pond_ripple's Fabric Blog

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...

Today's #SFDesignADay is  pen and ink ! Lucie Duclos (known as  Snowflower  in the Spoonflower Marketplace ) will show you all you need to know to delve into this rewarding design process. Be sure to follow along on the  blog  and in your inbox until March 15 as we feature a new Design-A-Day technique, presented to you by members of our talented community of designers! Lucie:  Pen and ink drawing is a line based method of creating images. Subtle variations in style and line quality can range from whimsical and clever illustrations to super realistic drawings. There is an endless amount of pen and ink techniques, but I prefer the basic black and white line drawings because you can create strong graphics with a clean, modern look. And you can always add color at the end and still keep the black outline for definition! Lucie:  Let’s start by picking a theme, let’s say “leaves” for example. First, I li...

This is a rather large needlebook made to accommodate my new leather needles as well as my smaller hand sewing needles. It was a quick project cutting out 2 rectangles of fabric and 3 layers of batting measuring 3 3/4 inch by 5 1/4 inch. I added a long length of lace that was about a foot long so that the needle case would be wrapped a couple of times to keep it closed. Everything was stacked together and pinned. The fabrics should have the printed sides together, and the batting layers set under that. The ribbon was wound up and placed between the fabric pieces with a little tail sticking out from the bundle. Then it was as simple as sewing around the perimeter leaving a gap and turning through that hole. I ladder stitched the hole closed and had a neat little place to store my needles :) The outside features one of the unicorns on my  Sweet Prizes fabric. The inside uses my  Endless Flowers & Butterflies fabric. The book closed with the lace wrapped a...

2015 Kitty Tea Towel Calendar

This intricate embroidery project has kept me very busy for the past month or so. It started out with a pattern book that I found online:  Modelbuch aller art Nehewercks un Strickens, by Christian Egenolf, 1527 There are a ton of embroidery designs, but these two pages caught my eye: I did a lot of fiddling around with the patterns on my computer to create a perfectly mirrored combination pattern. At first I made it to fit a standard piece of printer paper, but the detail required me to scale up my version to fit on a piece of legal sized paper. This gave me a little bit of trouble when tracing the design onto my fabric due to the loss of resolution. That was solved by first tracing onto a piece of thin tissue paper with a fine pen then using that version to trace with water soluble pen onto my fabric. Here's a group of pictures taken near the tail end of the embroidering stage. Most of the work that I did on this happened while I was on a long car trip over the ho...