Spoonflower & Fabric Design

14 October, 2025

Studio Windows: Designing a Custom Fabric for WBCA

beckarahn2025-10-14T14:22:51-05:00An Artist's Life, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|Comments Off on Studio Windows: Designing a Custom Fabric for WBCA

If you subscribe to the newsletter for White Bear Center for the Arts, one of my local art centers, you might have seen a new fabric featured. I had a really fun time working with WBCA to make a custom fabric in celebration of their new branding and logo. They reached out after a class that I taught on digital fabric design and asked if I could do something for them. This is one of my favorite kind of projects! I’ve done fabrics for the Guthrie Theater Shop and Darn Knit Anyway in the past few years.

For this design, the art center had a new palette of colors that were their new brand. I thought it would be fun to highlight those colors by making the rest of the design in black and white. I went to one of my very favorite art materials: security envelopes. If you aren’t familiar, security envelopes are the ones that your bank statement or utility bill comes in that have black and white patterns printed on the inside. I love those patterns. So I made 10 different tiny illustrations: painting, writing, sewing, weaving, clay, glass, metal, drawing, woodworking, and music. Each one has a close up of hands doing one of those crafts. I also hid the initials WBCA in 4 of the scenes, so it spells it out when the design is all put together.

I started this design with an idea of scenes in frames because of the new frame shape in their logo design and I wanted it to look like you are peeking in the windows to see what’s going on. Once I finished the paper illustrations, then I scan them and assemble the repeating pattern in Photoshop and add the bright colored frames.

It was a fun design to work on. They asked me to make artist tool bags, which are on sale in the WBCA shop now. We decided to do two sizes so one is good for pencils and markers and the other for larger tools and maybe a sketchbook. And they are printed on recycled canvas, which is made from recycled plastic bottles.

30 July, 2025

Fabric Design Myths: Photoshop Does Everything

beckarahn2025-07-30T20:36:52-05:00An Artist's Life, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|Comments Off on Fabric Design Myths: Photoshop Does Everything

I’ve done a couple of events in the last few weeks where I have been showing and talking to people about my fabric design work. I love the reactions when I start to describe how I design all of the fabric from scratch. The toucans shown up above are one of the examples I pull out all the time. You can see the kinds of paper I use: painted paper, recycled security envelopes, magazine pages (bottom right). Then I make cut paper designs like this toucan (top right). On the left is the finished printed fabric. But there is a step in between that always makes people stop me and comment. I scan those paper patterns and I pull them in to Photoshop.

There is a myth that Photoshop somehow magically does all the work and spits out a fabric design without anyone having to lift a finger. I’ve been plagued by this myth for years. I made pieces called Faking It and Trash Bags (left) that are responses to this same conversation that I have had before. If you’ve never used Photoshop before, let me assure you, Photoshop doesn’t do anything magically for you. In fact, it’s really complex to learn and even though I’ve been using Photoshop for at least 25 years, I don’t know to use 3/4 of the tools. I’m just good at the stuff I need.

And what is that stuff? Here’s what I use Photoshop to do:

Clean up little flaws in the recycled papers I use so there aren’t obvious things distracting from my art.
Erase pencil lines and dog hairs and fuzz that show up when I scan the art.
Rearrange the individual pieces (toucans, leaves) so that I can make a repeating pattern. This is tedious, time-consuming work; shifting things by pixels so that they match up exactly when they repeat. That pink line shows you one corner of the toucans design tile.
Sometimes I add a solid colored background. It’s hard to scan a large solid colored area and have it be one single color.
Adjust the scale. When I work in cut paper, sometimes I can’t actually cut the paper pieces as small as I need the pattern to be. So I make it larger and shrink it down. Or vice versa.

There are tools that can help with some of these tasks, but there is not a tool that you can choose that says “take these toucans and make them into an awesome repeating pattern”. That takes an artist behind the wheel. With more and more AI fueled art out there, I’m also really careful about what Photoshop tools I use so that I am not adding AI generated elements to my work. I create my own textures by drawing or painting something and making a pattern I can add as a layer over my work. Sometimes I paint with Photoshop “brushes” to add color to a line drawing design (because I hate painting). Many other artists use other apps to design; you don’t have to use Photoshop to do all of those tasks I mentioned. I just like Photoshop best because it’s the tool I’ve invested the time to learn.

