Last year, I created Spoonflower fabric with some of my favorite Photoshopped hexagons. I thought a dress from this fabric might be awesome, but I didn't know how to do repeats and some of my hexies weren't as lined up as I'd like.
I worked my way through a couple of online tutorials, but my dinosaur version of Photoshop (three versions back from the first Creative Suite) isn't 64-bit repeat-friendly.
Drawing upon my seventh-grade art class memories, I figured out a way to build my own repeats manually. And it worked!
This idea initially was inspired by digitally playing with rainbow photo I snapped through my back fence last July.
I got some GREAT snowflake shapes by tinkering with the rainbow photo, but the colors were wrong. So I inverted the image. What a difference!
I made 110 unique hexagons from that one photo (so far), and I used 102 of them in this fabric!
Next came several nights of digital quilting. This fabric image took approximately 20 nights after work to finish. Including days I needed a break and all the cycling training we've been trying to do, this fabric design took nearly two months to finish!
Spoonflower fabric takes a couple of weeks once ordered, then comes pattern-cutting, sewing, hemming, hand-stitching facings and trying on for size.
In the meantime, my Hexie Madness made Spoonflower's Trendy List!!!
Thankfully, sewing the dress once it arrived took only two nights.
The bodice is crafted from leftover fabric with quite the history. About a quarter of a century ago, a co-worker asked me to make plum costumes for her whole family for Halloween. (Her family's business incorporated the name of nearby Plum Creek.) She'd already bought the fabric, using the requirements on the back of the pattern envelope. (The pattern actually was for pumpkins, but the shape could easily be a plum, too, right?) When you're piecing six or eight outfits from a single cut of fabric, you don't need the 14 or so yards you might think, especially if you are a thrifty piecer like me. I think I had 7 yards of fabric leftover!
As a token of her appreciation, my co-worker let me keep the rest of the purple cotton. In reality, this particular co-worker didn't sew or do anything crafty, so she probably was very grateful I was willing to take the extra off her hands!
I used some of the fabric over the years to make clothing, quillows and gifts for my kids and for my nieces and nephews. I still had a ton of that purple leftover.
The bodice and lining of this dress used up another yard. Still about two more yards to go, but I'm getting close to working my way through it.
I used one of the larger hexagons from my first design attempt to break up the mass of solid plum fabric and add visual appeal.
This project turned out so cool, I decided to create another hexagon design, this time, patchwork, with no set color scheme, sort of like the paperweights of the '70s.