Tutorials

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.

6 October, 2014

Digital Design Tutorial: Part Six

beckarahn2014-10-06T19:07:43-05:00Spoonflower & Fabric Design, Tutorials|Comments Off on Digital Design Tutorial: Part Six

Part six of our faux batik journey takes us back to Photoshop.

I have all of the motifs for my faux batik laid out, I have my color palette chosen, so now it’s time to put the finishing touches on my design. This next bit might seem like a little bit of over-the-top, but I want to add a little bit of subtlety to this design, which is why I am going to go back into Photoshop before I add the final colors.

First I hide the colored background layer that I put in to help me lay out my design and I replace it with just basic black in my Illustrator file. This is going to make it really easy to do the design cleanup next. I export it, using the edges of my artboard or canvas to crop the design (getting rid of all the bits I left hanging off the edges). It looks something like this.

My first task is to make the edges of the design seamless. Since I have very organic shapes, the lines and shapes at the right side of the tile aren’t going to exactly match up with the things on the left side of the tile. But I want to make everything match up so there aren’t little flaws in the design when I repeat it. Photoshop has a tool called “Offset” that will wrap the design around and match up those outside edges so you can do the touchup work.

Here is one section of that matched up edge. I separated the black background from the other parts of the design and put them on two different layers. Then, I used a paintbrush and the eraser tool to carefully erase a little bit and redraw these lines to they seem to be one continuous line. I did this along the sides and top/bottom of the design and now I have a seamlessly repeating tile.

Now I want to add the background colors back in. I could have used the color blocks that I set up in Illustrator, but I wanted the edges where the colors meet to be a little less like a quilt block with straight lines and have a little more painterly quality. I also chose 7 colors for my colorway, where my mockup had only 5. Leaving my white batik shapes as the top layer and the black as the bottom, I added a layer in between for each of the colors in my colorway. I used a big paintbrush with a little bit of a soft edge to paint in the background colors where I wanted them in my design. Using a paintbrush allowed me to let things bleed a little outside the lines and to keep the more organic look to match my batik shapes. By putting each color on it’s own layer, it was easy to tweak the colors if it ended up that I didn’t like one of those colors I chose for my colorway and it will be really easy to make another colorway of this design this way (which I am planning to do!)

Finally, my white layer had some of those placeholder colors in it that I used to fill in some of the shapes (like the arch shapes above). To make those fit my colorway, I used a tool called Select Color Range which lets me click on a color and it selects that color anywhere it sees it on the screen all at once. So I could click the placeholder red and replace it with the red from my colorway.

Here are the finished colors painted in.

It took a couple of tries to get everything to feel like it was balanced and to make sure that I didn’t have any colors too crowded together. The next little bit of subtlety I wanted to add was a little bit of a hand-painted or hand-dyed effect, to make the background colors look less flat and even and perfect. I tried a bunch of different techniques to achieve this: painting with different brushes, playing with opacity and flow, but they were all a little too heavy-handed. Finally I found the effect I wanted. I added a layer on top of all of this with a filter called “Clouds” in a contrasty dark and light.

Then I made this clouds layer adjust the luminosity of the design instead of just layering on top. Luminosity is like the light shining through piece of paper, but it gave my just the effect I was going for: areas of lights and darks, without changing the colors of my design and making them muddy grey or washed out. Here you can see that effect:

One last effect and my batik is finished. For the last subtlety to really make this look like a batik, I wanted to add the distinctive crackled look that you get when working with wax. It took a lot of experimenting, but a photograph of a piece of marble gave me just the right pattern of cracks. I made this photo into a seamless repeat as well and added it as one more transparent layer on top of the design.

I have ordered a yard of this fabric to be printed and in a couple of weeks we will revisit the tutorial and see how it turned out!