Moroccan Tiles Fabric - Times Two

This fabric design (designs, if you could colour variations) came from a very real need for curtains for my bedroom! I'm sure the neighbours will appreciate it. Here's a photo of my very cool new bedroom in the old house I'm slowly restoring (the colours area  little dark, sorry):

Pay special attention to the stained floor pattern! I did that to excuse the crappy wood planks that are in the middle and are meant to be covered with an area rug. All the rooms are like that, it's pretty common in older houses, in order to save money on flooring. It probably made a lot of sense back in the day when the new area rugs were probably part of the overall house budget. Moving into a house that needs six or seven large rugs (including a custom shape in this one)... a little harder to figure out how to afford them. So, I stained a pattern on them instead. It looks really awesome and is my favourite part of the rooms I've finished.

Point is, it's a Moroccan pattern, and the room has a lot of colour in it, so I decided to come up with a very subtle Moroccan tile pattern for the curtains:

 

But to keep it interesting, I made a colour version as well, and that will be the bottom border, and I'll use a copper ribbon between the two in order to finish everything off.

The cream and white fabric turned out so much better than I ever expected! It's phenomenal in real life! The colour one looks great too, but the different off-white colours really suprised me.

I'll post photos of the finished product as soon as I find my sewing machine and the right ribbon.

Head over to Spoonflower to take a look at and purchase the fabric:

Moroccan Tiles in White

 Moroccan Tiles in Colour

New Honeycomb Fabrics

It has been a really really long time since I've been able to do anything creative (I moved and bought an old house that needs a lot of work, and I don't want to flood this blog with photos. Yet), but a few months ago I was in Winnipeg on course, and so I had spare time in the evenings to work on a few designs. I drove the person sitting beside me a little crazy doodling honey combs all week. The results are really nice, though!

I set myself the challenge of using a honeycomb pattern and the Pantone 2014 colours, and here is the result:

But all the doodling (and just the way I happened to make the pattern in Photoshop, which lent itself to some playing around) also led to this pattern, which uses one of the colours from the first design, Dazzling Blue.

Today they finally arrived, and here are the test swatches. They look terrific, especially the small honeycomb pattern. Well, and the blue is really rich and lovely as well. I'm very happy with them! These are on cotton-silk, and the fabric is really nice. I'm going to experiment with making them into book-cloth someday.

Both patterns are available at Spoonflower:

Honeycomb Pantone Rainbow

Honeycomb in Dazzling Blue

How Doth the Little Crocodile - Cover

One of the things I want to ensure for this project is that I have done every bit of the designing for the entire book. For that reason I've chosen to make my own fabric pattern, and have it printed at Spoonflower. It's a great site where I can order custom made fabric. I have a few designs for sale there already. This design is only going to be for me, and only for this project. I'm going to order it in the cotton-silk blend, for that extra bit of luxury, and then make it into bookcloth. I'm going to do the spine in leather.

I wanted a William Morris style design, because it fits the time period of the poem, but adapted to the subject matter. I decided to use leaves in the shapes of card suites (hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs) for the background:

The picture above is of the start of the design process. I pulled some colours from a William Morris print (the little picture to the left), which you can see above. Originally I had a dark blue background, with darker leaves, but it just didn't work very well. Also, I want the spine to be in dark brown leather, so I needed more contrast. I changed the colours around, it ended up closer to the inspiration print:

The final design is of different papyrus flowers, buds, and leaves on a light background. I think it works really well. The only thing I have to decided now is what scale I want it on. I made it in vectors, so I can make the flowers and big or small as I want without losing any detail. Then I can order a test swatch and see what it looks like in real life!

Steampunk Fabric - now available!

I just got the test swatch for the steampunk fabric I designed, so it's now available on Spoonflower. For some reason, even though I designed it, the large scale still surprised me. But it looks pretty good with my pillows. I will have to think of something to do with it now.

That's Not a Book!

I do, in fact, make things other than books. And I found a contest to design steampunk fabric and got a little obsessed. Moderation is not something I do well, I'm either extremely passionate or don't bother. And this piqued by interest, especially since I'd been thinking about a design of this type to embroider anyway, I had a great idea, and then of course got very ambitious.

It's complicated to do a repeating pattern that intersects at so many points and needs to be an interesting design when repeated. It took hours just to figure that out, and many many more to make all the little circle designs in this.

The design is based on Romanesque swirls, damask patterns, paisley, and of course, some steampunk Victorian stuff thrown in. All the little circles were where I decided to add the industrial feel. I wanted them to look sort of gear-like, but not be gears. I don't like how most steampunk stuff is just a bunch of useless gears stuck on top of things that don't actually have moving parts. And as a disclaimer I should say that I love gears. I freaking love gears and watches, I adore skeleton watches or open case-back watches where you can see the movement working, because then there's an actual point to them. I mean my to-do list when I win the lottery is basically my watch wishlist (and I work in a swanky jewellery store so I know my watches), Habs season tickets, and a loft in Vancouver. Probably in that order. But let's keep the gears where they belong and try to move beyond something quite so clichéd, eh?

Anyway, I'm sure the voting will start soon enough, so check it out on the spoonflower blog.