Clouds of Stars

Oklahoma summer sky

On Spoonflower one of the designers I follow asked me how I manipulated my Oklahoma summer sky photograph into Clouds of Stars which can be viewed in my Spoonflower Collection simply called Stars.

I took this photograph and loaded it into an on line photo and drawing site called Sumo Paint.  On that site, pick Filters, click and on the drop down and Distort will appear, click and more choices appear.  To get a star effect, I click on Kaleidoscope.  I sometimes use other effects before I take the photo on into Kaleidoscope.

I learned about Sumo Paint on the Spoonflower Fabric Designs Flickr group.  It's an easy to use program.  HOWEVER, within the last two weeks, I've been receiving cautionary warnings which pop up from McAfee virus protector about using this site.  I got a free app for Sumo through the Google Chrome store and put it on my Google Chrome browser.  I still get a brief warning from McAfee, but now I can access Sumo again.  I'm not sure what the issues are.  I just thought I needed to put that out there so users can be aware of this.

Carson

I have a collection of designs simply called "Carson."  Carson was the last name of my grandmother's grandparents.  If any of you have ever done any genealogy research for any length of time, you might have discovered, as I did, that even though I never met the individuals, the more I learned about them, the more I felt like I knew them.  A photograph of Lovina Jane Record Carson and her husband, Thomas Riley Carson, appears on my blog, Genealogy ending in Cowley County, Kansas ; more information about her can be found there.

My fabric design collection, "Carson"   on Spoonflower is dedicated to Lovina.  She was a milliner and she taught piano lessons, in addition to raising her children and helping her husband run their farm.  My grandmother gave me Lovina's travel trunk.  It traveled with her and her husband and their baby boy from Peoria County, Illinois to Cowley County, Kansas in 1874.  I am not sure exactly how old the trunk is but I date it on her travel date.

"Carson Star"

"Lost in Thought"

These two photographs show the design on which these fabric are based.  This lady rests on the interior lid of the travel trunk.  The first design, "Carson Star," is a crop of a detail  of the photograph of the lady.  The second design is a mirror repeat of the lady herself.  Both these fabrics work well together.  The fabric shown above is Spoonflower's Kona cotton.

Cinnamon Swirl

Bamboo blinds with morning sun shining.

Bamboo blinds manipulated with photo editing

Some designs I'm not too sure about until someone makes a comment.  In fact, you can tell this by looking at the name of the collection -- "Regrets, I've had a Few!"   Cinnamon Swirl is one of those designs.  One morning the sunlight was filtering through the lowered bamboo shade in the dining room and I took a picture. It was really quite lovely and I wondered what a fabric design would look like using that photo.  I uploaded the photo to Sumo Paint and fiddled with it until something showed up that I liked.  With Spoonflower's mirror imaging, the resulting design was something I liked. (Regarding Sumo Paint, for about the past week or so, there have been issues with that site.  It's an easy to use site and I read about it on the Spoonflower Fabric Design group on Flickr.  I'm not sure if the Sumo site has been revamped or what.)

Sumo Paint

I've mentioned Sumo Paint previously in this blog.  I first read about it on the Spoonflower Fabric Designs Discussion group on Flickr.  It is an easy to use on-line photo editing program.  Original drawings can also be created and saved to your hard drive using Sumo Paint.

Just an example:

A scan of acrylics on black tissue paper.

Acrylics on black tissue paper after having been uploaded to Sumo and manipulated through filters.

Kaleidoscope

Do you remember, as a child, playing with a kaleidoscope?  I loved those tubes of wonder.  Just by moving the tube around, different designs could be made with colored rocks.  In my adult years, I have continued to purchase kaleidoscopes.  I even have one kaleidoscope where the end can be removed and I can insert my own objects to view through the kaleidoscope.

On Sumo Paint, there is a feature that can be used to manipulate digital  photographs into beautiful kaleidoscope designs.

I have a collection on Spoonflower called Kaleidoscope.

