Fabric grown in a bath tub? Totally intriguing!

I’m participating in an intergenerational project at a community center – fourth and fifth graders and seniors working on 2 four week long art and crafts projects.

The first class will be a tracing and water color painting project of our hands. During our planning sessions we came up with the idea of creating a collage for the final project. Of course, I took on the task of coming up with a collage idea.

I want to combine words and images from the previous projects.

Mrs. Moen’s quilt is an inspiration at this point.

The fabrics are used for a variety of interior design projects, including upholstery. 

Ecó Creations organic fabrics

Ecó Creations is based in Dublin, Ireland.  The company is unique on the global market and delighted to be the ambassadors of Irish textile design abroad.

The first range of organic fabrics for interior decoration was launched in  September 2008; with a commitment to best quality, social responsibility and respect of the environment.

Ecó Creations is based in Dublin, Ireland

Creative and Managing Director Emmanuelle Marion has a background in Business, Visual Arts and Arts Management. She travelled extensively in search of the textile industry’s leading trendsetters before setting up Ecó Creations. Emmanuelle had the opportunity to study traditional and contemporary fabric design in Scandinavia, Western Europe, South-East Asia and North America.

“I wanted to take my inspiration from the beautiful landscape of Ireland and use its wild flowers as a metaphor to promote a more respectful textile industry, both towards people and the environment” says Emmanuelle.

Ecó Creations soft, organic and sustainable fabric

Ecó Creations first range of fabrics is 100% organic cotton. The fabric is thick, yet very soft and is the best quality of cotton achievable. Prints and dyes are solvent-free and recycled within the printers’ premises. All the finished products are handmade in Ireland to the best quality standards.

intial sketch for the first yasmintoo holiday card

I spent  time this week scrolling around the internet looking for a green printer who uses soy ink. I want to offer a truly eco friendly holiday card on yasmintoo.

I found one printer where the printed card and envelope price out to less than $1.00 per card including shipping. Really great price. This means the final cost of the cards to yasmintoo customers will be reasonable.  Once the original design is completed, I can spend my time on marketing and customer service.

first holiday card with the floral motif laid out in a square

 The soy ink printing option is not cost effective at the moment. I don’t have a distribution network set up to sell the quantity of cards I would need to have printed.  The retail price per card would limit the number of sales. I’ve decided to compromise. No soy ink this year, but  my yasmintoo cards will be printed on recycled paper. Buy a bunch and I’ll be able to move to soy ink sooner.

I’m sharing my initial design work with you today. Throughout the month as these designs move toward printing, I’ll keep you updated on the progress with images and posts.

The first design reminds me of poinsettia flowers. In Southern California, poinsettias are yard flowers. After growing for several years they don’t look anything like the poinsettias purchased in the store for the holiday season. The plant is tall and graceful, rather stark.

first strike up of the floral layout with text roughed in

green leaf background free hand layout 

This leaf design will be used for fabric. It will also get cut into a lino block for a limited edition set of cards. I may get carried away and do a two color lino cut adding the floral motif to the block. Not sure yet.

round petal bouquet initial sketch

When I started designing as a teenager, my compositions were filled with all kinds of space filling motifs and patterns.  Probably a result of working in batik. Following Javanese batik styles, I used a lot of dots and patterns teaching myself how to work with a tjanting tool.

rounded floral on top of the green leaf background

BagsGoneGreen - Textures, Casual Yet Styling

Who says green living has to be so serious?  This week yasmintoo features the gorgeous eco friendly bags of Susan Quaas from BagsGoneGreen.

BagsGoneGreen Springtime - Subtle but Rich

“BagsGoneGreen” was founded to find a practical and artistic way to use the hundreds of pieces of beautiful leftover upholstery and drapery fabrics and trims from Susan Quaas’ 30 year Interior Design career. Instead of throwing these high-end, quality small samples and scraps in a dumpster, Susan decided to combine them with gently used jewelry, buttons and belts from local charity and thrift stores. All bags are hand-made and designed by Susan and are one of a kind too!

BagsGoneGreen - The Cuff, Earthy Tones with Flair

95% of each “BagsGoneGreen” bag is recycled from clean, old and new materials and limit the impact on our planet and on our fellow humans.

BagsGoneGreen - Daisy, Is It Spring or Summer?

About Susan:  “I am an Interior Designer, Susan Quaas Interiors, from Minnesota, and with the hard financial times I decided to finally make use of the samples and fabrics and trims that I have held on to for many years and create a purse line. All re-purposed and one-of-a-kind. The finest designer fabrics to which I add jewelry and trims from local thrift shops. 95% eco-friendly.”

yasmintoo!

Promote Your Page Too

herbie hancock by silvia maria

Silvia Maria is the yasmintoo designer of  the week. A fashion design student, Silvia Maria lives in São Paulo, Brazil.

Baboom from Silvia Maria

About Silvia Maria: “I love to draw, my work is based on patterns for textile, this was the way I found to work with fashion and art together. Most of my inspiration cames from a different kind of art, such as music, movies, photography, anything that has a true beauty, a good idea behind it .  Anything I feel touched by.”

Baboom from Silvia Maria

Visit Silvia Maria’s portfolio
View her work on Flickr

yasmintoo!

Promote Your Page Too

These are the primary pattern and the stripe on a light background and a black background. I developed the pattern in Illustrator.

I like the black background best. Still working on two small co-ordinating patterns.

