Mother Wife and Artist: Stop Me Now!

I ran across this site called Spoonflower on Kal's blog... and boy I should have never went there. It has my brain going and has me itching like crazy to try designing my own fabrics. Lately I've been getting back into sewing. My mom loves to sew all kinds of things and I think it would fun to work with her and come up with some cool fabrics she could use in her sewing projects and quilt making. The possibilities.

So I wanted to check out really quickly how it worked, so I uploaded a fast .png I had on my computer of a cowboy from Mandy's Wild West Collection, and ended up with this.

Which could be so cute! I have some little nephews that are all cowboys! This would be so fun to make something like this up, with some of her other cute little drawings like horseshoes, stick horses etc, and possibly change the background colors to something besides white. (Note: If using images from digital scrapbook collections you have purchased, you could only print the material out for your own personal use. You could not sell it in anyway - in a project you made or the fabric itself. You also could not make it public in Spoonflowers design viewer and claim it as your own.) But the possibilities out there. Create your own drawings. Have your kids draw their own patterns.

Here's another quick sample using a paper of Erica's from her Bouncing Baby Boy Collection. If you used a 12 x 12 paper, and uploaded it it will be big enough for a fat quarter when it's made 150 dpi.

This excites me because I was trying to find fabric I loved for curtains that would match my green walls we just painted. 5 stores later - I could find nothing... so I had to result to solid cherry red, which I am excited about. (Bizarre color combo I know... but it's looking really good.) But now I could have designed my own!

I have to admit that I am super cheap. So their price per yard holds me back. Which is probably a good thing so I don't go crazy with it. But I was thinking that I might be able to create a design that is the size of a yard of fabric which is divided into 4 coordinating fat quarter designs, that could be printed on one yard for $18, rather than $44 dollars for 4 seperate fat quarters. I'm not sure yet if that would work since it has to be under a size limit. But I'm going to try.

The only other way I can justify that much is if I have my one yard of designed fabric, and color match it with just solid cotton fabric that I can get for $2-3 dollars a yard with a 40% on top of that - meaning $1 - $1.50 a yard. Then for 3 yards of fabric I could create a matching project for roughly an average of $5.50 a yard... plus I'd have the exact colors I want, the design I want... hmmm the girls bedroom which is soon to be redone is calling my name I think! :)

Here's Kal's designs she had posted on her site which are think are so much fun!