How to make your
children’s artwork a part of your home
(but not something you
have to hang on your walls)
By Heather Friedmann
As a mom of two young kids who love art projects, I’m
overwhelmed by the mass quantity of art that one drawing session can
produce.
Our house is not very big, and we try as much as we can to
minimize clutter, but some of the drawings my kids produce are good enough that
I’d like to keep the drawings around for a while. Rather than put the drawings all in a frame
or in a book, I tried to think of other ways that we could incorporate the art
into our home in a fun, semi-permanent way and in a manner in which there was a
low risk for the art to get ruined, even if the kids were left unattended with
the art. It was important to me that the
kids can have access to their own art and be proud of their work, and I thought
it would be really great if I could turn the art into something they could
touch without worrying about it being harmed, either by accident or on purpose.
I’ve discovered and fallen in love with this website named
Spoonflower (www.spoonflower.com)
where you can make your own fabric. I thought, how neat would it be to turn
some of my favorite kid drawings into a fabric that could be used for dinner
napkins, a table runner, pillowcase edging, throw pillows for the couch, a
custom quilt, as the background for a kid’s growth chart, or even staple the
fabric to a canvas to use as a wall decoration in their room? These are just examples of what you can do
with the fabric, because literally your imagination is the limit at Spoonflower.
The tutorial on how I turned the drawing my daughter did
into fabric and then into a throw pillow is below. If you’d like to buy this exact fabric for a
project of your own, it’s available via Spoonflower at http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/2861286
and http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/2672448.
TUTORIAL:
1)
Take the drawing that you want to turn into a
fabric. To make the fabric, I actually
combined two of my daughter’s drawings into one, but here’s one of the drawings
I used below. If you need to change the
colors of the drawing, don’t sweat – you can use this link to adjust colors later on: http://help.spoonflower.com/customer/portal/articles/1362639-using-the-color-changer-tool.
.
.
2) Either scan the photo to your computer or take a
photo of the drawing and upload it to your computer.
3)Use editing software, like Photoshop, or even
Microsoft Paint, to ensure that the quality is to your liking in terms of size,
color, contrast, etc. Since I took a
photo rather than scanned it and because it was my first time doing something
like this, and because the computer I was working with only had Microsoft
Paint, I made myself bananas erasing out the grey sections to ensure the most
contrast.
I’d recommend to any normal person
to be sensible and not to do this, but if you’re so inclined, by all means,
follow my approach. It’s slow going, but
it works. Here’s an example of my work
in progress for some other face drawings she had made. The erasing made the background completely
white, which was my goal. See where the
grey areas are? That’s where I still had
to go back in and keep erasing until it looked like the final version on the
right. Also, if you look closely, you’ll
see that I took some tiny artistic liberties and made the faces slightly more
smiley, but by and large, it’s my daughter’s original drawing that’s the final
version.
When you’re done editing, you should have
something that looks like this (or, alternatively, see photo above, right):
If at this point you want to combine two
drawings, just paste them side by side in the same file and resize as
necessary.
Keep in mind that the bigger the file, the
more flexibility you will have in your design, because Spoonflower sets a
minimum of 150 DPI for its fabrics, so smaller files will have a smaller
pattern on the fabric. If you have a
large file size, you will have more flexibility to adjust the pattern
size. Your file can be saved as a .TIF,
a .JPG, a .PNG, a .GIF, and others. See
the screen grab below or the Spoonflower website for a complete listing of
acceptable formats.
4)
Sign up for a Spoonflower account (www.spoonflower.com) and under the
“CREATE” tab, choose “custom fabric” from the dropdown menu.
Upload your file. Here’s the finished file that I uploaded:
And here’s the other fabric that I made
later as a follow-up to the original:
You can resize the design’s overall size on
the fabric, as well as its repeating pattern by clicking on the “Smaller”
button icon (changes the DPI) and you can amend how the drawing repeats on the
fabric by clicking on the various tabs next to Repeat (Basic, Half Drop, etc.)
5
Once you are satisfied with the results, you can
order your fabric. There are a variety
of fabrics from which to choose, depending on your project type a specific
fabric may be a better choice for you.
For the pillow fabrics, I used the linen-cotton canvas blend at
$27/yard. For my first project, I had
ordered the cheapest fabric option available, and I wouldn’t recommend anyone
waste their time with the cheapest fabric.
It’s flimsy and the color transfer to the fabric is not nearly as good
as the more expensive fabrics.
Spoonflower just recently expanded its line to include the silk and the
jersey fabrics, and these each hold promise, though I stand by the quality and
value of the $27/yard linen-cotton blend, especially for the throw pillow
project. Bonus: if you decide to list
your fabric design for sale on the Spoonflower site, you are given a small
discount on any of your purchases (your own or from other fabrics for sale on
the site), so keep that in mind. With a
yard of the linen-cotton canvas blend fabric, a yard measures 54” wide, so
there’s plenty of opportunity to face a few 18” by 18” throw pillows and have
leftovers for other smaller projects (cosmetics case, clutch, etc.) as
well.
6
Find your inner zen (patience). Spoonflower takes a while to actually process
the order and mail it out and when you’re excited and eager to start the
process, it can feel like a long time between uploading your design and
ordering it and the day the package actually arrives in the mail.
Here's a photo of the finished fabric as it arrived from Spoonflower for both the gold faces drawing and the navy faces drawing:
Here's a photo of the finished fabric as it arrived from Spoonflower for both the gold faces drawing and the navy faces drawing:
7
To make the actual pillow itself, I just cut a
slightly larger than 18” by 18” square (to include seam allowances) from the
yard of fabric. If you’d like a
“rotating gallery” of sorts where you can swap out pillow covers, I’d recommend
making a pillow cover with a zipper for easy removal. If you’re looking for a keepsake pillow that
you’re not ever going to change, you can probably skip the zipper and just sew
the pillow cover onto the pillow to finish it off.
If you'd like a full tutorial on how to make a cover for the pillow, stay tuned, I'll post one as soon as I can.
If you'd like a full tutorial on how to make a cover for the pillow, stay tuned, I'll post one as soon as I can.