16 July, 2025

Adapting to a New Spoonflower Color Profile (Argh!)

beckarahn2025-07-16T10:02:32-05:00Everything Else, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|Comments Off on Adapting to a New Spoonflower Color Profile (Argh!)

If you follow me over on Instagram you might have seen a series of photos I posted about Spoonflower’s new color profile that they adopted earlier this spring. It was a complete surprise to me when I got an order of fabric in designs that I print all of the time to see that some of the colors in my designs shifted dramatically. Here’s what I mean. The colors I expected are on the top; the new fabric is the colors on the bottom.

For some designs this might not really matter, but when I sell these zip bags in my Etsy shop, my customers expect to get a pink bag when they choose a pink bag, not one that’s the color of grape candy.

I spent a lot of time talking to Spoonflower’s tech support and their philosophy behind making the color shift is to make the colors that print better match the colors that show on your screen. I think this is an impossible task because everyone’s screens are completely different. This is a photo I use in classes a lot when I teach about fabric design. It’s the same exact file pulled up on my laptop screen and my phone screen. They look wildly different. If I have everyone in class open this same file and if we step to the back of the room, we see 15 different shades of aqua on 15 different screens. So I think what they are trying to do is an impossible task, but I totally understand that it’s important to their average customer. You want to get fabric that looks like it does on the screen when you order it. So I don’t have an argument with what they are trying to accomplish, but rather how they went about it.

I don’t expect this shift again any time soon, and I totally understand that with print-on-demand that there is going to be some variation. But some of the colors I was working with were more than just a “little variation”.

I decided that the best (and certainly not easiest) solution for me was to re-color my designs. Some of these zip bag designs I have been making for years, so they “should” be a certain color. So I got a new colormap so I would have a physical copy of what the new colors looked like when printed and I could easily compare to the colors I was used to.

I started by making a spreadsheet and recorded the main color for each of the designs. For example, the “Be-ewe-tiful friendsheep” design below is #7473BE in my original design file. That’s a lilac purple color. But instead of printing as a lilac color, the new fabric I got was cornflower blue. You can see the old and new versions on the left in this picture. Those are the same HEX code but printed before and after Spoonflower’s software update.

Next, I put my old and new colormaps side by side. That’s what you see at the top of this post. I found the original color (#7473BE) and then found a new color on the new colormap that I thought best matched the original one. In this case, that was #9777D0. Then I changed the color in my file to the new HEX code. Repeat this for about 40 different designs.

Then I uploaded new versions and re-printed all of my re-colored designs. On the right above, you can see the original color version and underneath is the new color version. The new lilac is slightly warmer, but it’s perfectly acceptable to me as a little variation. Most of my new colors worked out great. I have a few I need to try again. It has taken me about 15 hours so far, 6 weeks of diagnosing the problem and waiting for samples, and 4 yards of re-printed fabrics to get most of them back to printing the colors I expect them to.

The thing that’s the most frustrating about this whole situation is that in the end it is going to probably be about 20 hours worth of work that no one but me is ever going to know about or benefit from, that I certainly wasn’t planning for in my schedule and that I am not getting paid for. My Etsy shop is super low on inventory because I had to do all this work behind the scenes. Today I am sewing up some of the successful samples so I can re-stock a few things in my shop, re-photograph a few that I couldn’t get a color match, and then I’ll sit down to revise again on a few others. In my last newsletter, I talked about ripple effects and this is certainly a great example.

If you haven’t printed anything with Spoonflower in a while I recommend you get a new colormap and order a swatch of a few designs, especially if you have ones that are predominantly pink, purple, or cool blues.

23 June, 2025

1929 Collection for the Guthrie Theater Store

beckarahn2025-06-23T16:18:32-05:00An Artist's Life, Spoonflower & Fabric Design|1 Comment

I was delighted to be invited once again to design a collection of fabrics inspired by the Guthrie Theater’s summer musical. The copyright holders of this year’s show were very strict about how the show could be mentioned or quoted so I am not going to call it out by name, but it’s set in 1929 Berlin and revolves around a variety show in a risqué nightclub. I often use song lyrics from musicals as a starting point for designs, but given the sometimes dark and seedy subject matter for this show, that just wasn’t inspiring designs that felt like something someone would want to take home with them. And that is the point of designing things for the shop, after all.

So instead of being specifically inspired by the show, I looked to the broader landscape of the world in 1929 and dug into the Victoria and Albert Museum textiles collection looking for fabrics of 1929. You can see that inspiration up above. I looked at both the popular colors and shapes for both clothing and home decor fabrics.

