In this now deleted post, I talked about wanting to write, if not balanced reviews, at least appreciations of some books on textiles that have mattered to me. (I’d even gone so far as to sign up with Powell’s and Amazon’s book-selling “associates” programs so as to get permission to use their bookcover photos.) And then I changed my mind, lost my enthusiasm for the project.

Partly because the permissions extended to cover photos only, leaving me only words to convey a book’s inner content. (A real handicap in cases where the book’s strength lies as much in its images as in its text!) I also felt uneasy about the conflict of interest inherent in praising books on which I stood to earn a commission, however small. So…no book reviews, at least for now.

[Above: rutabaga slices carved for printmaking purposes and a digital textile design using motifs created by printing with the rutabaga slices on paper.]

Back in 2008 Spoonflower altered forever the landscape of small-quantity on-demand fabric printiing. By offering digital printing at prices affordable to artists, hobbyists, and small crafts businesses, Spoonflower changed not only what can be done (and done by whom) with cloth, but also what’s likely to be done, both for pleasure and for profit. Commercial inkjet printing for fabric has been on the horizon for decades – see Danielle Locastro’s essay at first2print.com for an analysis oriented toward the garment industry – but only recently available at artist-friendly prices. In the past designers who wanted to see a repeat pattern printed on fabric had to: (1) sell or license the pattern to a business, (2) pay $100/yard or more to a commercial digital printer that bundled digital editing and/or color-matching services in with the printing, or (3) resort to low-tech printing devices. And by “low tech” I mean everything from finicky consumer-priced inkjet printers to silkscreen to linocut blocks to Javanese wax-printing tjaps to rubber stamps to paper stencils to the lowly potato (or rutabaga). Spoonflower’s affordable printing service changes everything; it’s what’s known, in business terminology, as a “disruptive technology.”

[Above: two more digital rutabaga prints, rendered in randomly chosen colors from Spoonflower's downloadable color swatch

Every printing process has its special aesthetic appeal, and fabric designers will no doubt continue to print and experiment with all the traditional low-tech methods. And, of course, they’ll continue to produce repeat patterns with the mass appeal needed for profitable mass production. But the services of Spoonflower (and its emerging competitors in the affordable custom-printing marketplace) will surely help shape the future of printed fabric design. Patterns bubbling up from hobbyists and artists/craftspeople will mingle in unforeseeable ways with those created strictly for mass production. That’s the nature of disruptive technology: game-changing, fascinating, and potentially disruptive. As far as “disruptive” goes, I guess I’ll just say that I’m glad I haven’t invested all my hopes in a business making old-fashioned rutabaga prints! The Spoonflower-enabled competition might be fierce.

Well, that’s an example (albeit a contrived and ridiculous one) of how affordable high-tech fabric printing could undercut a hypothetical low-tech printing business. What about Spoonflower’s new design marketplace? What effect will it have on person-to-person sales of digital repeat patterns outside the Spoonflower marketplace? Up till now these patterns have mostly been created and sold for non-textile purposes – as backgrounds for web pages, textures for 3D-computer-modeling, etc. But there are some at designs at patternhead.com and at istockphoto.com (find them at istockphoto by searching on “seamless pattern”) entirely suitable for printing on fabric. Will people go to the trouble of searching out these designs, paying for them, and uploading them to Spoonflower, if they can get similar designs right at the Spoonflower site with no trouble and no extra payment at all? The Spoonflower design marketplace benefits designers by providing them with a free place to show their work to a highly interested audience, by paying generous royalties on fabric actually printed, and by allowing them to retain copyright to their work. And, at the same time Spoonflower poses a serious challenge to designers hoping to set up shop independently in the just-barely-emerging person-to-person textile design market. It will be interesting to see how this challenge plays out.

I will be writing more on this. And also on Spoonflower’s textile design software that, I read somewhere (can’t recall where, just now), may be in the works.

Each time I update fabric listings on this site, I find myself lingering over particular images and thinking about the design strategies behind them.

Fading and blending with restricted color

The three fabrics above, all quilting-weight cotton from the Northcott “Visual Arts” series, appear to be printed in the normal commercial way (i.e. using rotary screens, a small palette of colors, and, maybe, halftones for the areas where one color fades to another). These color-blending areas – light yellow to dark in the top two images, light green to dark in the bottom one – give the cloth a vaguely antique or hand-colored look. I love these subtle blends, however mechanically and artificially achieved. But getting the fading colors to read as fresh and contemporary (rather than simply as nostalgic and fake) has called for some clever design decisions.

