Tutorials – Becka Rahn, artist

23 September, 2019

Etsy Resources: A Virtual Handout with my top 10 articles to read first

beckarahn2019-09-23T12:31:21-05:00Classes & Teaching, Etsy, Tutorials, UpcomingClasses|Comments Off on Etsy Resources: A Virtual Handout with my top 10 articles to read first

I’m teaching a class today about opening an Etsy shop and I wanted to create a quick reference handout that had clickable links. That’s hard to do with a paper handout. So I decided to create it as a blog post and even if you aren’t in my class, this reference might be helpful to you as well.

I always recommend that new potential Etsy sellers take some time to read the Etsy Seller Handbook, but it can be really overwhelming to get started. It has a lot of information. So here are my 10 favorite articles to help you make decisions as you are opening up your shop and trying to decide what features to use.

Getting Started.

This beginners guide to selling on Etsy has a whole lot of links to some of the most frequently used features and is kind of like a checklist of the steps you should take to set up.
Tips for choosing your shop name.
This article on Communicating your Brand has great advice and links about creating shop policies and FAQs.

Listings.

How to add variations (color, size, style) and photos of those variations to your listings.
7 types of product photos. This is a really good checklist of what kinds of photos to include to communicate everything about your item.

Getting Found in Search.

Seriously, read this one. The ultimate guide to Etsy Search.
I also learned things listening to the podcast that is linked in this “Your Search Questions Answered” article.

Shipping.

Understanding the somewhat controversial new free shipping initiative.
The ultimate guide to shipping has links to all of the current Etsy advice about being strategic about shipping costs.

[…]

16 August, 2019

Mini Spoonflower Tutorial: Two ways to see your designs as finished goods

beckarahn2019-08-17T10:16:15-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials, Videos|2 Comments

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.

26 October, 2018

Save This Layout and Selling your Spoonflower designs. (I learned something new.)

beckarahn2018-10-26T11:33:23-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|3 Comments

I’ve been designing a bunch of tea towels for my Spoonflower shop lately. The September design challenges were all about tea towels and I did a couple of tea towel calendars too. Those kinds of designs aren’t really made to repeat. Instead you are designing a panel that is set up to be exactly the size of a fat quarter of fabric. For linen-cotton canvas, which is my preferred fabric for those, that means I am designing a rectangle that is 27×18 inches.

I had sold several of the designs to people shopping on Spoonflower, but a couple of those shoppers chose a different fabric than the linen-cotton canvas, which might not seem like a problem, except that different fabrics have different widths and so the size of the fat quarter is different. If you choose basic cotton for example, a fat quarter is only 21 x 18 inches. Which means that you are going to lose 6 inches of my design. The top photo here is showing you what a fat quarter of basic cotton looks like; the bottom shows linen-cotton canvas. If you order this design in basic cotton, a third of the calendar will be missing.

If you haven’t used Spoonflower a lot, you might not realize that what you see is exactly what you get – if that design is cut off in the preview, then that’s what your fabric is going to look like. It’s an easy mistake to make. I caught it when I saw these orders come through and contacted Spoonflower to get in touch with those customers, since I was pretty sure they didn’t actually want to have only 2/3 of […]

7 September, 2018

Video Tutorial: Combining photos to print at Spoonflower

beckarahn2018-10-07T22:39:27-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials, Videos|4 Comments

I’ve had several students ask me this week: “How can I combine a bunch of different things together and print them all on a yard of fabric at Spoonflower? Do I use Fill-A-Yard?”

I wanted to help by walking you through how to combine photos or art from a group of friends into one fat quarter or yard of fabric, so you can print many things all at once. This is a very fast and informal overview about how you do it in Photoshop (starring some barking dogs in the background). I am a big fan of “Done is Better than Perfect” and I wanted to get this posted and not worry about it being polished. So think of it like a live video chat where I am just talking you through the process. (It’s about 25 minutes long, so you know that going in. You can pause and come back if you need to.) Click the arrows icon (next to the Vimeo logo) to see it bigger so you can read the menus on my screen.

You will see:

creating a canvas that is exactly the size of a fat quarter or yard
adding photos or art to the canvas using “place embedded”
using save as and uploading to Spoonflower
uploading a revision
when you need to rotate your canvas so it prints correctly and the easy way to do that
how to resize a photo you have placed and what to do if it looks blurry or pixellated

Here’s a link to the tea towel I used as an example […]

10 July, 2018

Video Tutorial: Fill-A-Yard Projects with Spoonflower

beckarahn2018-07-10T14:26:37-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials, Videos|Comments Off on Video Tutorial: Fill-A-Yard Projects with Spoonflower

A quick video tutorial of how to use Spoonflower’s Fill-A-Yard feature. Thanks to a student from my online class for the question.

If you need a little more help working with collections, be sure to check out my online classes. I go through collections in the Spoonflower Step One class.

25 May, 2018

Making Paper Mosaics: A video demo

beckarahn2018-05-25T10:14:07-05:00Everything Else, Gallery Exhibitions, Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|2 Comments

At my last fabric design class, I chatted with my students about how I make paper mosaic designs. I like to design fabrics using original art like paper collage or drawings or paintings. They were very curious to see the originals that my fabrics had started out as, so I thought it would be fun to make a video demo to show the process from paper to fabric.

Here are a few other mosaic designs I have done. All are made from recycled magazines or other patterned papers.