I decided to do three different designs, each inspired by a different theme: music, love and art. We wanted to use the fabrics to make scarves, tea towels and small zip pouches, so I did both a portrait style design to put on tea towels and a repeating pattern for wearables.

“Music is the Universal Language” is the inspiration for the music themed designs. They feature silhouettes of musical instruments (trumpet, trombone, oboe and clarinet) and vibrant shades of pink. One of the songs in the show tells a story about a pineapple and so the love themed designs have pineapples and shades of cool green. The art themed designs are all about an artist’s role in bringing the light to dark times and are shades of moody purples and blues.

All of the art for these designs started as digital illustrations then layered together with hand-drawn and scanned textures. I really like the richness that those “imperfect” hand-drawn elements add to the designs. I repeated elements like parallel lines (which hint at music staffs) and radiating points (bright lights) to tie them all together. I designed, had professionally printed, and then sewed each piece of this collection.

It was by far the theater-inspired collection that I struggled with the most because it’s not a show that I particularly love, but I do love these fabrics. You can find these pieces and more exclusively at the Guthrie Theater Store. (They aren’t yet in the online shop, but they will probably be there later in the summer.)

10 June, 2025

Tutorial: How to do a 3-Thread Serger Rolled Hem on Chiffon

beckarahn2025-06-10T18:47:58-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|Comments Off on Tutorial: How to do a 3-Thread Serger Rolled Hem on Chiffon

Last week I went down a rabbit hole of trying to learn how to use the narrow rolled hem foot for my new Bernina sewing machine. The main thing I have learned is that there is a major learning curve. But the other thing I noticed was that there are a lot of half tutorials for how to use that foot and none that actually show finishing a project with it. (Or at least none that I found). Specifically I couldn’t find information about how to do corners, like when you are hemming a rectangular scarf.

So this tutorial is not how to do that, because honestly I think it’s basically impossible. Instead I decided to go back to my own tried-and-true method for making a narrow hem: the 3-thread rolled hem on my serger. You can see what it looks like in the photo above. It’s an especially neat way to finish the edges of rectangular scarves especially if you are using a fabric like chiffon or crepe de chine. I needed to hem a batch of scarves and the reason I was looking for an alternate finish is that it does need some specialty thread and with the demise of Joann, I wasn’t sure if I could get any locally and I wasn’t sure I had the colors I needed.

Setting up my Serger

I have a Brother 1034D serger. I am going to talk about the settings I use with that specific machine and one very specific fabric: Spoonflower’s Chiffon. If you have a different serger, I hope this tutorial will give you a starting point but you’ll have to look at the instructions for your machine to see how to set it up and create a rolled hem.

The very bare bones instructions that came with my serger say to remove the left needle, remove the stitch finger, and adjust the thread tension and you are ready to go. It took me many many many many yards of experiments to figure out what those settings are. Here’s what works for me:

Yellow (left needle) not used.
Pink (right needle) 3.5
Green (upper looper) 2
Blue (lower looper) 5

Differential .7
Length R
Width 5.5

Remember, these settings are a starting point. Use the selvedges of your fabric to stitch a few inches and see if you like the way the hem looks.

Threads & Needle

I use two different threads to make a rolled hem: a cone of regular serger thread and 2 cones of wooly nylon thread all in matching colors. I have gotten my threads from Threadart.com and they’ve always worked well for me. I thread the serger with the regular thread in the needle and the wooly nylon in the upper and lower loopers. If you’ve never worked with wooly nylon, it’s a little unruly. It fluffs out when it’s not under tension and it can be difficult to thread through the eyes in the serger. I used a little Sew Fine Thread Gloss on the ends of the threads to stick it together this time and it was very helpful.

Because I was working with chiffon, I swapped the serger needle for a 60/8 microtex needle.

Fabric

My project was hemming scarves made from Spoonflower’s chiffon fabric. I print 2 yards of fabric and cut it lengthwise down the center to make two scarves approximately 26×72 inches. The chiffon is translucent so you can see the print on both sides, although the wrong side is muted. A rolled hem makes a really nice finish that looks great from both sides. You can use this technique on other fabrics, of course but you will need to adjust the serger settings and needle choice for each different kind of fabric.