Each of the yellow-background fabrics is overprinted (in appearance, if not in reality) with a highly complex but single-color (black) pattern. This pattern catches and holds the eye, diverting attention from the mechanical means by which the background effect is achieved. And the crisp, unfaded black lines announce up front that this is a piece of contemporary fabric, not imitation vintage. In the green fabric, a grayish pattern, derived, maybe, from a high-contrast photo of a woven texture, is printed over a solid yellow-green ground. This pattern looks modern/postmodern (frankly photo-derived) and it also draws attention away from the mechanics of the green fades going on inside the round medallions.

No fades, no overlaps, no oblique angles

The next three prints , which by coincidence (or maybe not) all happen to be animal prints, use simple shapes, no blending and little detail inside the shapes, and no overlapping at all. In the middle fabric – the only one where some of the shapes are hollow – a few of these hollow shapes do touch each other or the big black target-like form. But none of these collisions lead to deformation. Nothing gets squashed; nothing overlaps. It’s as if all the animals, plants, and rocks (or whatever) are on parade and all taking care to stay a proper distance apart and turn their best sides toward us.

The charm of each design is that they do this so well, filling up the blank white space so fully and evenly. That and the inherent appeal of animals, however symbolized and simplified for easy recognition. There’s also the feat of fitting all these shapes together while keeping all the animals in heads-up position (or, in the case of the first fabric, at right angles to each other). The designers have done a lot with simple means.

At some point back in 2000-2001 I made the decision, for reasons both practical and philosophical, to stop using Microsoft’s Windows, along with a lot of other proprietary software. Everything I do these days – the morecloth site, my personal computing, the soon-to-be-launched site I’m building for online textile design – everything runs on free open-source software. This policy has worked well for me. The only only glitch I’ve encountered so far has come from the fact that fabric-printing services, all of which seem to depend on mysterious black-box configurations of unnamed software and hardware, tend to release clues about their secret processes only in proprietary Adobe Photoshop formats.

Of the four low-cost custom fabric printers I’ve looked at (Spoonflower, FabricOnDemand, KarmaKraft, and EyeCandey aka candeyshop.com), Spoonflower has been the most forthcoming with information. Last year Spoonflower published a downloadable file (in Photoshop .aco format) containing 523 colors (well, actually, 505 colors, since some turn out to be duplicates, at least when expressed in 24-bit truecolor RGB format) – let’s just say a downloadable file containing a big general-purpose selection of Spoonflower-safe colors. By “Spoonflower-safe (my term, not theirs) I mean that, if I understand things correctly, none of these 523 (or 505 or whatever) colors is “out of gamut” for Spoonflower’s printers. In other words, all of these colors can be printed, singly or in combination with each other without triggering the dreaded “remap colors” function that seems to reside deep in the bowels of all commercial printing systems.

I say “dreaded” because this “remap colors” function is undisclosed (at least to us end-user customers) and therefore unpredictable. The function doesn’t just remap the out-of-gamut colors to in-gamut colors; it remaps some or all of the in-gamut colors as well. In short, it tries to help us clueless customers out – and, no doubt, in many cases succeeds – while telling us, in effect, not to bother our pretty little heads about all that in-gamut / out-of-gamut stuff. Not my preferred way of doing business. In fact, as I’ve been getting ready to offer design-and-layout services to people wanting custom-printed fabric, my biggest worry has been color predictability – i.e., preparing files in such a way as to dodge the unwanted help of unknown color remapping functions.

Yesterday I finally set to work on Spoonflower’s Photoshop-formatted file of safe colors. (I hadn’t realized earlier that it could, in fact, be auto-translated into a format usable by gimp-2.4, the free open-source program I use in place of Photoshop.) Once I had the Spoonflower palette file in a format I could use, I still had to make some adjustments; I had to split the palette up into smaller ones, since indexed-color images require palettes of 256 or fewer colors. But now, with that detail taken care of, I have the means, so it seems, to auto-generate a large number of color schemes in Spoonflower-safe colors. (You can see a sampling of 252 such color schemes in the two images above.) I’ll be printing swatches to test things out and, if all goes well, uploading some color scheme files here that others may find useful.