Digital fabric patterns can be created using any medium you like. Photos, paintings, pen and pencil, hand textile processes, etc.

When you’re satisfied with the image, it’s scanned into the computer. I like to use the professional scanners at my local community college. After scanning, the images can be uploaded into an image editing software program. I use Photoshop and Illustrator, but there are free editing programs available. Picnik is one.

If you’re like me at this point you’ll spend a great deal of time fooling around, sizing, trying out different colorways, working with repeats.

The completed pattern is then uploaded to a digital printing house. You should be able to view the pattern in various repeats. 

All of this digital stuff requires some flexibility in terms of color. Studying CMYK, RGB and Pantone colors is time well spent. Ask your printer what works best with their equipment. If you’ve designed web sites you’ll be familiar with the way different monitors and browsers show color, same thing here. So be sure to order a sample and be prepared to make color adjustments after the sample arrives.

yasmintoo!

I did get the first dye in on four yards of fabric – organic cotton voile  (Hart Fabric) and sateen (Silk Road), and silk habotai (Dharma Trading Co.).

I have in mind a line of  voile T-shirts, with a silk lined, sateen tank top underneath. Something for the green crowd to wear on special occasions.

This is the fabric after shibori, one dye, and handpainting.

Maybe I was tired, but everything that can go wrong with the first dye did. I did a shibori circle wrap on the voile. The circles came out squared off. I dyed all three pieces at one time, chocolate brown. Or so I thought. Used a dip dye method and soaked the fabric in a soda ash solution beforehand. The voile came out a strange shade of grey. I didn’t panic. Unexpected colors are the exciting part of shibori. 

I did panic when the sateen came out a color that for lack of a better term I will call rust, and the silk was bright orange. Something way wrong with the dye method. Won’t use it again.

I kept going. I wanted to see how the “circles” would work with a handpainted swirl motif I’ve been using in  different variations and  mediums.

This is the fabric after painting metallic swirls with Lumiere. I can tell this is going to be a problem to photograph.

Next I laid out a grid.  The swirls are random, we all know that random is anything but. Repetition holds most patterns together. I used a blue violet dye, thickened with sodium alginate and added baking soda.

(Use a blender to mix the thickner. Let it sit for at least 24 hours before adding dye and soda. Then blend again using an emersion blender or hand whisk.)

I started to like the voile.

I use a bamboo steamer to set fabric. I’ve been working with a lot of silk lately and forgot how much larger cotton is when wrapped for steaming. Of course, my wrapped fabric didn’t fit and I wound up using a metal steamer with several layers of paper toweling between my wrapped fabric and the steamer.

Did I fall asleep? I don’t know. But I do know that I removed a soggy mess from the steamer. The paper towel was beautiful. My voile fabric was now gray, the unknown shade of rust, turquiose blue in some spots and a very muted shade of violet in others.

Still it looked interesting. So I hand painted the center of the “circles” with a copper colored metallic Lumiere paint.

This is the cotton sateen, including grid lines and brush bristles.

Finished, I realized this was not the piece I intended, but one I like anyway. Now the question is will this fabric in any way, shape or fashion coordinate with the sateen. The lining will definitely have to be redyed. Even I refuse to put an orange lining in a rust and purple garment.

What do you think? Tomorrow the finished cotton sateen.

This appears to be a crowd favorite. I like it too.

I knew from the outset that I was taking a chance on selling greeting cards.

Who sends cards in this age of e-greetings? 

If you buy cards, the big guys have set the price at a maximum of $3 to $4, even for museum reproductions.  I don’t really like cutesy florals or sentimental victoriana. So my designs are strong graphics, many are geometric. Not your everyday designs for cards.

Gocco and letter press printing seem to be the current vogue for hand printed cards. The few lino block cards I’ve seen are printed directly on card stock. Mine are printed on natural papers, then mounted on recycled card stock. Gotta stay eco friendly.

I’ve been making cards forever. I started off with batik cards on rice paper mounted on card stock. My then rep, Hermene Hartman, sold a few thousand to Marshall Field’s in Chicago. That was my first and last experience with wholesale production for a large retailer.

Black framed, lino cut printed on unryu paper, mounted on a kraft paper card stock

Every body anywhere in the area of my studio got put to work. What started off as art wound up being production. By the time it was over with, I was applying one stroke of wax to each card, dying the rice paper, applying a second stroke and on down the line.

I had cards printed from designs, and sold them at community events up and down the eastern coast. I still have boxes of them somewhere.

When I started block printing cards, I realized that I really enjoyed it. Something about fine paper and the printing process appealed to me.

So one of the items I knew I wanted to have in the yasmintoo store was block printed cards, despite all of my past experience.

Etsy has taught me to follow my creative muse. Do what you love. Forty years designing textiles has taught me most things I create will be too expensive for many of my friends to buy. So the cards are something small and, relative to the price of  the rest of my work, inexpensive. They are bright and fun and can be a creative statement if framed and hung in a grouping.

Mix and match set of four Petite Artifacts cards.

This week I introduced gift sets and framed prints in  the yasmintoo shop. Take a look and let me know what you think.

jasmine flower

That didn’t take into account the spelling disabled.

From all of the questions, mispronunciations, and  misspellings of my name, I guess I should have realized that my beautiful name would forever be associated with birth control, not Princess Yasmin.

looks like a candidate for a spoonflower digital textile design, or should that be karmakraft

Maybe I should try Jasmine. A rose is a rose . . .