Freebie Stickers

I am still in the digital phase of designing my own patterned paper. Once I move on to more of a collage look, I will share resources like I promised in an earlier post.

For digital drawings, I use Inkscape. It's free and works on both Windows and PC. Once you complete a drawing, you choose "export bitmap" which saves the document as a .png file. Then you can open it up in Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (like I have) and fiddle with it a bit. The result is something like this - today's freebie:


When making patterns from objects, I find it easier to think in terms of a "sticker sheet" type format, then expand it into a repeating pattern. There are some good Inkscape tutorials out there. For now, I'll just say that you should "group" your images and drag one of the corners to make them smaller. When they are tiny enough to please you, use the "tiled clone" feature to create a repeating pattern.

Here is a smaller repeating pattern:

And here is an even smaller repeating pattern:

Another variation: stripes!

Coffee + No Sleep = Cupcakes!

It's our last day in Oregon. In fact, our plane leaves in a few hours. We are staying in a luxurious corner sweet of a lovely hotel in downtown Portland. I spent most of the night working on this luscious cupcake fabric. This bed is so delicious, I'm rolling around in it with both glee (because, hey, cupcakes!) and sadness that I didn't spend more time in it.

So, what we have here is the blackline from my sketches, the color tile, and a prototype of what the fabric will look like, although lots of color matching work remains to be done. This is style 1, "rainbow cupcakes on white" and a number of variations are in the works. Spoonflower, here I come! Look for cupcake goodies in the shop in September.