Fabric Design Process

Last week I spoke at the Berry Basket Quilter's Guild in Medford, NJ. I met a lovely group of ladies and talked about my wool pins and my fabric design process. (Don't I have a weird look on my face in this picture??)

I also debuted my new book, Child's Play, and showed some samples from the book:

May is rapidly approaching- that means it's almost time for International Quilt Market in Portland, Oregon. I will have a new fabric line debuting at that show. I feel like I have been working on it forever.... This particular line has had many revisions. Sometimes a fabric line will come about quite easily, and other times it seems it takes a million tweaks to get it right.

I wanted to show you a little glimpse into how a fabric design might come about. This is a page from the Better Homes and Gardens June 2012 issue. I liked the pattern in the wall paper, with the alternating circular and diamond shaped motifs, and I thought an idea like this would work well with the line I was working on.

The description in the magazine says that the decorator was influenced by Indian prints. Indian prints are often done with a carved wooden block, which is stamped onto fabric or other surfaces. You can see that the circular motif in the wall paper has 8 "petals" and the center is a circle. Using that for inspiration, I drew a circular design that had 8 petals, but I had a different idea for the center:

 I also drew a square which I could rotate into a diamond shape:

The palette for this line has a lot of blues, so I painted my motifs in a pretty turquoise color. Also, I couldn't get a close look at the details in the wall paper so my design ended up being quite a bit different from the original. The original also had some extra "fan shapes" in the circular motif which I did not include. (Even if I did have a detailed look at the original, I wouldn't copy it- I look at something to inspire me and then do my own thing.)

Then it was time to start laying things out in a repeat in PhotoShop to see what would happen....

(I also had some versions with the circles rotated a bit, but apparently I didn't save those...)

I took the center of the circle:

and repeated it to make a border:

In the end, we ended up not using the circle & diamond repeat, but we did use the border and the individual circle and square motifs that I originally painted. When we get closer to Quilt Market, I will  show you some of the patterns that DID actually make it into the line!

So that is a little bit about the evolution of just one pattern in a fabric line.... And then you figure that there are anywhere from 5-8 patterns in a line... a lot of stuff that you like doesn't make the final cut because it just doesn't work with the rest of the line. It takes a lot of hours... (if I ever actually kept track of how many hours I spend putting a line together, I would probably shock myself!)