Designing Fabric ...

I stayed up WAY too late Monday night designing fabric!

Now that sound's cool, doesn't it?

Should I leave it at that?

Okay okay ... so, no, I have not become a fabric designer! :-(

But if someone out there wants to hire me - feel free to write me an email! ;-)

Here in Germany there is a new online-service - you can print your own fabric. Like Spoonflower. Just in Germany. It's called stoff'n. Which is German for fabric. Well, actually "Stoff" is German for fabric. 

Stoff'n is what you say if you are a black mole handpuppet with a speech disorder ... but to get into that would lead way too far ...

Anyway, so I was quite excited when that online store opened this year. But also it is not necessarily cheap to get your own fabric printed. Which seems natural - as they print it just for you. But that is the reason why I have not tried it yet. 

Last weekend I saw that they are having a contest. Design your own fall themed fabric. And you can win fabric!

The winners get their own fabric printed.

WOW!

So over the weekend I started doodling and thinking up designs. I had some doodly kinda designs in mind and thought I would do the following: 

make some hand sketches

get hubby to scan them

figure out how to arrange and color them in GIMP

make a design

!

Sounds good?

However, at the weekend I kinda forgot to mention the whole thing to hubby though ...

So on Monday when I was kinda finished with my sketches I told him and asked whether he would help me to figure out GIMP.

(I love GIMP as it is free and you can do LOADS of stuff with it. I do not love GIMP as it is not necessarily intuitive ... I am really having a hard time figuring things out. Once I know how to do something I am fine. But everytime I try to do something new .... it takes FOREVER!)

He said yes. As hubby is always rather busy - he is the one actually working in our family and not just having fun with the kids like I am ;-) - I mentioned that the contest runs until the 14th of September so we would have to be done by then.

After I said that he looks at me rather puzzled and says "The 14th is TOMORROW."

I am in shock.

I gasp.

WHAT?

How can it be the middle of September already.

September has just started!

How is that possible!?

So I figured there is no way I will be able to hand in a design in time.

But hubby did take the time and helped me all evening to at least make two designs. I have so many more in my head but am happy that we at least got something together. Well, to be completely honest - he ended up doing all the fiddling with GIMP as otherwise it would have taken much longer. I did tell him though which colors and where to put stuff. :-)

So it was a joint effort ...

So here you can see my designs:

I love the tree and the leaves. This is just a very small patch ... if you would order the fabric you would place many of these bits next to each other (there is a programme on that online-service that does that for you) so you end up with fabric with many trees and even more laves.

Oh, I love how those leaves turned out!

Wanna know a secret? I am not such a good doodler. So when I had the idea of having fabric with many small leaves on there I tried doodling different ones ... and well, it did NOT look pretty. So I thought to myself that design will not be made by me! No way am I able to draw pretty leaves. 

Then I went for a walk with little man like every day. 

And while I was walking I looked at all the beautiful trees on my way ... and it hit me!

What do you do if you can't draw something well?

COPY it!

Where do you look if you want to copy leaves?

Google?

Well, no - even though that is a pretty good answer for everything else. ;-)

Leaves of course. I mean the real ones. Out in nature. On trees. Or on the ground!

So I collected a whole bunch while I was walking. Back home I simply put them on some white paper and traced around them simplifying the shape a bit. Hubby scanned my drawings and made them MUCH smaller. And that's how those leaves ended up on my design.

Am I clever or what?

I know, I know - it's not SUCH an amazing idea. But you would not believe how happy it made me at the time as it meant I could create what I had in my head after all!

Second design - teacups of course. :-)

I know, the colors kinda hurt in the eye. I actually wanted to make a design that would be more soothing colors ... but it was very very late by the time we started working on this and picking out colors and matching them does take quite long. So we decided to kinda go crazy and pick ANYthing (well, kinda) and get finished quicker. 

I think this is not the type of fabric you would want to make a dress out of! :-)

But I can imagine it being quite nice for small accents ...

What do you think about my first attempts of fabric design?

Btw, I will need your help . The decision who wins will be made via facebook likes. So I will need all of you to go there and like my design(s)!

I will write another post for it when they start the voting.