Pattern Repeat Experiment

Its not quite sketching, but its definitely more like drawing than sewing on the blog today.

I'm foolin' around trying to learn the seamless pattern repeat on the computer. I want my spoonflower fabrics to look lovely tiled, rather than "nice enough" when I manually tile a fat quarter's amount.

I told you about the "cut out" feature on Photoshop. Love that feature. I applied the cutout filter to a rose photograph.


I had to clean up some of the extra colors around the background, so all my edges would be pink. Then I changed the hue/saturation to make the whole thing peachy and not pink at all. I set up a new file in photoshop and added some guidelines to the image. Once I clicked the "snap", the image lined up at all the guideline intersections.

I was able to crop the image (originally 5 roses) into this picture above. I highlighted the whole thing and clicked Edit->Define Pattern. I opened a new image and use the paintbucket fill-with-pattern feature to fill the whole new image.


After a scalloped border overlay, a couple white rectangles and a grey fold line- I've got this little matronly 5x7 card. If you click on the card, you'll get the downloadable pdf printable version of the card. I haven't yet figured out how to get the "crop" marks onto the pdf, so if you actually print this, you'll have to use the paper trimmer around the rose printed corner first, then measure out the 7" one direction and 10" the other direction.

So that was my big practice test and that is how I did it. I'm sure there are many many other, better resources out there- but I thought I'd share.

Now I'm off to go make something a little less rosy.

Pattern Repeat Experiment