I had the day off today (mostly) and I can finally gather my thoughts and talk about the Surface Design Association Conference that I have been absorbed in for the last few days. Every other year, the Surface Design Association has a conference. They are an organization with several thousand members and usually about 400 people attend the conference. What is surface design? It sort of broadly encompasses all of the things you can do to or with the surface of fabric: dyes, paints, shibori, batik, embroidery, digital printing. All of the rock stars of the field come to teach workshops (1-5 days) and present seminars and demonstrations. There is a fashion show and lots of shopping with trunk shows and vendor shows and this year a DIY festival. The Textile Center, where I work, helped to host the conference and some of the sessions were held at our space. Most of my hours were spent being staff at various events, but I did get to participate in a few really amazing things.
Workshop with Stephen Fraser of Spoonflower.com
I had the delightful task of being Stephen’s workshop assistant for his class on digital fabric design. He is charming and his love for Spoonflower and the community that surrounds it is infectious. (I don’t have time to enter those weekly contests and he had me thinking about it again!) We had 2 groups of students that learned how to make a basic design and upload it to the site. My favorite project was based on this week’s contest theme: crayons and construction paper to make a design and then scanned in to the computer. My favorite moments were hearing the “Oh wow!” from across the room when a mirrored pattern did something totally amazing to a simple crayon drawing.
Ironically, the only lecture I was able to listen to was also Stephen’s. Fun talking to people afterwards who were completely inspired!
The DIY Festival
This was a new event, inspired by the conference and hosted by the Textile Center. Lauren, a former intern of mine, was the coordinator and she did an amazing job. I was the official Textile Center rep and general event “cop”. The event was basically a small craft show but with a real goal of featuring new artists. The fees to participate were low and we really tried to encourage first time sellers to come and try it out, meet some of the SDA attendees and network with other new artists. We had a fashion show with prodigy designer Josh Homic (a former Textile Center student), and other groups making spontaneous art through yarn-bombing the campus and a “wearable art slam” restyling t-shirts. Thank you to Donna Kallner who brought me chocolate around hour 12 of my “supervising” duties. The lovely Nikol of Sewtropolis has posted some pictures.
My Seminar – Etsy: From the Inside Out
I was thrilled to pieces to also be a presenter at the conference. I did a session on Etsy-behind-the-scenes. Basically I walk you through all of the things about the site you can’t tell before you set up shop: What does it look like to list a new item, what happens when you sell something, how do I find the settings for x, y, or z? I also share a few of my “silver bullets” for things that I think really help make your shop outstanding and present some questions to help you decide about whether Etsy is the right venue for what you are trying to do. It was a lot to put in to an hour! There was no clock in the room, so I had to keep checking my phone to make sure I was on schedule – I promise I wasn’t checking my texts!
My audience for the session was outstanding – thank you to everyone who attended! I hope you got something out of it that you can really use. If anyone took some photos, I would love to have them!
I am calling this one “Classy Leaves”. I passed around a piece of paper with a grid on it. Everyone had the instruction to draw a leaf in a box, add a little color and pass it on to your neighbor. I gave everyone a black pen and about 5 colors of colored pencils so we would have a coordinated color scheme. Once we finished drawing, I scanned it, cropped away the white edges and we uploaded it to Spoonflower. This is the “mirror” layout that my class liked best.
The best part is that I gave each student a blank envelope and had them self-address it. I have ordered some of this fabric and plan to mail everyone a swatch when it is done, so they can see their work. I like his project because there is no graphics software (ie Photoshop) involved in getting the art, rather, the art making part is “low tech” colored pencils. I think this helps make the “high tech” part of the process more approachable.
