Soaring into Spring with Spoonflower (I designed my own fabric!)

Ahoy me hearties!

I am so sew SO ridiculously excited to share this make – not only is it Spring and hot and finally cotton dress time and I’ve made one of my favourite dress patterns, By Hand London’s Kim, but also I DESIGNED THE FABRIC! I am over the moon to get a chance to collaborate with the legendary Spoonflower to see my own fabric design come to life!

Spoonflower are an amazing company who allow you to print your own fabric design onto a variety of wonderful high quality fabrics. They also have a huge range of 1000s of predesigned prints in their marketplace which are a joy to look through but when they asked if I wanted to work with their fabrics I jumped at the chance of designing my own as it’s something I’ve always wanted to do, well since I started dressmaking of course!

I started out by deciding I wanted to make a lovely spring dress – the sort you wear for a picnic or a sunny outing – I haven’t made one of them for a while and always really enjoy the process and wearing of them! Once I had that in mind I spent a good week brainstorming ideas for fabric designs and I actually found this a lot harder than I thought – I had many blank mind moments as I couldn’t work out what was really ‘me’ and unlike any fabric I’ve seen before. I would be sitting at my computer looking for inspiration online – pinterest mainly, in my bay window area in my crowded sitting room thinking ‘what do I want on a dress? and after a few sessions of pinning this and that and making moodboards I wasn’t happy with the ideas – they didn’t feel like my ideas, they were someone elses and it wasn’t personal to me. So I sat back and looked up… EUREKA! I had it! Hanging from the ceiling of our sitting room are 12 hot air balloons that my husband and I made entirely from scratch for our wedding two years ago… that was it – I wanted a hot air balloon dress!

Our (hubby &I) obsession with hot air balloons is a multi faceted one – it goes from being a love we shared in common to my surprise present for our first anniversary – a trip in one! It was also in a balloon shaped box that my engagement ring (or red piece of wool – long story see here!) was presented to me in! We made one up for each of the tables at our wedding and now they hang above us in all their bright colours and we both love them to bits! So this now felt like an obvious choice, a sort of ‘durr Gabby why didn’t you think of this before’ one!

I started sketching and realised for the hundredth time in my life that I am the most appalling artist – it will always upset me that I have absolutely no talent for drawing, especially as my mum and sister are amazing artists! Anyway it was clear to me that if I wanted my dream fabric it was not going to be drawn by my fair hand! I knew exactly the woman for the job though – enter Sarah Hughes!

Sarah is an incredible illustrator and I am lucky enough to work with her on several things including the lovely Stitcher’s Brew Podcast logo that I designed roughly in photoshop, handed it to her and she turned into a beautiful illustrated version that Megan and I love so I knew she would be perfect to help me with this. I sent her a couple of photos of the hot air balloons we made and asked her for a few illustrated versions left blank for me to colour in. A few hours later she sent me back these gorgeous illustrations and threw in some clouds, because that’s the kind of lovely, talented person she is!

So now I had my illustrations – I opened them in photoshop and started to add some colour to them! I had just been given an adorable birthday card with lots of party balloons on and they were all red apart from one blue and I really loved the idea of making all the hot air balloons the same apart from the odd random one. The colour choice was easy for me – my favourite colours blue and yellow had to be the main striped balloon and the classic red and white as the contrast. I spent a while trying to get the right shade but when I was happy they looked so good together. Then the basket and hanging bags colours probably took the most time as I just couldn’t decide! I kept it neutral as to not take away the focus of the balloons and coloured them all in using masking tools and paint bucket in photoshop.

Then I watched this tutorial from Spoonflower on how to create a seamless repeat print – which is so helpful and there are lots more tutorials here for other programs too.

I decided on a non directional print so that I didn’t need yards and yards of fabric for my dress and went about duplicating and spacing apart my hot air balloons in a square document, still in photoshop. I then rotated them all differently, added the clouds and rotated some of them too, filled in a sky blue background and ended up with this…

I uploaded this onto the Spoonflower website and straight away didn’t like the background colour – it was too ‘cutesy’ for me and I know there are giant hot air balloons but I still wanted this fabric to seem slightly sophisticated! I played around with all sorts of backgrounds – yellows, navy, green and then fell upon this cloudy grey blue that felt completely right – the balloon colours popped against it and it was a colour I wanted to wear. I also spent more time moving around the balloons so the repeat looked right and then hey presto I had my design and I completely loved it!

Next I had to choose the fabric and this was another hard decision as the swatch pack Spoonflower sent me was full of beautiful fabrics – I realised I had to settle on a dress pattern before I made my mind up so off to search through the patterns on The Fold Line I went. I love looking through patterns but I wasn’t feeling inspired and I quickly came to the conclusion that I wanted to use this fabric for something I already know I will love – it has to be something I have made before and want to make again… lightning bolt moment … the Kim Dress from By Hand London is the perfect choice! I have made it twice and LOVE it – it fits me great (out the packet – wooh!) and is perfect for this fabric – YAY!

With the pattern decided it really helped me narrow down the fabric choice to a medium weight woven and I fell for the Kona Cotton Ultra as it was the perfect weight for Kim! A few days later (they were super quick!) the fabric arrived and made me SO happy! I love the oversize print and the colours look amazing!

I reserved myself a sewing day and whipped up the Kim dress in a few hours. I found some red and white polka dot cotton in my stash that was the perfect match for the lining and added pockets. I also added some extra length to gather to make it a really full skirt and I am overjoyed with how it’s all turned out! I really took my time over every aspect from the cutting out to hand sewing in the lining hem as I really wanted to do the fabric justice and make the dress look as professional as possible.

I was all ready for rain when I was getting ready for this photoshoot in the middle of a dog walk with my wonderful husband behind the camera but the sun came out and I was squinting too much so even though I had done my eye makeup the shades had to come out! This is also the first shoot with my new hair colour and I do wonder how the dress would have looked with my former bright blue hair but I’m relieved it suits the brunette!

I did try to pattern match the bodice as much as I could so at least there was no overlapping of the balloons and I knew I wanted the red and white right in the middle front. The Kim bodice is princess seamed so it gives you lots of opportunities to play with the print and I took full advantage of that!

I am seriously proud of this make and I think I will not only wear this to everything this summer but will definitely be hoping to design more fabric in the future!

Huge thankyou to Spoonflower for asking me to be part of their Spring blog roundup – it really made me get creative and take time to think it all through so that I did the best job possible, and that’s quite unlike me – I’m normally an impatient do-er but I really loved stepping away from that and taking my time to make something I am really proud of.

I hope you all get inspired to try something new and maybe even get designing your own fabric too!

Hugs and balloons