Tech Tuesday: Inspiration, Spoonflower and Photoshop

This started out to be a post on working with multiple images in Photoshop, but it has turned into a post about inspiration and why I allow my inbox to be filled with promotions for this product or that service. Most of you know that I’m a saver. Kris thinks I’m a boarderline hoarder, but I can still walk in all the rooms in my house. The barn is another story. Lucky for me, it doesn’t take up much space to save digital stuff. But I digress. A while back I received an email from Spoonflower, an online fabric printing company, announcing their new Fill-A-Yard™ feature.

You can put multiple designs into a yard of fabric to be printed. “Well, that’s silly,” I thought to myself. Just use Photoshop, create a “canvas” that’s 42” wide (or whatever the width of the fabric is) and 36” (1 yard) high. Create whatever you want on that canvas, upload it and let Spoonflower (or any other company, for that matter) print it. It’s nothing new. Spoonflower just created an automated way for you to fill that yard with any of the designs in their marketplace. Brilliant marketing, I say!

Because it’s a template, making up your own yard of fabric is easy. But it’s still a template. If you use Photoshop to create your own canvas, you aren’t limited to a specific template. We’ve even created bias strips of fabric that won’t waste a lot of fabric.* For you non-fabric people, bias strips are strips of fabric cut on the diagonal. In a woven fabric that doesn’t stretch, the bias will stretch a bit. When you want woven fabric to curve around things, that bit of stretch can come in handy.

 

Why don’t you check out Spoonflower Magazine for some inspiration**, put your name on our contact list for the next Pixeladies Photoshop class, and come back next week when I’ll talk about working with multiple images in Photoshop.

By the way, Photoshop Elements 2018 (what would have been version 16) is available and has some nifty features for combining more than one image.

* The thing about cutting strips of fabric on the bias is that to get a long strip, you have to “waste” a lot of fabric. To get a bias strip that’s 2” wide by 36” long from a 42” wide piece of fabric, you need to buy x inches of fabric. What’s x? Approximately 28¼”. Here is the formula I used: √(2²+2²) + 36sin⁡45° = 28.27. I know what you’re thinking. Either

• • • that’s a lot of fabric, or
    • she must have a degree in math (no, but my math teachers would be proud).

** Check out pages 40-41 for a really cool idea for wallpaper and 56-57 for bedsheets. I can hardly wait! (Use the zoom tool to see the actual magazine page numbers.)