn […]
Intention and Expectation: Attending the Americans for the Arts Conference
The Americans for the Arts (AFTA) conference was held in Minneapolis this weekend. It is a national conference for art administrators primarily to get together and talk about funding, sustainability, data, evaluation, and innovation and do it in a room with other people who get it. I love being an artist, but I was really good at being an arts administrator. Art is something I have to do because it is part of who I am and I can’t not do it; being an arts admin was something I was called to do by whatever little voice in your head it is that tells you that you need to do this because you can make a difference.
I left my arts admin job about 5 years ago. It was an organization that I deeply loved, a mission I believed in and a community with a lot of untapped potential. I worked way too many hours and there were some parts of the approximately 1 million cobbled together parts of my job that I was less than wonderful at, but by and large it was a good fit. I did good work and proud of the projects and connections I got to be a part of.
But something changed. There was a transition in leadership. The board of directors decided to shift the values and culture of the organization to follow a different path. It wasn’t just “things change because of new leadership and people hate change” but a bigger organizational shift that included altering the mission statement. I’ve been on enough boards of directors to know that I don’t know the whole story about why and how that came to be, but I do know that suddenly I was part of an organization that wasn’t a good fit anymore and was moving […]
Hi, I’m Becka.
Talking about fabric design, Spoonflower, teaching, and the life and business of being an artist.
Social
Upcoming events
-
Etsy Shop Behind the Scenes
September 23 @ 5:30 pm - 7:30 pm CDT -
Tea Towel from a Recipe Card
September 28 @ 10:00 am - 12:30 pm CDT
Shop my art
