Thank you!
It was a great party. Thank you to all of you who came, who listened to me talk about it, and who sent me notes wishing you could come. I am truly delighted to be a part of this great community.
5
October, 2015
29
September, 2015
Online Party: A Spoonflower Handbook Giveaway
I know that not all of you live in the Twin Cities area and you can’t all make it to our book event here, so I am going to have an online party as well and I am going to give away a copy of the book as a door prize. (That’s my way of saying thank you to all of you out there in my online community too.)
To enter yourself for my doorprize drawing, you just have to give me a shout out and I will put your name in the hat. It’s that simple. Between now and October 16…
- make a comment on this post
- hop over to my Facebook page and say hi
- tweet me something @beckarahn
- send me a hello message through my Spoonflower shop
- sign yourself up for my e-newsletter (there’s a form right over in the sidebar)
Any of those things will put your name in for the drawing. If you already have a copy of the book or have seen it, I would love to hear what you like best. (I love the Pen tutorial on page 203.)
The fine print.
- If you already have a copy of the book (YAY!) and you win, I will send your prize as a gift to a friend. You tell me where it should go.
- Make sure I can get in touch with you. ie. If you leave a comment without your email address entered in the comment form, I won’t be able to track you down.
- Any comments, tweets, posts etc I receive before 11 pm (CDT) on October 16 will count.
29
September, 2015
22
September, 2015
You are invited: Spoonflower Handbook Book Party
We are throwing a party and we want you to come. I would like to personally invite all of you to join us at a book party for the release of the Spoonflower Handbook. I wanted to do a little event here in Minneapolis because this community has been so fantastic. So many of you have taken a class or asked me about a project or taught me something about design, that I thought it was only right to do something fun to say thank you for all of your help and encouragement and inspiration. So, Stephen is coming and we will talk about the book. He’s bringing all of the projects from the book (and some more really fun bonus projects). We will have door prizes to give away. Textile Center will have books to sell. We will even sign your books if you want us too. (I can’t believe I actually have a book to sign! How cool is that??)
The party will be held at Textile Center on Thursday October 1 at 6pm. (Go to www.textilecentermn.org for parking & directions.)
9
September, 2015
Tutorial: Seamless Arrows Pattern, Part Four
(This is part four of a tutorial for making a seamless arrow pattern. Find Part One and Part Two and Part Three here.)
Proofing and touching up the pattern is the finishing step to create the seamless arrow design and I am going to do that with the Photoshop pattern tool. The first thing I do is select the whole design (Edit -> Select All) and create a pattern tile by choosing Edit -> Define Pattern and click OK.
It will look like nothing has happened. That’s ok! The tile that you selected has been saved in the patterns palette, which is kind of hidden.
To proof the design, I create a new blank file that is the size of a yard of fabric. That’s an arbitrary size – I just think it’s nice to look at a large number of repeats.
Then I choose Edit -> Fill from the menu. From the pop-up Fill menu, choose Pattern from the contents drop down menu. Just below that in Options there is another drop down and in it, you should find that pattern you just saved. (See what I mean about a little hidden.)
Now you can see what it looks like when the tile is repeating across a whole yard of fabric. And right away a couple of things jump out at me.
Oops. I didn’t think about the edges and I have a blank space where there aren’t any arrows. I can fix that by cropping out some of the blank space. The other thing that jumps out is a seam where the color changes. The color change is kind of abrupt and it makes a dark line. I can fix that pretty easily by going back a step to my original file. I select the photo layer of that flower because that is where the color is coming from. The easiest way for me to make that contrasting line to go away is to just use a paintbrush to just touch it up. I choose a green color from the bottom of the image and paint some at the top where that really deep green was, hiding that seam line and blending the two together.
After I do those two little edits…
I have a pretty good finished design. I save that tile and that is the repeat that I can upload to Spoonflower and print my fabric. This is the version that I used for my grant project exhibition, which I will post photos of very soon.
More in this series: Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four
1
September, 2015
Tutorial: Seamless Arrow Repeat Part 3
(This is part three of a tutorial for making a seamless arrow pattern. Find Part One and Part Two here.)
For Part Three, I am going to move over and work with the design in Photoshop now. Why? I could easily add color in Illustrator, but the effect I want is to cut those arrowheads out of another photo, which will give it a very organic color wash instead of a solid color.
Open the file in Photoshop.
So first I open that file we just saved in Photoshop. I first double click the Layer marked Background to unlock it (making it Layer 0). Then I use the Magic Wand tool and delete to remove the white background and just leave the pattern of black lines. (Make sure the option marked contiguous at the top center is clicked off and you will select all of the white in the image and not just the parts touching where you click.)
That will leave a checkerboard pattern in the background. That is Photoshop’s way of telling you that is now transparent.
Add the photo layer.
Next I will add something to create that colored layer. For my grant project design, I used one of the layers from the photo created by my design partner, so that her print and mine would coordinate. But really anything will work, as long as it has the colors you want. So for this example, I used a photograph of a columbine. Choose File -> Place Embedded and pick your image. Size/resolution is not really important. Once you have placed it, click and drag it to resize and fill the space. Make sure the photo layer is on top and your arrows on the bottom.
You can add filters or adjust colors or edit this layer if you want to. For example, I might blur it to make it look more watercolored and less photo sharp. In my grant project design, I added a few pops of magenta with a paint brush to bring out that color in the coordinating fabric.
Create a clipping mask.
Select the Layer with your image and right-click it to bring up a pop up menu or choose Layer -> Create Clipping Mask from the top menu. This will cut from the photo in the shape of the layer underneath.
Add a background.
I will add a new layer to give the design a background color. You can click the new layer button in the palette (looks like a page with a bent corner) or choose Layer -> New from the menu. I can choose Edit -> Fill from the menu to fill this layer with color and then drag it in the Layers palette to be on the bottom of the stack.
The last thing I did was to add a little texture to that flat grey layer. When I double click the layer in the Layer Palette, I will get a menu of Layer Style options. I chose an asphalt texture that I had saved previously and set it to be only 19% opaque.
In Part Four, I will show you how to proof your design and touch up any little flaws in the repeat and then it is finished and ready to go.
More in this series: Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four