Design your own fabric by hand
Previously on ‘Would you like to design your own fabric?’
This is for those of you who are not trained designers, but who would like to have a go at designing your own fabric.
You can create a fabric design however you like – by hand, on the computer, with a photograph – whichever way best suits you and the design you’re working on.
Today we’ll look at hand-drawn designs.
If you can draw or paint, go ahead and draw a design. Again, a well-spaced picture is better than a pattern, unless the repeat is straightforward.
I can’t really draw, so for my hand-drawn design, I first looked for inspiration on Google. I decided to look at Lilies of the Valley. The best image I found was this one:

I started off by tracing the elements of the design. Sometimes, you may want to rearrange things, add in extra bits etc. In this case, I omitted bits I didn’t want and lengthened the stem:
If you’re not much of an artist, it can be useful to copy from a drawing, rather than a photograph, or use a drawing or painting for ideas about colour.

I coloured my drawing with pastels (they’re a bit messy to use, but you can get good shading and blend colours nicely with them. I’ve always liked them, since I first used them at Junior school!) and then scanned the image into the computer.

I added a background colour in Photoshop, (you could use Paint if you don’t have Photoshop), then uploaded the design to our website to decide which pattern repeat to use.
Here’s my hand-drawn design printed onto cotton, all ready to make into a vintage-style blouse.

If you use images from Google or books, please be aware of copyright. Some Google images are copyright-free, but it’s not always easy to find out about. Usually, if it’s just for your own use, you will be OK, but you cannot offer for sale a design which is copied from someone else’s work without their written permission. If you can, do your own thing.
If, by now, you’re feeling a bit more adventurous and fancy having a go at a more complicated all-over pattern, there’s a good tutorial here on how to create a hand-drawn repeat.
For more ways of creating fabric designs, check out these blog posts: Using a scanner to create a design, Design your own fabric using Inkscape and Creating a design with pattern-filled shapes.