Spoonflower & Fabric Design

26 March, 2014

Black Dog Series: Dogs with Yarn Fabric

beckarahn2014-03-26T09:53:28-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design|2 Comments

My mama asked “when will there be a black dog series on Spoonflower” and I couldn’t resist the taunt. Here is a sneak peek at the first two colorways of my Dogs Stealing Yarn design. It will get a better title eventually. I have swatches of these ordered so I can check them out properly and do some color fine-tuning. Each dog has snatched some yarn and you will see some knitting needles scattered around if you look closely. My hounds are fascinated with my knitting project and are convinced that the ball of yarn is actually a toy for them. So far they haven’t snatched it, but it is only a matter of time.

16 March, 2014

Ugly photos make great patterns

beckarahn2014-03-16T14:41:59-05:00Classes & Teaching, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|1 Comment

This is an ugly photo. But I am posting it here because my digital design class is going to learn how to turn this photo into this seamless repeat…

Or even this seamless repeat…

If I post it here to my blog then it is easy for the whole class to find it and download it for class. But I also thought it would be fun to talk about how that ugly photo gets to be something cool. My top seamless sample needs a little work still to make a few more flaws disappear where the edges of the repeat tile meet, but once you add a filter effect on top of it (like sample 2) the flaws pretty much vanish. For the third week of class, I let the students vote on what kind of a repeat we are going to work on and my class this semester chose to work with something photographic. We are going to use a tool called Pixlr to do our photo editing. It is a free online graphics program and it is pretty sophisticated.

In a nutshell, here’s what we are going to do:

Wish us luck!

27 February, 2014

Rain Storm: Silk screen, digital print, hand embroidery

beckarahn2014-09-24T18:30:30-05:00Embroidery, Gallery Exhibitions, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|2 Comments

This is my piece that is in the A Common Thread show at Textile Center this year. It’s a 3 piece “suit” with three different techniques. It started with the fabric for the skirt. I taught a class last summer about silk screening and I needed a sample of how you would create an all over repeat with silk screens. This is two screens – one printed in dark silver and the other in blue. So it took many passes to screen it to make sure that I wasn’t touching any of the wet paint where the edges of the screen might overlap. I made the screens using a thermofax machine and specially treated fabric – you print your design on a laser printer or copier and run it through the machine with the fabric. The coating on the screen is burned away whereever it touches your artwork. It is a very cool process. The fabric is a metallic denim and it is printed in metallic ink, so it is hard to photograph because everything reflects the light. The pattern is a simple pencil skirt because I didn’t want to do much to interrupt the pattern.

The top is digitally printed “silky faille” which is one of Spoonflower’s newer fabrics. I needed an excuse to get some and try it out. The pattern is the same rainclouds from the silk screen, shrunk down and colored using the Spoonflower color chart. The color chart is a piece of fabric printed with “chips” of about 1600 colors that can be printed. Each one has a code, so you can choose the color you want and enter the code in Photoshop as you create your design. Since I had already printed the skirt fabric, I could compare colors on the color chart to the paint colors and get a pretty great match. I forgot when I printed this that the pattern pieces are supposed to be cut on the diagonal grain for this top, but I wanted to keep the design running the same way as on the skirt, so I cut it with the grain. This is such a nice drapey fabric that it worked just fine.

The jacket is a simple bolero trimmed with a little blue organza around the collar and cuffs and then hand embroidered with rows of running stitch, matching the rain drops from the design. I laid out the stitching lines with masking tape that I stitched along the edges of. The buttons are vintage ones I found on Etsy.

12 November, 2013

The Thief

beckarahn2014-09-24T18:30:51-05:00Embroidery, Gallery Exhibitions, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|Comments Off on The Thief

The Thief

2013

Digitally printed fabric with hand embroidery

This piece was my contribution to the art auction in my hometown. They do a fundraiser every year with a silent auction of 8×8 inch pieces. The artists are kept anonymous until after the event, so I have been keeping this one under wraps.

This is a collaboration with my mom. She snapped this photo of one of her neighbor deer. This particular deer had been recently snacking at the neighbors pear tree so I made the repeat pattern behind her with pears and flowers. I embroidered with shiny rayon thread to addd texture to her nose and ears and then gave her extra thick eyelashes. I love the “who me?” expression that mom captured.

26 August, 2013

A Collection of Digitally Printed Garments and a thank you.

beckarahn2013-08-26T18:48:35-05:00Gallery Exhibitions, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|2 Comments

: A view of the collection

: Glaciology

: Vein

: Mosaic

: Wallflower

: Guardian

: 1060

: Gallery

: Coils

: A view of the collection

: Strut

: Zinnia

: Flamingo Mambo

: Neighborhood DNA

: Waterlily

First a very big thank you to everyone who attended, volunteered or wished me well from near or far on Thursday. It was a lovely lovely party. For those that missed my post about it earlier, I was honored by Textile Center with a Spun Gold award on Thursday night. The Spun Gold is a kind of lifetime achievement award for contributions to the fiber art field. One of the very neatest things for me was the excuse to bring a whole collection of my work to be part of the celebration. I have never seen this whole collection in one place before and I was just blown away. It was neat to see.