(To see the Spoonflower-safe palette and a couple of smaller palettes that I extracted from it click on the following link.) Continue Reading »

There’s no substitute for the human eye and brain when it comes to choosing colors and color combinations to please … the human eye and brain. We pick up and integrate, often effortlessly and unconsciously, countless cues about material, texture, hue, lighting, style, fashion, and cultural context. Still, there’s no shortage of mathematical rules – and no shortage of software to implement these rules. Common formulas include triads (sets of three colors similar in saturation and value with hues equally spaced around the color wheel), tetrads (like triads but with four colors instead of three), analogous colors (sets of colors fairly close in hue and more or less identical in saturation and value), etc. Check out Color Scheme Designer for a sophisticated example of an online color-scheme generator based on such formulas.

above: machine-generated color combination of Etsy fabrics using a “split complement” formula

above: compact representation of this color combination

Anyway, I’d been getting impatient with my own piecemeal efforts to put together color combinations of fabrics at morecloth. It seemed to take hours just to arrive at twenty or so semi-attractive combinations. And then it occurred to me that I was, in effect, using whole pages of fabrics at morecloth in much the same way that color-scheme software uses the single colors in a palette. So a wrote a little color-scheme generator to work with morecloth’s pages of color-sorted fabrics.

I asked it to auto-generate some color combinations, and, in a matter of seconds, it came up with fifty-eight of them – most of which looked better to me than the ones I’d chosen by hand! (Is this progress or a reflection on my color-picking abilities? It’s sort of embarrassing to be beaten by a machine, even if you’re the one who programmed the machine.) You can see the fifty-eight combinations here (or just click on the “color combos” link at the top of most morecloth pages). I’m working on additional color-combining rules and plan to have more and more varied combinations in the next site update.

Some people have asked about what’s behind morecloth.com, what I’m trying to do here and how the software works.

Maybe I should start by saying what I’m not trying to do. I’m not trying to:

(1) Come up with come up anything definitive – any model way of sorting or presenting fabric. There’s plenty of room for other approaches and other websites built around the wealth of fabric at Etsy and elsewhere.

(2) Turn morecloth into a for-profit undertaking. This is a side project for me, something I started impulsively when I learned, a few months ago, that Etsy had created an API (application programming interface), i.e. an easy way for programmers to get at the data on Etsy’s site.

(3) Create a mysterious “black box” situation (see picture above). The software behind this site is pretty simple. I’m not publishing the source code – at least not yet – because it’s in flux and a bit of a mess right now. But read on for an explanation of how it works. Continue Reading »

I’ve just uploaded a selection of fabrics from gloriouscolor.com: 552 of them that I sorted, more or less, into color groups; to see these groupings click on the image below. The Glorious Color fabric shop stocks, among other things, a huge collection of prints by Kaffe Fassett, Philip Jacobs, and Brandon Mably, and the selection I’m showing here (at http://morecloth.com/gloriouscolor) is drawn from these. But “huge” in reference to a single independent fabric retailer means something rather different (smaller, more aesthetically coherent, and more consistent in terms of photography and lighting than “huge” in reference to the Etsy marketplace.

The challenge of looking at, appreciating, classifying, and generally wrapping the mind around the work of three selected designers differs in surprising ways from the challenge of sampling, every week or two, some part (not necessarily representative) of the big forest of fabric (10,000 items, 15,000? more? who knows?) present at any given moment at Etsy. I like looking at fabric both ways: seeing both the forest and the garden.

Maybe I should add a note of thanks to the people who provide, one way or another, the images that appear here – to the Etsy sellers and to Liza Prior Lucy of Glorious Color, who gave me permission to use images from her site. I don’t work for any of these people – morecloth is a strictly non-commercial undertaking – but my fabric-sorting efforts wouldn’t get anywhere without a good supply of fabrics to sort. In the next post I’ll be writing a bit about my own motives and about the software behind my site.

