Spoon Flower : Design Your Own Fabric (Learning Hospitality, Round 2)

Meaningful Space

Last month, I started trying out new recipes (and inviting others to do the same) for Community Table, the first round of a blog series called Learning Hospitality. [Read why here.]

Then last week, I announced the beginning of Round 2, Meaningful Spaces. In the next four weeks, I’ll be doing something that helps add meaning to my home and I’m inviting you to do the same. [More here] This week, I’m designing my own fabric using Spoonflower.

Bonus: If you share what you do to your house in the comment of this post (or the ones to come), you’ll also be entered to win prizes. Last round, we gave away several hospitality and foodie-related books, two custom aprons and a $72 flower arrangement.

A Long Time Ago in a Life Far, Far Away

Ten plus years ago, I worked in a place (a church) as it designed its first building. There were hallway tiles created by the founding children and mosaics representing broken people coming together in a sacred space. [Here’s an article Leadership Network wrote about it.]

The building blended values into decor. And the result was, well, meaningful.

It probably won’t surprise you then that while working here, I caught the itch to attach meaning to other life spaces. Hence, my husband and I spent a good amount of time personalizing our first house.

But our new place? Not so much. We rolled in the late heat of last summer while I was ridiculously pregnant and on the verge of producing Baby #2.

Believe me, decorating (with or without meaning) was ten miles from my to do list.

Life’s was a little more monotonous than all that: Nurse, change diapers, sleep. Repeat.

But now it’s time to remedy that.

Week 1: Meaningful Spaces from Spoonflower

This week’s project was inspired by a strange source (for me anyways): Project Runway (which I should clarify is about designers not super models). While I haven’t stayed loyal to the series over time, I once spent every episode fascinated by the thinking processes of these more haptic, visually-moved design-types who regularly shed tears over good design.

I was hooked.

I made a mental note to one day try one of their regular challenges: designing their own fabric. During several episodes, the designers would hand draw birds or flowers or some sort of vintage shapes, repeat it across a digital screen and then print it onto yards and yards of unique, custom-made fabric.

I was a little bit spellbound by that.

Today I made good on that notion to follow suit.

Introducing Spoonflower

So here’s my process.

1. I opened up my trusty Photoshop Elements. It’s a scaled down (read: affordable) version of the more professional Photoshop. Sidenote: I haven’t found any design work I can’t do with it.

2. I saved a digital image of a map of our neighborhood (think lakes) and then used Photoshop to isolate and recolor the bodies of water in our area.

3. I saved the image as a .png and uploaded it to Spoonflower.com. From there, things got simple. I had a choice of how big I wanted the size of my map of lakes to be and a choice on how to repeat the pattern. After selecting those options, I ordered an 18×21 piece of custom fabric for $9.45 plus $1.00 shipping.

4. In a couple weeks, I’ll turn that into a living room pillow (pillows, buttons and sock puppets are the current scope of my seamstress abilities).

Pretty fun, huh? So what about it? Want to make your own custom fabric and post about your process in the comments? Or want to try something else (even something as simple as creating a wall or shelf of photos) to add meaning to your space? Come join me and add your idea to the comments of this post and you’ll be entered for the next giveaway.

Lastly, are you on Pinterest? I’m going to start collecting all the Learning Hospitality challenges on my Learning Hospitality board. So feel free to click over and rendezvous there as well.