These are 13 digitally printed garments I created over the last 2+ years. The waterlily skirt was the very first garment I created from Spoonflower fabric. The dress I am wearing in the photos called “Wallflower” is the most recent. I can’t get this gallery gadget to show you captions, so I will caption these below. (You can mouseover to see the title for each piece. Top to bottom, left to right. You can also click each one to zoom in.)

I work primarily in digitally manipulated photos and engineered prints. That means that each of these designs started with a photo as inspiration and then I sculpt it into a fabric design. Some of them have filters and effects applied. I cut out and rescale or move elements and bend parts of the image to fit the curves of the pieces I am working with. I always know exactly what the garment design is before I start the design for the fabric and for the most part, each one is designed to fit the exact pieces I need to make it.

Glaciology: There is a whole post about this one here. Digitally printed silk cotton. Manipulated photo of two views of ice. One is an icy sidewalk beginning to melt, the other is ice blocks stacking up in the spring on the shore of Lake Superior.

Vein: Digitally printed linen cotton. A manipulated photo of a giant leaf at the Como Park Conservatory, St Paul MN.

Mosaic: Another post about this one here. Digitally printed cotton voile, layered with cotton. A photo of a “mosaic plant” from the Como Conservatory water garden.

Wallflower: Digitally printed cotton sateen. Hand beaded (the very last white stripe is sequined so the hem shimmers), belt made from grosgrain ribbon. Manipulated photo of the wall of yarn and fiber from the Weavers Guild of MN. The white lines you see on the dress are the shelves.

Guardian: Digitally printed linen/cotton canvas. Manipulated photo of a lion guarding the doors to Parliament in London and a photo of a stone street in Bayeux France.

1060: Digitally printed linen/cotton canvas. Manipulated photo of my husband’s oboe. Named for his favorite Bach solo piece.

Gallery: Digitally printed organic cotton knit. Manipulated photo of a wall of art from the Minneapolis Institute of Art “Foot in the Door” exhibition. My piece from that exhibition can be seen in several places in the print.

Coils: Post about this piece here. Digitally printed silk/cotton. Photo of a huge pile of video cables.

Strut: Post about this piece here. Digitally printed linen/cotton canvas, vintage velvet ribbon. Photo of a piece of lace from the Victoria & Albert museum collection in London.

Zinnia: Digitally printed linen/cotton canvas and hand-dyed cotton. Manipulated photo of zinnias from Sioux Park flower garden in Rapid City, SD, combined with digitally created stripe and hand-dyed trim on pockets.

Flamingo Mambo: Digitally printed linen/cotton canvas. Manipulated photos of flamingos from Sea World Florida and a scanned sharpie drawing.

Neighborhood DNA: Digitally printed cotton sateen. Manipulated combined photos of weathered paint from a curb cut and a parking lot paint marking. Created for Spoonflower/Textile Center Urban Sightings challenge and exhibition.

Waterlily: Digitally printed linen/cotton canvas. A photo of a waterlily from my own tiny water garden. My first printed garment.

Some of these are also accessorized with jewelry I made. I paired them mainly with solid colored t-shirts so that the prints were really what draws your eye. (And this is the way I wear most of them anyway.)

11 August, 2013

Renfrew & Wild Horse Stampede

beckarahn2013-08-11T20:01:43-05:00Sewing & Design, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|Comments Off on Renfrew & Wild Horse Stampede

This is the Renfrew Top by Sewaholic patterns. It is seriously one of my favorite patterns ever. I have made about 6 shirts in several variations and I still love it. I admit I was a total chicken about working with knits. I do all kinds of crazy sewing projects but I didn’t even touch knits until about a year ago. I saw this pattern and I had a piece of vintage knit and it was absolute love. I bought a serger a few months later and I am now getting brave enough to tackling a few alterations to the pattern – I made a version with what my husband calls “princess sleeves” that are puffed on top with long very fitted cuffs. This is basically everything I love in a good t-shirt – it’s not too short or too tight or see-through. It’s cute and flattering and dead easy.

You can just make the short sleeved version in my size with a yard of Spoonflower knit. They have a new knit fabric out and I so I ordered a yard so I could check it out. And the most perfect design just jumped in to my cart: Wild Horse Stampede by MulberryTree. Guys, it has seahorses. Total love. The trim I did with a bit of orange rayon/cotton knit from Joanns that has tiny tiny little orange and grey stripes. It just happened to be just the right orange (there are a few little orange seahorses) and I thought the contrast would make the shirt a little more sophisticated. I wore this to work on Friday and my summer camp kids loved it.