Spoonflower patches to the rescue again.

My daughter is a busy mother of three children, the oldest being 7 and the youngest an ornery 2, with a 5 year old in between.  She was in a rush the other morning cleaning, and as she later said, "I don't know why I was using bleach while wearing a good skirt."  The bleach splashed onto her black skirt.  She asked me if I could think of something to do and I thought about what I'd done with my Fossil bag.

I looked through my Spoonflower test swatches and found "Seems Like Old Times."  Since it's a pattern in repeatable squares, I clipped out one square with the pretty lady.  I used one of those squares that Spoonflower sends out with the printed fabric and used that as a backing.  Between, I put in a bit of quilt batting and sewed it up, using a top stitch across the small square.  I had an antique button just looking for a home and that was sewn in the corner.

You might have guessed by now that the buttons scattered across the skirt are where tinier drops of bleach landed.  Of course, looking at the photograph of my handiwork through the eyes of the camera, I could have done a better job of stitching.  To the naked eye, though, the skirt looks really cute.  I hope she likes it.

The lady in the design is from a scan of old sheet music that was purchased at an estate sale in the 1980s in Miami, Oklahoma.  The sheet music is from before 1920.  I included the lady in a collage I did a few years ago.  I chose the name for the fabric design. The sheet music the image was scanned from was not the same song as the title of  my design.  The look of the sheet music lady just reminded me of the song's performance by Diane Keaton in Woody Allen's "Annie Hall."

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.)

A Summertime Clutch

My envelope clutch made from fabric purchased from Nekanen's Shop on Spoonflower.

Check out Nekanen's Shop on Spoonflower.  I ordered a fat quarter of her roses stripes fabric and made this simple envelope clutch.  The design speaks for itself.  I kept trying to add embellishments to the cover of the bag but ended up discarding everything because the design itself is lovely and needs nothing added.  A pretty summertime clutch.  

Singing the praises of my Janome Magnolia 7318

This is a collage made on PicMonkey.  In the collage are three shots of the Barney Bag, three shots of a  collection of  8x8 sample scraps that I pieced together, and one scan of a collage I did out of bleeding tissue paper.

Since the purchase of my Janome Magnolia 7318, the sewing life has become much easier.  I've gone through a series of Brothers.  It was always with trepidation that I approached my Brother sewing machine.  I've been sewing off and on since I was 10 and I had three years of Home Ec (back when it was really Home Ec) so I have sewing skills.  It's the machine end of the deal that put me off.  I have a low frustration level for all things mechanical.  Since my discovery of Spoonflower, though, I keep thinking of all the things I can make if only I can get my machine to work.

One day, while researching sewing machines, I read a review of a Singer machine on Amazon.  In the review the person wrote that rather than purchasing that particular Singer machine, she was going to get a Janome Magnolia.  What's a Janome???  I had never heard of a Janome.  White, Singer, Brother, yes. But Janome?  No.

I googled the name and found this site: sewingmachinecabinets.com.  There was the Janome Magnnolia 7318 and there was also a video demonstrating the use of the machine.  I decided to take the plunge and order it.  It was delivered in a couple of days.  The top drop in bobbin is wonderful.  Since sewing with the Janome Magnolia, I've completed several projects with nary a curse word.  I can't believe that for all these years there existed a sewing machine that I was happy to see and to use.  There are many stitch options and features on this machine and it is well worth the price.  I recommend it.  Oh, and my Brother?  It's sitting on the floor.

8 x 8 Test Swatches from Spoonflower

If you create with Spoonflower, you eventually collect a load of 8 x 8 test swatches of fabric designs.  An 8x8 test swatch of any design uploaded to Spoonflower must be ordered so that the designer can actually hold the swatch in his or her hands and decide if that design is what was desired, i.e., does it look okay on fabric, not just on a computer screen.

What to do with the 8x8 test swatches?  I found a pattern in "Simply Sublime Bags" by Jodi Kahn.  She calls her purse design the Barney Bag.  She used place mats to make her bag.  I sewed 4 8x8 test swatches together to get the desired size of the bag, then I ordered two bamboo purse handles from Etsy.  After the test swatches were sewn together, I ironed on  fusable interfacing to stiffen the Kona cotton -- I wanted it flexible, but sturdy.  For the lining of the bag, I used a square cotton napkin.

My Collage Collection can be seen at my shop Summersgaze on Spoonflower.

Here's a picture of my Barney Bag:

My version of the Barney Bag.

PicMonkey

Spoonflower has an photo editing link with PicMonkey.  What I like about PicMonkey is its cropping tool and all the resizing options for an image.  There are also different filters that can be applied to the images that are uploaded to PicMonkey.  There are a lot of options with PicMonkey.  It's a site worth exploring and it is simple to use.

For instance, I've been working on a design called "Kitchen Tile."  I first drew, scanned and uploaded my design to Spoonflower:

Original drawing -- you can still see some of the edges surrounding the design.

Same design uploaded to PicMonkey through Spoonflower, enhanced.

Once I got the effect I wanted, my design was downloaded back to Spoonflower.  Spoonflower has options for how a designer wants their design to look on the fabric: centered, basic repeat, half drop, half brick, and mirror repeat.  Choose which option works best for your work and then click "Save this view."