Thanks, MammaMade!

The very generous Rachel from MammaMade has been super-helpful in teaching us how to format images for Spoonflower fabric. AND she shared one of my fabric designs in her post. How kind! Thanks, Rachel!

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.

Cupcakes, Damn it.

I've looked all over the place, and I cannot find satisfying cupcake fabric. So, it falls upon me to create this item, and boy-howdy am I trying to do it in a little way I like to call, "the right way." Except I'm not sure what the right way is so away I go.

First, I drew sketches in my Rhodia notebook, comme ca (note: I drew these while riding in the car from Yachats to Portland, so they are a bit rougher than usual due to car turbulence):





Next, I begin to digitize and form some kind of a pattern in Inkscape:

I want the fabric to be "multi-directional" so there's no way for it to be upside-down. This makes it easier to cut. So I fiddle around with rotating the shapes and tiling the original design to get an idea of what it would look like on a larger scale.


Now, I'm working on adding color and patterns before submitting it to Spoonflower for a swatch to see if the colors are true to my vision.

Note polka-dot and stripe-y patterns on these 2 'cakes.

Any suggestions are welcome!!! Nation, we are in need of a kick-ass cupcake fabric. So let your voice be heard. These babies will find their way into vinyl covered zip pouches at some point soon. xxxooo melissa

Some Sites I'm Really Excited About

I've been dabbling with designing fabrics and printing with Spoonflower. The generous and talented Rachel from Mamma Made Designs has a series of tutorials that help with some of the the more technical aspects of this process. These tutorials are totally blowing my mind! Thanks, Rachel!

Also, M.Patrizio Illustrations is fun blog and will entice you to buy cute things like her stationery, such as one this one I recently purchased on her etsy site So Softies. Her stationery design style is similar to my own and it caught my eye immediately. I can't wait to send a note with one of these lovlies!

Bag Orders, New Fabric, and my first crochet flower

I'm back from New Orleans, and it was a lovely visit! In my spare time, I sewed vintage buttons on "pre" bags. The whipped up bag I made for myself drew some attention from friends and family (thank you SO MUCH!!!) and now I have 7 custom bag orders! This week I'm teaching a class at Austin Community College and have no time to sew until the weekend, poot!

Still, there are exciting things to report. First, my Spoonflower fabric order arrived today, and it came in this lovely package:


Upon unwrapping it, I was dee-lighted to see my own design printed on really nice cotton:


While in New Orleans, my Mom showed me how to crochet a 5 petal flower from Suzann Thompson's book Crochet Bouquet. It has tons of cute flower instructions, but I'm new so I had to start with an easy one. So this is my second flower (the first one was totally wack) after a lot of undoing and redoing.


More later when I'm not being teacher-lady.

Spoonflower order and new fabric design

Hooray! I got my invitation for Spoonflower today, and submitted my first "fat quarter" of fabric order of the mixer on white design. I also have a new design - toasters! - that I may submit as well. Here I am in the Spoonflower tag group on Flickr, and here is what my design should look like...
And, here is my latest design...