Fabrics, the DailySkirt way

I was sitting at my desk yesterday dreaming up ways to avoid working when I realized that I would love nothing more than to be clad head to toe in that truck lino print I made last year.

And so, harnessing the power of the Internet (plus PhotoShop Elements and Microsoft Publisher), I spent about 6 hours today designing my own fabric. The truck print came out so well, I went to town with other prints of Porsches, Pontiacs, Farm-Alls, crows, and fish.

When I was happy with each design (I made 10 or 12), I uploaded them onto Spoonflower (a site where you can make your own custom fabric). You can check out my Spoonflower profile here, or see the low-res JPGs of JPGs of JPGs below. (By the way, the yellow tape measure along two of the borders isn't part of the print; it's to show how broadly the print scales.) The little white lines visible in the prints below shouldn't actually be on the finished fabric.

I'm afraid none of them are for sale yet; I ordered swatches to make sure the color's good and the images print without too much distortion. Porsche Speedster above; 1951 stepback Chevy below. Border print of the same Chevy, below--meant for skirts. Most of these, I had done up in organic cotton sateen.

Crazy print commemorating a wild night of my stepfather's in his torrid youth when, after a night of debauchery, he drove home through his rural North Dakota home and noticed some orange pylons out on the roads. He thought he would be a mensch and return them to the police, who had clearly forgotten to remove them for the night. I think he spent a few hours in a holding cell.

Above is the pattern I created; below, you can see it as it's repeated in the fabric--I mirrored it to give it some symmetry. It makes for a busy print, but I'm making a jacket out of it just the same.

I loved flipping the Pontiac LeMans over and over again, and the crow standing in the middle, and then walking off, all innocent. (The crow isn't a part of the story but I thought, what the hell, put a bird on it.)

I really love this graphical print of crows, below. I'd intended initially to just make a border print out of this, but when I saw how well they tiled together, I couldn't resist.

Porsches mirrored together to make a pattern.

Old Farm-All tractors mirrored together against a violet field to make a pattern, this one more abstract than the Porsches, simply because it's harder to tell that they're actually tractors.

For those of you who are interested in doing this yourself, it's pretty easy--it takes a lot of steps, but they're not hard steps. (Much like sewing, right?) First you load your own artwork into something like PhotoShop Elements (a photo-editing software kit that lets you change colors, add effects like sharpening and blur, and get rid of elements you don't want).

Once you've got the image the way you want it, add it to your overall design in a product like Microsoft Publisher, where you can add lots of elements and move them around to get them the way you want them. (Truth be told, Elements will probably do that for you, but I just started using it and haven't figured it out yet.)

Save it as a PNG and upload the whole shooting match onto Spoonflower, which is where you can get your design to repeat in a lot of ways--either by doing a mirror image, a simple repeat, or an offset tiling.