pond_ripple's Fabric Blog

We're in the home stretch of our Design-A-Day SpoonChallenge! Are you hanging in there? Today's #SFDesignADay comes to you from 2014 Spoonflower Staff Challenge Winner,  Allie Tate , head of marketing at Spoonflower in Berlin. Allie knows better than most that you needn't look further than the contents of your junk drawer at home to create an award-winning surface pattern.  Allie:  Surface design doesn't have to be complicated. It can be as simple as using everyday objects laying around your home to create a compelling textile design. Find inspiration in items you use every day or test your creativity by incorporating unusual items into your fabric design. To create this design, I used materials purchased at a local hardware store as a part of Spoonflower's 2014 Staff Design Challenge. By restricting the tools available (and with just 1 hour to create and upload our designs from start to finish!), we had to really get creative in h...

Inspired by her love of the super cute, today's Design-A-Day SpoonChallenge is brought to you by  Heidi Kenney . Today Heidi gives us a rundown of the history behind this fabulously fun design style along with pointers on the various ways you can make it your own. Ranging from her love of pizza to drawing nuns, she shows us just how versatile kawaii truly is. Be sure to check out more of Heidi's kawaii designs over in the  Spoonflower Marketplace ! Heidi:  Kawaii is a Japanese word that means the quality of being cute or items that are cute. Kawaii began in the 1970s in Japan, when teenage girls began using a cute informal style of writing. It included hearts, smiling faces, and doodles and was seen as a rise against traditional Japanese culture. Kawaii has grown from a small teenage rebellion into an huge part of Japanese culture. In Japan today, you can see the kawaii influence everywhere, from adorable items you might expect ...

We're 10 days into the #SFDesignADay SpoonChallenge! Today's design prompt is brought to you by Sharon Turner (aka  Scrummy ), an avid  Spoonflower Marketplace  contributor with a knack for  Steampunk  designs.  Sharon:  I think of steampunk as a mash up of mechanical Victorian fantasy and grungy science fiction. Visually, the aesthetic is really cool and all about the details. ( Check out some steampunk inspiration on Pinterest! ) My favourite things to draw are animals and architecture so I combined the two and created some tower 'stripes' with birds! My design started with an ink drawing which I scanned at high dpi and vectorised in Adobe Illustrator. I changed up some of the details and elements using my Wacom. Once I had the repeat in transparency, I coloured this digitally in Photoshop. That's the bit I love to do the best! Colours can make or break a design. Pro tip:...

Today's #SFDesignADay comes to you from 2015 Spoonflower Staff Challenge Winner, Eloisa Docton, better known as  Natitys  in the  Spoonflower Marketplace . Eloisa is proof that expensive design software is not needed to create beautiful, bold surface patterns. Eloisa stops by today to talk about her favorite open source tools for creating fun, playful designs that won't break the bank!  Eloisa:   Before learning Photoshop and Illustrator, I would search online for countless hours online for easy tools that would allow me to create my designs. To this day, I still recommend using these over expensive programs to start off, because they help you make fun creations without the large investment and the big learning curve. These online programs are also easily accessible, and very user-friendly, people of all ages can play with them! One of my favorite online tools is  Canva . On this website, you can ...

Today’s Design-A-Day prompt comes from NYC-based artist  Anne Spalter . Her recent 3,000 square foot installation,  Precession , featured "kaleidoscoped" photographs of the iconic New York skyline and Coney Island printed on wallpaper and displayed on canvas prints and video screen. The result was a surreal and psychedelic experience. We caught up with Anne during the installation of the  SPRING/BREAK Art Show  exhibit to learn more about how she works from photographs to create her vision. With 200 custom strips of Spoonflower-printed  Smooth Wallpaper  and 12 video screens to set the scene, Precession transformed the lobby of New York City’s 34th St. Beaux-Arts Post Office into a journey through a day in New York City. Images arranged by the time of day when the image was captured guided the trip, with "kaleidoscoped" images evoking the frenetic energy of the city throughout the space. From images taken from a hel...