Turning Kid Art Into Custom Fabric: a house log

Well, Clara can go ahead and add fabric designer to her resume. With her 23 month photo in the can (see the full photo project here), it means the next monthly picture in line is the big 2-4… otherwise known as age 2.

And since we concluded her first year of weekly-fabric-backdropped photos…

… with a custom fabric design that we made through Spoonflower by scanning her name drawn out in marker on paper (and tiling it in Photoshop), we though we’d make it a tradition and create more homemade fabric for her second birthday.

We thought about doing something similar with Clara’s name for our she’s-two fabric (perhaps in Sherry’s handwriting instead of mine) since we liked how personalized it felt, but then we realized it could be even more special if we left it to someone else. Enter our latest fabric designing project- it is a bit more subtle than last year’s but it is so much more meaningful to us because… Clara drew it herself!

It in short simply involved some Clara scribble, photographing said scribble, playing around in Photoshop, and tiling it in Spoonflower, but we will get to that in a minute.

It began on Easter afternoon when we broke out a big sheet of paper and some markers and let Clara do her thing:

We gave her an orange and pink marker, since they are her current go-to colors (and the ones we are planning to use for her party) but eventually she requested a black one and we handed that over too. Gotta let the artist do her thing.

She was certainly in the zone. Which was good because we were determined not to interfere so the drawing would truly be hers.

And although it might be hard to see them in the final work of art, Clara not only incorporated her party colors – but also her party theme, which is, by her own request: “WORMS!” (the girl is so in love with worms that she regularly tells us she dreams about them and looks out the window and says “Oh, hi worms.”). It is kind of hilarious.

Here is the final result… which had us scratching our heads thinking “how exactly is this going to become fabric?” and wondering if perhaps we should’ve “assisted” a bit more.

But sometimes you’ve simply gotta trust the artist and her “vision.” So I snapped this pic of it straight on (since the paper was too large to scan):

Then using Photoshop we put the design on a plain white background (by upping the contrasting and then selecting and deleting the rest of the background). The black marker sort of turned navy, but we did not mind, so we went with it. Still not looking quite much like patterned fabric though, is it?

Simply like with the first-year fabric, we figured we might be able to make it look more “pattern-like” by repeating it. So we duplicated the layer and began playing around with distinct ways to tile it in order to make an abstract pattern out of the bean’s masterpiece. Here is what it looked like when I duplicated the layer once, rotated it 180-degrees, and placed it on top of the original drawing:

Then we took a second copy of the original (also rotating it 180-degrees) and lined it up on the bottom:

Confusing, I know, so here we have put a red box around the original rectangle (and two blue boxes around the flipped and shifted ones) so you can hopefully see how they are layered a little better:

But of course if we want the Spoonflower program to tile the pattern accurately, we had to crop it in a way that it would repeat seamlessly. So I simply found an straightforward reference point for where I could cut it off at the top and bottom, like this:

So here is what the pattern looks like cropped and without those colored boxes on each section. The alternating orange circles with the navy squiggles and the dark pink splotch were starting to look kinda cool. At least to proud parents like us.

But we’d have to upload it to Spoonflower and see it as a sheet of fabric to truly see if were were on to something…

Spoonflower in fact gives you a lot of options for resizing and adjusting how your pattern repeats. We did not truly explore this much in our our last fabric-designing adventure, but here is simply an idea of the distinct ways you can tile your pattern (the one on the bottom right with the stripe was achieved by adding a bit of white space on each side of our JPG before uploading it to Spoonflower).

After some contemplation we chose the Basic Repeat simply like last time (we initially liked Mirror Repeat, but Sherry said it was a bit female-form-ish and once we saw that we could not unsee it – or stop giggling like twelve year olds). So then Basic Repeat became the go-to. It is kind of ikat-esque, and not obviously kid-scribble until you get closer, which is part of the lively. So we ordered two yards of it for $36 + $3 shipping (for a total of $39) thanks to a discount at checkout for uploading our own design. Yes, it is still more pricey than our usual fabric budget, but you gotta splurge sometimes, right?

Not only do we plan to use it for the backdrop of her big birthday photo, Sherry wants to sew something memorable with it (along with the Clara fabric from last year) – so we will keep you posted on that. She’s already made a birthday banner, a quilt, and a beanbag from other weekly photo fabrics.

Fast forward about a week and our fabric arrived. Woot. These photos do not truly do it justice (it is bolder/brighter in person), but it is excellent. It likely will not be winning any fabric design awards or anything, but it is the coolest thing we have seen in a while.

 

We have to wait a few more weeks before Clara is officially 24 months old to put it to use for a photo session…

… but Clara chose she could not keep her hands off of her own creation, so we had a little playtime with it in the guest room…

…which turned into a little impromptu photo shoot as well. She liked hiding under it.

And gazing lovingly at her creation.

At one point she even asked to take a nap under her “blanket.”

This is the expression I got when I reminded her that naps involve closed eyes:

Then fabric playtime turned into pillow playtime. And there was some hiding…

…and some spirited “Clara popping out!” (her words, every time it happened).

Receiving her scribble fabric makes us even more excited for Clara to hit the big 2 year mark, though we are also in disbelief. It seems like simply yesterday we were designing fabric for her… and now she’s doing it on her own. Well, sorta.

Anyone else use Spoonflower lately? Or do something else with your son or daughter’s artwork?

Psst- Check out Clara getting her Rihanna on here on the house Life.