Spoonflower & Fabric Design

30 June, 2026

Pattern Review: Style Arc Barry Pants & iTokri Fabric

beckarahn2026-06-30T11:57:34-05:00Fabric Reviews|Comments Off on Pattern Review: Style Arc Barry Pants & iTokri Fabric

This post is going to be a double review! Today it’s 90+ degrees outside and I finished these pants and I might wear them all week. These are the Barry Woven Pants from Style Arc with a little modification and they are made from some beautiful cotton jacquard fabric from iTokri.

Barry Woven Pants

I made another pair of these in a rose colored linen but I decided those needed a few tweaks before I was really going to wear them, so this is the second attempt at this pattern. The major modification I made was to take out 5 inches from the length. They are drafted to be a slightly above the ankle length on someone 5’6″. I am only 5’4″ and when I made the first pair following the pattern exactly, they just look a little out of proportion on me. I should have shortened them, but I didn’t think to look at the height the pattern was drafted for until after I finished.

So for this one, I took 5 inches out at the lengthen/shorten line printed on the pattern. Easy! I like a capri length pant better than ankle length anyway, so these are really more my style. I wear about a size 10; I made the 16 in this pattern and I think that’s about right.

I also removed the faux fly and reduced the “ruffle” at the top by about 1/2 inch. The faux fly just seemed like a silly detail so I cut the center front seam straight and just removed that section. I like the paper bag waist detail but the ruffle on the first pair just felt too bulky (and no one wants bulk around the middle) so I just took an inch out of the waistband depth.

Things I love:

they went together so fast.
the pockets are nice and deep and stitched into both the side seam and the waistband so they aren’t flopping around.
the dart in the bottom of the leg gives them a slight balloon shape, which I like. It might be too comical from a stiffer fabric, but it works in this one. The extra room around the knee (since I shortened them) makes these feel really practical and movable.
Style Arc lets you purchase a pattern in a single size at a slight discount and when you download the PDF it includes the sizes one up and one down from what you chose (14/16/18) which is great if you need to grade between sizes or tweak the fit.

Things I didn’t love:

When I read the pattern reviews, several people mentioned that the instructions for attaching the waistband were dumb. I have to agree. I did it differently on this pair and I will tweak it a little more on the next pair. I didn’t change much about the waistband itself, I just stitched it in a different way.

iTokri fabric

I got really frustrated recently about being able to find clothing that wasn’t 100% polyester. I just don’t like to wear it and I won’t buy it anymore. So I took a chance and ordered some fabric from a place called iTokri in India. This piece was from my second fabric order and this green jacquard was just $5/meter. It is my absolutely favorite shade of green and it has a woven in stripe of creamy white.

Ordering from iTokri isn’t like working with an American company. There are tariffs and the receipt is shown in rupees so there is some currency conversion and you don’t know exactly what the total is going to be. But they ship things super fast, they are packed carefully, they have great communication, and I have been really happy with both of the orders I have placed. The tariff amount turned out to be $17 from the shipping company and about $9 in tariffs on a $150 order.

Their website says to hand wash the fabrics, but I am not going to handwash pants, so I threw it in the washer and dryer and took my chances. It washed up great; no regrets. I have another piece of cotton jacquard in a kind of olive/brown with a charcoal stripe that I will make into another pair just like this.

2 June, 2026

Fabric Review: Spoonflower’s Seersucker

beckarahn2026-06-02T10:52:46-05:00Fabric Reviews|2 Comments

I am just going to come right out and say it: I think this might be my favorite Spoonflower fabric for clothing. I had ordered several pieces of seersucker after they introduced it about 2 years ago and even wrote an intro post when I first ordered a swatch but this is the first real project I’ve made from it.

The print quality is crisp and vibrant. I think the one caveat about this as a fabric is that the design you choose has to lend itself to being layered with that narrow stripe texture of a seersucker. I don’t think a strong geometric print might look as nice with the texture lines fighting with the design lines. But this batik style floral is perfect. (This is one of my designs called Nutmeg.) The fabric washed up beautifully with very few wrinkles and little fraying at the cut edges. It pressed well when I was sewing it. It’s not a super drapey or flowy fabric because that texture gives it a little body, so that’s something to keep in mind when choosing a design to make. Why is it my favorite? Seersucker is really designed to be a clothing fabric so I think it looks more sophisticated than something sewn with quilting cotton. I’ve talked before how I don’t love how the cotton lawn and poplin fabric wrinkle easily and feel too crisp for the kinds of shapes I like to sew. This was a great fabric to match up with this pattern.

I made a top from a pattern called the Bondi Top from Sew to Grow. I love this pattern because it has only three pieces, which is great to show off a fabric print since you aren’t chopping it up into a bunch of smaller pieces. (I usually wear a size 8-10 and I made the size 12 in this pattern with no alterations.) I love the curved hem on this one which I think makes the shape look a little more put together than a plain t-shirt. The curved hem takes some patience to sew, but I used a bias binding technique I saw in this instagram reel for this one and it turned out perfectly. The back has a yoke piece at the top which you can do in a contrasting fabric. I’ve made several from this same pattern, so also played around with cutting that piece on the bias with stripes, adding some ribbon and hand embroidery to make that piece have a little extra detail. Because this fabric is a little extra wide (52″) I have enough scraps that I am going to also make a Bucket Hat from Betz White from the leftovers.

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.)