Fabric Design

Sometimes it takes years for an idea to come to fruition. Other times a mere matter of minutes.

Yesterday after getting back from the Holiday Gift Fair, which was a complete waste of time by the way, I started making my Pumpkin Chocolate Chip Cupcakes for the dessert auction at church today. Okay, the Gift Fair wasn’t all bad. We did go with a couple friends and found some of the tables to be interesting, but for the most part it was not so much a gift fair like a craft bazaar I had in mind, but a lot like walking through the center of the mall and being bombarded by all those mall kiosk types. Fortunately we were able to redeem the afternoon by going to two actual bazaars on the way home, which made up for the lack of handcrafted goods at our first stop. Alas, ideas abounded but purchases not so much. Probably a good thing. So anyway, once the cupcakes were done baking, I ran to the grocery store… wait, let me reword that… I drove to the grocery store (I can’t even picture myself running) to get a few more things for both Thanksgiving and to make the frosting for the cupcakes, whipped up a batch of delicious Maple Brown Sugar Cream Cheese Frosting, frosted said cupcakes and plated them.

Now, on to the fun part… sketching out designs for the Frog and Fairy Baby Blanket. With pen and paper in hand I quickly draw out a fairy and quickly discard it because, well, it was ugly not the look I was going for. I then drew another and was quite happy with the results and decided that yes, that was exactly what I wanted the fairy to look like. Now on to the frog. After two unsuccessful attempts (please don’t feel pity, I spent a total of about ten seconds drawing the pair combined) I came up with the exact type of frog I wanted. So then I stared at the two of them and waited for inspiration to hit to get a feel for what their relationship would be. Pretty quickly it hit me they were best friends and so I sketched out a total of four scenes that I plan on using as feature panels for the quilt. After choosing the colors, I colored them in using colored pencils before scanning the images onto the computer for some fun with Photoshop. Within a few minutes I had a printable image ready so I grabbed a roll of printable cotton fabric I got a year and a half ago, opened it up and printed my fussy-cut sample. I figured I was going to just use the images themselves with a little of the background fabric so I simply squeezed the four images into an eight-and-a-half inch square space.

Not realizing just how easy the process was going to be, I now have no idea why I didn’t try doing this earlier. However, now that I’ve got a grasp on the design on, thanks to Heather Ross’s seminar I attended last year and reading an interview with Kate Spain on how they approach fabric design, I guess something just connected finally. Call it focus and determination. Either way, I can’t wait to plan out the remainder of the line and play with the color schemes before I put it all up on Spoonflower.