One of my designs for sale in my shop on Spoonflower, SUMMERSGAZE, is called "Eye of the Chicken." This design is based on this photograph:

This is a beautiful barred rock hen.  One day she came up close to the house and I snapped this picture.  I uploaded this picture to Sumo Paint, chose the Kaleidoscope feature until I saw a pattern I liked.  I centered the Kailedoscope feature over the hen's eye.  The resulting design, with the red and black center of the hen's eye and her black and white feathers, turned out well.  

Milton's Roses

So after I worked on my Bee's Knees collection on Spoonflower yesterday, I worked on a collection devoted  to digital pictures I took of the surprise Mother's Day bouquet of red roses that my husband gave me this past Sunday.   Also included are digital photographs, manipulated, of roses that grow in our garden.

I call this new collection "Milton's Roses."  The designs are dedicated to my paternal grandfather.  His passion was for roses and  mums. He entered . . . and won . . . contests sponsored by the flower clubs  in Oklahoma City.  I have many memories of my grandparents walking toward our house with a bucket load of blooms for us to enjoy.  Growing up, my brother and I could walk through my grandfather's garden and greenhouse, but we had to keep our hands to our side.  My grandfather's love of flowers was a serious avocation.

There are two photo editing/manipulation web sites that I enjoy using.  One is PicMonkey.  Once you have a Spoonflower account, the photos or scanned images that you upload there can be edited on PicMonkey by clicking on "Actions" above your uploaded image.  A drop down box will appear and one of the choices will be to edit with PicMonkey.

Another great editing site is Sumo Paint.  The learning curve on this site is nice and gradual.  A photo can be enhanced and then turned into mosaic tiles or a kaleidoscope.  It's fun to use.  When the picture is uploaded to Spoonflower, wonderful designs appear. Below is a design I did  using Sumo Paint.  I scanned rose petals and uploaded the scan to Sumo Paint.  I uploaded another layer of the same scan and outline some of the petals with black ink.  The top layer was manipulated with "kaleidoscope" on Sumo.

The Bees' Knees

So I've begun working on a new fabric collection on Spoonflower.  The collection is based on a series of photographs and artwork I've created over the years having to do with the venerable honey bee.  For several years, my husband had several hives of honey bees.  I've broken my foot while being chased by honey bees.  I've been known to throw pots and pans at angry honey bees (which did no one any good at all except make me look ridiculous!)

Below is a picture of my husband harvesting the honey.

I call my collection "The Bees' Knees."  I used to hear my grandparents say that phrase.  I never knew what it meant though.  I just did a Google search and it means "of the highest quality."   And I just thought it sounded funny.

Here is one design I'm still working with.  I manipulated a photograph of a sunflower with two honey bees on it.   I think it looks like a glass ready for some iced tea.  (It's still a work in progress.)

Regrets . . . I've had a few.

One thing I've learned since trying my hand at designing my own fabric is that what looks good on the computer might not look good on fabric.  My main problem has been that, sometimes, the image I upload has been too large, thus affecting the design.  The optimal pixels for a design  on Spoonflower is 150 pixels.

Yesterday, as I went through my Kaleidoscope collection, trying to decide which designs I wanted to put on the Spoonflower Marketplace, I noticed that some of the designs were rather large.  I logged onto Spoonflower and checked the sizes of the images that I didn't think look very good.  I created a new collection called "Regrets . . . I've Had a Few" and spent the afternoon cropping my images down and reworking them so that they would look better as fabric designs.  When I've completed that task, I'll order a sampling of my "Regrets . . . I've Had a Few" collection to see if the design swatches measure up to what I am seeing on the computer screen.

These are the designs that did pass my inspection and that are now shown on the Spoonflower Marketplace:

Kaleidoscope Collection at Summersgaze on Spoonflower

The first photograph is of wildflowers in our front yard.  The second picture is a design I created from that image using on line photo editing tools.