Semi-Beginner’s Guide to Fabric Design

You know the idea of a side hustle? I’ve had (and have) many of them, and one of the ones that most intrigued me for a long time is designing fabric.

I love doodling, and always thought it would be awesome to have those doodles on fabric. So when I moved to North Carolina in 2014 for school, I found out that there was a way I could actually put my designs on fabric (aka Spoonflower!)!

I had been designing things for my Redbubble shop at the time for a year, but fabric was a game changer (in my head, at least).

Quickly I realized that fabric repeats are challenging. So for most of the designs I posted and tested early on I went the easy way and made a small design and let Spoonflower’s design “software” handle the repeats. Which was great!

This has not been a lucrative endeavor for me, but my Stargate inspired designs have gotten a lot of love (thanks to the geeks and geek-loving family members for supporting them) so I had some Spoondollars saved up and I wanted to upload some more of my designs, specifically my mandalas, while also expanding to maybe other things!

So I did some research and learned some techniques for making repeats both physically and digitally. You can see the fruits of that labor in the pictures throughout this post, and I can’t believe how adorable this ocean creature print I made is… I don’t care that I’m bragging. It’s so cute, right?

The paid thing I found was this series from Creative Bug… Kinda like Audible, you get to “keep” one workshop a month (or something like that), so I still have access to these (darn you autopay!), but I found it soothing and fun to watch. Basically 3 or 4 designers give a peek into how they make their fabric designs, how you can make it on paper, and how you can make/translate the designs to digital means in Photoshop, though the idea should be pretty much the same for Gimp, if that’s more your speed.

I also know there’s some courses on Skillshare, but I haven’t given them a try yet.

If you want to stay entirely in the physical world, Megan Nielsen had a great set of posts out a couple months ago about a screen printing class she took, which you can see here!

Spoonflower has a handy tutorial for doing repeats by hand, which was specifically what I followed for the artwork above, of cutting up your sketch and taping back together to distribute your pattern. And here’s a post of repeat resources Spoonflower put together!

Then I scanned it, edited all the animals, and then used a tutorial for Photoshop to get the repeats to work… but I’ve now checked every bookmark on my browsers and I can’t find it… (edit: it’s now linked!). There are many options if you google repeating patterns in photoshop, so I’m sure you’d find a great one!

I’ve now gotten the proofs, and I’m ready to sell more of my original designs! I’ve made a bunch of my mandalas available for sale in different scales, with the same technique of letting Spoonflower make my repeat for me. I did find that washing dulled the colors, or at least made the black background of some designs more of a very dark grey, but overall it’s still great to see my designs on fabric in person!

What’s your favorite kind of design to see on fabrics?