There’s no such thing a an ugly piece of cloth. There may be lost or lonely fabrics, fabrics fabrics that have been damaged or strayed from their fashion era, fabrics that look good only when cut up into pieces and stitched into the company of others. But all fabrics have some use and potential for beauty. At least that’s my operating belief – and the principle behind a lot of patchwork and reuse.The same idea may apply to fabric motifs. The beauty comes from their placement and the way they interact as much from the motifs themselves. Plain circles (dots or balls, as below) don’t look plain anymore when laid out in a clever pseudo-random arrangement.

And placing dots within dots or varying their circular shape creates a huge variety of effects. All without overlapping the dots, putting them over a patterned ground, or joining them to each other by means of tendrils or stripes. Quite likely the drama of these designs depends on the austerity of the motifs and layout. To do so much with so little…
At the other extreme of textile design lie prints for Hawaiian shirts (complete with shorelines, volcanoes, and thatched-roof houses), toile de Jouy landscape prints with buildings and outdoor factories, and 20th century prints (and derivations thereof) with content ranging from Soviet tractors at work in the fields to art deco monkeys swinging through the jungle. In future posts I’ll be looking at some of these more pictorial fabric motifs.

Images in this article show items on sale at Etsy. Click on them to see the Etsy listings.

Tomorrow the site showing Etsy fabrics by color will be two months old. And in the course of those two months it will have been seen by more than 19,500 people. If I’d had any idea what I was getting into back in May when I started this project… I’m coming to see the flow of cloth through Etsy as a river: unstoppable, ever-changing, and altogether daunting. No matter how I struggle to represent this river of fabric – rewriting (and debugging) the software I use to sort it and doing by hand and eye what can’t be done by computer – I wind up always with an imperfect snapshot of a river that’s already flowed on. My website is always, necessarily, out of date.

In terms of commerce, this is a good thing: fabric at Etsy is selling, new fabric is being offered for sale, and the great river is moving on. In terms my personal life, this is a stressful situation. I hadn’t quite planned on doing almost-weekly updates of such huge amount of fabric (7,006 pieces looked at in this last update and 1817 of them shown on the morecloth site). Nor had I foreseen that I’d be at the same time rewriting and debugging the software that does the sorting. Certainly I hadn’t planned on carrying off this performance with a potential audience of 19,500+ people. All very exciting and a bit scary. If glitches occur, I hope there’s some forgiveness: the whole team for this project consists of me and my cat, together with two aged and battered computers.

The collages in this post are put together from screenshots of what’s currently up at morecloth. For now all my effort is going into streamlining the more or less weekly process of assembling pages like these.

It’s impossible, at least for me, to look at fabric designs involving dots without undergoing a kind of involuntary Rorschach test. Without, that is, on some subliminal level, seeing the dots on fabric as living creatures. They line up in rows and columns, drift apart, or contend for space. They jostle against each other, step on each other’s toes and, at times, nearly manage to merge without quite ceasing to be dots. They live, move, and animate the fabric; no wonder so many designers use them.

The squarish dots with the dark green centers in the image to the right above are derived from plant forms, according to the description of this fabric at Etsy. (All images of fabric in this post are taken from Etsy sellers; click on a fabric to see its Etsy listing.) These dots remind me somehow of one-celled organisms – little animicules crowded tightly together in the process of merging or dividing. On the other hand, those dots above on the left suggest some kind of military drill – or else checkerboard fields of evenly planted crops. I love this pattern, both the color and the form, but the part of me intrigued by random disorder wonders what skirmishes would occur if a few small dots strayed into large-dot territory.

In the lefthand image above (necklaces, I guess), I see orderly lines of multi-sized dots, all held in place by thin vertical threads. Once again I imagine small eruptions of disorder. What if a thread or two broke, scattering dots here and there and turning the pattern of stripes into an all-over design? The image above to the right looks quite stable; I don’t imagine the dark spots migrating off the leopards. But what if the leopards themselves launched themselves into a leap, wreaking havoc among the white dots?

The two images above both use motifs known as millefiori (an Italian word meaning “a thousand flowers”) in a closely packed formation. But what a difference in the results! Motifs in the righthand picture have angular shard-like boundaries, and all manage to stay a safe (though tiny) distance apart. Motifs in the left hand picture, with their smooth, less threatening edges, crowd together amiably, cheek to cheek.

Am I reading too much into mere arrangements of dots? Hard to say, since fabric makes its appeal to us in sometimes very subtle and subliminal ways.