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 My website is always, necessarily, out of date.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.

Yesterday I updated morecloth.com, adding more fabrics (over 1,400 there now) and a couple of new ways of displaying some of them. In addition to 132 pages of fabrics in single-color ranges, there are now a few new experimental pages showing side-by-side columns of fabrics in multiple color ranges. Click on the “like-color ranges” and “contrasting-color ranges” links at the very top of morecloth.com to try these out.

Last night I uploaded the fourth installment of my ongoing struggle to classify Etsy fabrics by color. (Click here to see what I came up this time.) The struggle is hopeless, of course, though enjoyable. This time I looked (or at least my software looked) at 4,506 fabric images – just a sampling of what’s available at Etsy – and sorted  1,590 of them into crude groups by color. I looked at the these groups on my monitor (which may or may not match anyone else’s monitor) and tried to eliminate obvious duplicates, fabrics that seemed out of place with their mates, and images that included tape measures (useful to the buyer but distracting in this context). And that’s how I came up with 71 of this week’s 73 color groups.

But I felt kind of bad about the 2,916 fabrics left behind – not to mention all the others at Etsy never even examined. I knew, in particular, that the software was grossly discriminating in favor of fabrics with a single dominant color – things that might wind up, say, in the “kelly green” or “mauve” or “brown” section of a color-sorted bricks-and-mortar fabric shop. So I wrote a little add-on to the software to help it find fabrics that combined multiple dominant bright colors. Click on the multi-colored band of stripes above to see what it found! (I have an intermittent love of wild, raucous color….)

Since I also like monochrome – grays, blacks, and whites – I did the same for fabrics in that range. With results you can see by clicking above.

There is, literally, an astronomical number of ways to sort a collection of fabrics by color. And choosing a few ways out of this vast number looks to me more like an art than a science. What can I say? I’m trying….

Above are two fabrics from the new color groups. I’m glad they turned up in this week’s batch.

The word “cartouche” has various meanings in art. Mostly it seems to refer to an enclosed area, often more or less rectangular, that contains words, symbols, or decorative elements. These enclosed areas work pretty well as a way of organizing motifs in tightly packed scatter prints. The two prints above (photos link to listings at luckykaerufabric.etsy.com) are mostly designed this way, with just a few loose elements (arrows and chopsticks) to fill in spaces between the cartouche shapes.

As seen in the photo on the left (also from luckykaerufabric), even the human skull can serve as a cartouche – a container for decorative teeth, flowers, and abstract motifs. The photo on the right shows a Day-of-the Dead-themed skirt that I hemmed with a quarter-yard remnant of this print. One intriguing aspect of maintaining the morecloth site is recognizing fabrics that I’ve known in real life as they reappear in a different context at Etsy.

Since starting http://morecloth.com 12 days ago, I’ve had an amazing response: over 2200 different visitors from over 60 countries. Thanks to all of you for your interest and patience as I try to make this sort-by-color effort into something useful and sustainable. I’m learning as I go….

If you have an Etsy fabric shop, and your listings weren’t included this time, you’re in good company. It turns out that Etsy has thousands upon thousands of fabric listings. This past week I downloaded 3156 of them and wound up with a total of 371 listings in the color groups at morecloth.com – thus omitting 88% of the fabrics my software looked at (including very beautiful ones) and untold thousands of others it never even downloaded. Since it’s only feasible (for now at least) to show a tiny fraction of what’s at Etsy, I’m working on a better and more random sampling process.

Creative fabric photography

Below are a couple of intriguing Etsy fabric photos:

These are from shops of two independent designers that I like, known as “summersville” and “cicadastudio” on Etsy. (Click on the photos to visit their shops.) Semi-automated color-sorting of fabric photos works best with flat straight-on images, so, with regrets, I wound up excluding these and other similarly attractive and creatively photographed items.

Fabrics with many contrasting bright colors

Most listings with images colored like those below have been getting filtered out by the software. I’m hoping to change this in the near future.

The overwhelming majority of Etsy fabrics

…of which the listing below is just one, may never be up at morecloth.com in any given week. But I’m hoping gradually to increase the number and the variety of color ranges shown.

Comments welcome…