Designing Fabric

Moda boasts a variety of fabrics from a variety of designers. Each of us works in different ways. I wish I had the computer skills to generate a digital design or the painting skills to paint a croqui, pronounced croak-ee, the word for a painted fabric design, which comes from the French word for sketch.

Sandi Gervais paints her designs. See her blog Pieces of My Heart for insight into how she works.

http://piecesfrommyheart-sgervais.blogspot.com/2009/07/process-of-fabric-designing.html

Jennifer of Tula Pink generates her designs in the computer. These blog postings show how she works.

http://tulapink.com/2010/02/21/building-plume/
http://tulapink.com/2010/02/28/the-changing-of-the-guard/  

My skills are 1) hoarding, 2) sorting. I have a huge collection of antique fabric scraps so reproducing antique fabric is my niche at Moda. Most of the scraps came from my friend Joyce Gross. Others were gifts from collectors like Bets Ramsey, Katy Christopherson, Mary Sue Hannan and Arnold Savage. I also buy antique fabrics to fill holes in the collection and occasionally I come across an old top in terrible shape that I can unpiece.

The worn top I used for color inspiration and a few swatches for Civil War Homefront lies under the strike-offs, which are the first fabric proofs of the actual reproductions. The ones with the white dots wound up in the line. It is hard to choose.

Because I love to sort I have classified the swatches into notebooks by color, by figure style, by date, by subject matter. I keep the scraps in archival plastic notebook pages and move them around. One year I might sort them by era, another by dye. This keeps me entertained by the hour, the way my mother's button box used to.

When I think of a historical theme for a new collection I re-sort.

Archival baseball card holders work great for the small pieces.

Right now I am working on another Civil War line for the 150th anniversary year of the beginning of the War. I'm also doing a late 19th-century collection in fall colors like the scraps below. (You have to wait till summer to see that fall fabric.)

Once I choose a theme and fabrics that date to that era, I choose a palette based on historical colors. If it's Civil War-era the colors have to mimic natural dyes. I like copying late-in-the-century prints because I can have blacks and different greens, purples and other shades that came from test tubes.

The colors have to work across all the pieces in the collection---the hardest part for me, because I have to imagine how the purple is going to look as a background as well as the figure. If I were better at computer imaging I could actually see that but right now I have to imagine.

Strikeoffs of the reproductions atop a quilt block

 of the original for Poke Salad

in the Civil War Homefront collection.

I had several to pick from and chose based on authentic color palettes as well as considering how it would fit into the overall collection. The original fabric is called the document print.

I send the document prints to Texas, where they go on to Japan for design and Korea for printing. Most of the time I get them back a year or so later. I send a cut with just the minimum repeat in case I don't get the antique swatch back from across all those geographical and language barriers.

I've been taking a class in Photoshop but I imagine I will always work with the actual swatches. That way I can justify shopping for antique swatches and storage space for all those notebooks.