Tutorials

28 August, 2015

Tutorial: Seamless Arrows Print – Part One

beckarahn2016-03-16T10:01:48-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|2 Comments

It’s a busy week for me with The Spoonflower Handbook coming out on Tuesday and the opening reception for my grant project on Thursday, so I thought I would combine the two and give you something fun: a fabric design tutorial based on one of the prints from my grant project.

The third project for my grant was a dress also created in duet with another artist. For that design, she created a layered photo image and sent it to me. I created a coordinating print and the two were combined in the final piece. The photo she created had lots of organic shapes, transparent layers and abstract imagery, so I decided to create some contrast by making a print that was the opposite of that: geometric & somewhat representational.

The inspiration for this design is actually a software engineering tool that helps designers collaborate by tracking the different versions of the code and where things merge and branch off. I saw this graphic representation of that over my husband’s shoulder while he was working and I loved both the look and the metaphor.

I decided to make arrowheads instead of dots and to use a layer from the photo to choose the colors in my design (which I will show you more about later.)

Creating the Arrowhead Design

Open a new file in Adobe Illustrator.

For this tutorial I did just a small repeat so it was easy for you to follow along. (My finished design was about 18 inches square.)

I turned on two options in Illustrator that really make this design easy to do: Show Grid and Snap to Grid. You can find both of those in the View menu. You can adjust the spacing of your grid lines under Illustrator -> Preferences -> Guides & Grid.

Draw with the Pen Tool & adjust lines.

I drew all of the lines in the design using the Pen Tool. (If you need help, there’s a great tutorial here for drawing straight lines with the Pen Tool.) The grid will help you see where to place lines and the Snap to Grid option will make them stick to the intersections of the grid – making it really easy to make straight lines that are very precisely spaced based on your grid spacing.

Once I had a line in place, I selected it and went to the Stroke Palette to adjust the look of the line. I made the line weight heavier at 6 pt and added an arrowhead at the end by choosing one from the dropdown.

Add extra arrowheads with the Polygon Tool.

I did all of my drawing in black and white because I am going to add the color in a later step. Once I had all of the lines in place, I wanted to add some extra arrowheads, not just at the end of the lines. To do that, I used the Polygon Tool (which is one of the options under the Rectangle Tool). I chose a 3 sided shape with a .5 inch radius, which matched the arrowheads pretty perfectly. I adjusted the fill to be black and the outline transparent.

Adjust the fill and outline in the bottom of the tools palette. It’s the two overlapping squares.

In part two of this tutorial, I will talk about how to make sure that this design is seamless and check for a balanced repeat.

More in this series: Part One • Part Two • Part Three • Part Four

4 March, 2015

A post starring my own handwriting

beckarahn2015-03-04T19:46:10-06:00Everything Else, Tutorials|Comments Off on A post starring my own handwriting

I had a sort of annoying day. And so when I saw a Facebook article on Craft about making a font from your handwriting for free, I clicked it. That sounds fun. I am sure there is a gimmick. Or it won’t work. But it would be a fun little project.

It totally works. And it’s fun. And it was fast. I might seriously have to do this with a class some day. I didn’t overthink it, I just wrote. I might do another one now and do something fancy.

The lovely Christine has written up a tutorial on how to do it here. Or you can just go to the website and figure it out. It’s that easy. MyScriptFont.com, you are genius.

24 February, 2015

Video: A skirt in 3 minutes

beckarahn2015-02-24T23:40:45-06:00Sewing & Design, Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials, Videos|2 Comments

I spend so much of my time behind a computer screen that it is hard to show “behind the scenes” shots of what I do. And I know that people love to see works in progress. I do too. So I made this video which shows my process in about 3 minutes. I captured it in 2 sessions and sped it up 1500%. This is a wrap skirt that I designed that should be one of the ones for sale at the American Craft Council show I am participating in. I just finished it so I haven’t seen the fabric in person yet.

The video shows the whole process from drafting the skirt in Illustrator to adding the photos in Photoshop. In this case it is a wrap style skirt and I used 3 photos: long exposure shots from a nighttime “parade of lights” we watched at Disney several years ago. This is a simple design relatively speaking. The photos are so cool that I didn’t need to do much manipulation to them. I left in all of the things I tried and rejected. You will see that I thought about a row of polkadots at one point. It’s tiny – it’s not meant to be a tutorial, but just so you can join along in the process. Enjoy!

5 February, 2015

Design Tutorial: Creating a layered design

beckarahn2015-02-05T10:46:57-06:00Classes & Teaching, Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|2 Comments

Often when I teach an intro fabric design class, the students and I create a collaborative fabric design during class, which I have printed and mail to them after class. This most recent class played along with me and made this design using speech bubble shaped post-it-notes and wrote their favorite “clean” swear word. I thought it would make a funny fabric, especially given the day I had before I got to class. So I scanned our design and got ready to put it into a repeat and it just seemed sort of blah. We needed a much more colorful fabric to match our colorful language. So I added some color and after I sent the swatches, I told my class I would post a tutorial about how I did it so they could check back. My screenshots for this are in Photoshop, but many other design programs have the same tools you can use.

