'Rose Garden Collection' My First Fabric Designs For Handmade Monday

This week i've been taking my first steps towards a new and exciting venture... fabric design! Its all part of a decision i've made to be more organised with my output and create more cohesive collections and fewer random one offs (although there will always be a some of those around i suspect!)

Rose Garden Collection

If you popped by my blog last week you may remember the rose garden inspired cup and saucer i showed you - if you didn't catch that post, this is what i'm talking about.

Rose Garden Cup And Saucer

Thank you very much for you kind comments by the way :) They helped me decide to make this design my first 'collection'! I've painted some coasters to match but the weather is too gloomy here for photos today so i'l need to show you them another time. I also have plans for a tea pot... watch this space!

Rose Garden Fabric

What i can show you though is the fabric! Well, a digital representation of it anyway... when i have the real thing i will be sure to show you what i make with it :)

If you're wondering how i made these designs and if they are available to buy, bare with me, all will be revealed a little further on in this post...

There are five designs in the collection. The first is a small print, perfect for little projects and details. There are three to five roses per square inch to give you an idea of scale.

I'll be using this for things like lavender pillows and tea cosies i expect!

The second in the collection is the same design but on a much larger scale. This image represents what a 16.5x16.5 inch piece would look like - perfect for cushion covers.

Next is a variation on the theme - a small/medium scale print made up of lots of little 'bunches' of roses.

To give you an idea of scale, one little bunch like this will take up approximately one square inch of fabric.

The last two designs are very simple and intended to compliment the more complex rose patterns. I have used the pastel pink and pastel green from the colour palette and created two fabrics covered in tiny white dots.

Its a bit hard to see the dots on the green one in this image but they are there! To give you an idea of scale there are about 16 dots per square inch.

I have had so much fun with this new creative avenue i'm just itching to:

a) make some things with these fabrics

and

b) work on some more designs!!

First though, i'm going to tell you a bit about how i created these and also how you can buy them if you'd like to and create your own designs too!

Spoonflower

I suspect some of you reading this may have heard of Spoonflower but for the uninitiated it is a US based website that allows you to upload any digital image and have it printed onto fabric! There are a range of types of fabric to choose from and you can even have your design printed as wall paper or as a sticky backed vinyl decal!

The next exciting thing is that you can also allow your designs to be sold on the site in your own in site shop (think Etsy/Folksy) - here's my Spoonflower shop if you'd like to take a look. My designs aren't for sale quite yet as i need to order and check a test swatch of each before they can be made available but that shouldn't take too long.

The way it works on the money side is if someone orders your fabric design you get 10% of the sale price - you don't have to do anything, it just get deposited in your account. When you buy your own fabric design, you get a 10% discount on the usual purchase price.

There are also lots of other fun aspects to the site like the ability to 'follow' designers who's work you like and comment on people's designs too. There are designing competitions to enter and of course loads of gorgeous fabrics available to buy - its going to be hard not to go on a mad spending spree! :)

Fabric Design

I created my designs using an image editing app for Macs called pixelmator - i bought it recently after it was recommended to me and i'm sooooooooo glad i did! I'm not a computer wizz, nor am i made of money, so to able to do pretty much everything i would do on photoshop (if i owned it or had the slightest clue how to use it...) on a very user friendly platform for just over £10 was well worth it!

The next thing will be using it to improve my product photography... another thing on the 'to do' list!

* On this subject, has anyone else noticed how a lot of the features that used to be free on Pic Monkey (online photo editor) are now 'Royale' features, i.e. you have to pay to upgrade... very annoying although i'm glad it pushed me into doing a bit of research and discovering Pixelmator :)

Handmade Monday

That's it from me for this week folks! I'm off over to Handmade Harbour now to link up with Handmade Monday and enjoy a mooch around everyone else crafting world... maybe i'll see you there!

Thanks for dropping by x