Your Most Essential Tool: Spray Starch

After a lot of trial and error, the tool that has been the absolute most help to making a beautiful hem is spray starch. I bought mine at the grocery store: Niagara Heavy Finish Ironing Spray Starch

I hang the fabric from the shower curtain rod in the bathroom using binder clips and some S hooks and spray the edges all the way around the rectangle. You want it to be about the consistency of tissue paper when it dries. I let mine dry overnight usually. I like to do the spray in the shower because the starch can make surfaces like the floor kind of slippery and this way the extra starch just washes away when I turn on the shower.

Ready, Set, Stitch.

I stitch scarves one side at a time. My serger has a cutter, so I try to trim off at least 1/8 inch of the edge of the fabric to get really clean edges.

My best tip for stitching is to be smooth and steady. I try to have the scarf straightened out so I can feed it through the machine without stopping to untangle or unfold it. I try to keep a consistent speed without a bunch of stops and starts. I try to make sure that I am not pulling or distorting the fabric as it goes through the machine. Chiffon is very prone to wiggle and skew so I try to minimize that as much as possible. I’ll be honest, it took me lots of practice. I got a cheap thrift store sheer curtain to practice on when I was trying to figure it out so I didn’t have to worry about using “good fabric”.

If you wobble or somehow make a mistake on a side, start again about 1/8 inch away from the first line of stitching and try to do the whole side again.

Corners

The best way I’ve found to make a clean corner is to not try to turn a corner. I stitch each side as a separate pass. Usually I start with a long side (with the fabric grain) and stitch the whole side. To stitch the next side, I start with the cutter blade up, turn the fabric so I am feeding a short side into the serger, and hold the previous thread tail straight out to the right side. This helps the edge of the fabric feed into my machine smoothly without anything getting caught on the foot or cutter and crumpled up. (Your mileage may vary.) Once I’ve gone around all four sides this way, the corners each have a tail of thread left on them.

I trim this thread tail about 1/8 inch long and use a lighter to gently melt the remaining thread tail. Be careful at this step that you don’t scorch the fabric. I’ve also used a dot of fabric glue or fray check to finish the corners but melting seems to be the neatest.

Wash it.

The last step is to wash out the starch. I use the “speed” cycle on my washer and tumble dry on gentle with a dryer sheet because the chiffon will build up static like crazy. The photo above is taken before the starch was washed out so the fabric looks a little crispy and stiff. It will soften up a lot with washing.

One Last Tip.

I hope this tutorial can help as a jumping off point for you to try your first rolled hem. One last tip I have is to take a photo of your serger settings before you change everything (so you can easily set it back to what you were using before) AND take a photo of the settings when you have it set up for the rolled hem for the next time you want to do one. I have those photos saved in a folder on my phone and it’s so easy to swap back and forth without a lot of hassle.

30 January, 2025

My favorite scissors for mixed media art

beckarahn2025-01-30T15:57:57-06:00An Artist's Life, Fabric Reviews|Comments Off on My favorite scissors for mixed media art

I shared a photo of my studio table in my newsletter today while I was in the middle of a project and I noticed that all of my favorite cutting tools were on the table, so I thought I would talk about what they are and why I like them.

I work with both fabric and paper often in the same project, so I unlike many fiber artists, I don’t have a dedicated pair of fabric-only scissors. My cutting tools include scissors, thread snips, and a utility knife.

I have two pairs of Fiskars scissors. The large pair has a non-stick coating on the blades. I love this classic bent handle shape; I know you’ve seen ones like that before. The small pair are a style they call Microtips. If I had to have only one pair of scissors in my entire studio, it would be these microtips. I use them for everything and the very fine pointed tips make them especially good for cutting fine details in felt or paper. Both of these are nice and sharp, hold an edge well, and work equally well on fabric, paper, threads, or cardboard. The best part is that they are super affordable and you can find them nearly anywhere. When they get too dull for my art, I retire them to the garage and the kitchen where they still work great for those things.

The utility knife is one I found because I was looking for a sturdy handle that was easier on my hands when I was cutting things like bookboard, which is very dense and hard. This is a handle which holds standard box cutter/utility knife blades. It’s aluminum and folds up with a push button latch. The photo shows it folded closed, which also protects the blade. It is THE BEST. It’s comfortable in my hand and holds the blade really steady unlike some of the xacto handles I’ve used. And it comes in about 10 fun colors.

Finally, there is my favorite pair of thread snips. The thing I like the best about these is that they are so simple. I have several other pairs with fancy molded handles and loops and this pair is the one I love. They came from my local yarn shop but these look nearly identical to the ones I have.