We started with a scanned image of post-it-notes on black paper. I scanned this at 150 dpi because I wanted to print it at the same size and that is the resolution I need for fabric.

The first thing I wanted to do was to move the speech bubbles to a layer all by themselves. This way I could insert something into the background and have them float over top. When I open the image in Photoshop, it automatically makes it a locked background layer. (See the lock icon?) When I go to the Layers palette and double click the layer that says Background, it will unlock it and convert it to a regular layer (Layer 0), which is what we need.

Next I want to remove the black background and leave just the speech bubbles by themselves on this layer. Choose the Magic Wand tool and click anywhere in that black background. You can see what’s selected because Photoshop traces around it with dashed lines. Once you have it selected, hit the delete key. Your black background will disappear. The checkered pattern you now see indicates that this part of the design is transparent. (It won’t show on your finished design.)

Next I will add a new background layer back in, by choosing the new layer icon (looks like a page with a bent corner) to make Layer 1. Then choose Edit -> Fill from the menu to fill it with black. You will probably also have to put your layers in the right order by clicking and dragging them in the palette to make sure the bubbles are on top and the black layer on the bottom.

So it doesn’t actually look like we have done much at this point, but what we have done is split the design into two layers so that we can now insert something in between them. Next, I am going to add a Text layer, by clicking the text tool and dragging a text box to fill the design space. Now I can type text into this layer. I filled it with cartoon style swear words (*&%$!!@) to match our theme. It doesn’t matter what color they are, we will change that next. Drag the text layer so it is sandwiched between Layers 0 and 1.

Now the color! If you double click the Text layer in the Layers Palette, a window will pop up giving you options for Layer Styles. We are going to use a Gradient Overlay to add a rainbow to this text.

The last little tweak I made to the design was to add a black outline to our speech bubbles to help make them pop out from the background a little more. That is easy to do with the same Layer Styles tool. Double click Layer 0 with the speech bubbles and choose Stroke from the style options. I added a 3 px border of black.

And this is the finished design.

Now I understand that this is a pretty silly fabric and you aren’t probably going to run right out and order yards of it. But by using the same steps you learned here, you can create fabrics like these:

These sheep are drawn with a fine tip sharpie and scanned. I cut them out from the background the same way and added a white Stroke to the layer so they have that white outline. The background for this design instead of text, is a piece of painted paper that I scanned and added a Color Overlay (from the Layer Styles Palette) in green.

Or dancing sheep on a knitted background.

19 November, 2014

Video Tutorial: Origami collapsing box

beckarahn2015-02-24T23:42:23-06:00Tutorials, Videos|2 Comments

In honor of Uncle Lester. This origami box was in a book that Lester gave my dad. My sister and I loved the book when we were kids and had to be very respectful and careful with it. This is the first origami project that I memorized. The thing I love about this box is that it starts with a rectangle and not a square. Which means you can make it with a piece of typing paper (or bright pink construction paper). Which is a very cool thing when you don’t have much allowance money to spend on fancy origami paper. (Leo makes a brief appearance and comment).

9 October, 2014

Sometimes the best tutorial has no words

beckarahn2014-10-09T22:53:11-05:00Embroidery, Sewing & Design, Tutorials|Comments Off on Sometimes the best tutorial has no words

I had a vast quantity of tiny rolled hems to do this week. The project is something I can’t really share yet, but I can talk about rolled hems and what I learned. So I have done both machine stitched and hand stitched rolled hems before and although I am pretty good at the machine variety, I hadn’t really mastered the hand stitch. I could make it work, but they were fiddly and so very slow. It was frustrating. So I started to do a little research. Maybe there was a better way to do the stitch?

The tips that really helped?

Rolled Hem Hankies at the Purl Bee. Not only are the photos beautiful and clear, but the tip about slobbering on your fingers is essential. I did just grab a damp washcloth and throw it on the table in front of me, but it’s amazing how much of a difference that made in getting the roll to happen. She also does the stitch just slightly differently than what I was taught (with much of the stitch hidden in the roll) and this is much nicer.

It turns out that the best “tutorial” I found has no words. But just by watching an anonymous and skilled seamstress hem a Hermes scarf, I picked up another really helpful hint or two. If you watch the video you will see how she pins the scarf to a heavy pincushion. This is genius. It’s like having an extra hand to put some tension on what you are stitching and I could go twice as fast. My tomato pincushion isn’t heavy enough. I ended up weighting it down awkwardly with a pair of scissors. But the next time I have a batch of hemming to do, I will take a few minutes and make a heavy weighted pincushion. You can also watch how she does the corner. I am not sure exactly what she did, but based on my observations, I folded just the tiny tip of the corner at 45 degrees and then double rolled to make a neat little miter at the corner and secured it with a couple of tiny stitches.

My own trick is to use a beading needle to do the stitching. Although this one was a little long (I couldn’t find my short ones), I really like working with tiny needles. When you are only trying to make a stitch that catches 2 or 3 threads of the fabric, it is so much easier with a small needle. I almost always hand stitch my hems. I like hand stitching and I like the way a hand stitched hem can just disappear and not draw attention to itself.

If you want to learn more beautiful hand stitched hems, the Coletterie blog has been posting a really great series about all kinds of hem finishes. Here is their take on the hand rolled hem.