How to Design and Print Your Own Scarf, Starting from Zero

It all started with reading Heather Ross’s textile arts blog.

[http://heatherross.squarespace.com/journal/]

See, as a writer, you have to constantly find new ways to avoid writing, and for me, crafting has always been a reliable method. Or even better, reading about crafting, because that counts as research, see? And then you don’t have to do any actual work.

Now normally I’d be perfectly happy to just read Heather talking

about drawing her gorgeous designs for children’s fabric, and look at

the pretty pictures, and perhaps occasionally buy some fabric,

thinking that oh, someday, I will make a skirt out of this for my

daughter. This is the sort of thing I would do even before I had a daughter.

And now that I do have one, and some of Heather’s fabric sits on a

shelf in my basement, that might be the end of that. You can go quite

a long time on the pleasure of the lovely skirt that you’re going to

sew, some day, especially if your sewing skills are basically non-

existent.

But then I hit a roadblock. Or rather, Heather did.

She became enmeshed in a discussion that erupted in the fabric world

about diversity and representation, about the paucity of children of

color in children’s fabric. I don’t want to recap that discussion here,

although if you’re interested, you might follow this link

[http://www.trueup.net/2011/q-a/fabric-and-diversity/] or that one

[http://heatherross.squarespace.com/journal/hitting-pavement.html].

My own position is that while it makes me sad that I don’t see my

brown Sri Lankan-American self in fabric, and even sadder that my

young mixed-race daughter doesn’t see herself either, that I don’t

think it’s necessarily Heather’s responsibility to put us there. Her

work is often autobiographical, with a fairy tale flavor, and if that’s

what inspires her, she gets to do that.

But still – the lack of such fabric made me wish I could draw. I can’t.

Or rather, I thought I couldn’t. But Heather frequently encouraged

her readers to try drawing, and one day, I went to the art store and

picked up colored pencils and good paper (it turns out that the art

store is another great writing-avoidance technique), and I tried

sketching a few things.

One thing led to another, and I was surprised to find that I could, with

some careful copying and much erasing, draw a quite respectable

little moon moth. The Indian moon moth is found in Sri Lanka as well.

I added the word ‘nilavu,’ which means moon in Tamil (the language

my family speaks, though one I have mostly forgotten since

emigrating to the U.S. at age two). I was surprisingly happy with the

result.

Now I might have done nothing more with that sketch, if it weren’t for

Spoonflower. Do you know about the wonders of Spoonflower? It’s

astonishing. You can scan in a sketch, or a photograph, or draw

something on-screen. Then you upload your finished artwork to

Spoonflower –wait, this is the magic part – and they will print your art

on fabric! At first there were just a few fabric options, but there are

lots now. And yes, the price per yard is not cheap. That’s what

happens when it’s being printed one-off, custom, just for you. But

having this option available to us at all is frankly wondrous.

Sometime in 2011, I drew my moon moth and scanned it and uploaded

it to Spoonflower as a test fabric.

[http://www.spoonflower.com/fabric/151504]

And then promptly forgot all about it. I stopped back in a year later, looking for

something else entirely, and discovered someone had sent me a

message saying they wanted to buy a yard of it. I was so flattered! I

made it available for purchase, and if anyone buys it, I actually get a

tiny royalty as a designer. A designer, me!

Now, the print isn’t perfect. The colored pencils were very pale, and I

didn’t color the background at all, so it’s just white. But nonetheless,

I liked the result, and I guess at least one other person did too.

Perhaps they were as frustrated with the lack of desi (South Asian)

kids’ fabric as I was? I immediately ordered Heather Ross’s book on

making fabric (and things with fabric). I devoured it cover to cover

when it arrived, and then promptly forgot about it on a shelf for the

next two years. Because, as I said, all of this was avoidance behavior

for writing (and for my day job as an English teacher), and eventually,

all that avoidance catches up with you and you have to actually do

some work.

But here we are, two years later. My semester just ended, and last

week I wandered onto Spoonflower again and thought, ‘hey – I should

do something with that fabric.’

It definitely helped that the previous winter, I’d signed up for my local

park district’s Intro to Sewing class – four two-hour sessions, $60

total, had actually gotten me comfortable with threading my long-

dusty sewing machine, and in the course of the four-week class, we’d

made four items – a tissue holder, a lunch sack, a gathered cowl, and

finally, two cushions for the kids’ playroom. I found a few yards of

totally awesome elephant and monkey fabric (very much the kind of

fabric I’d like to draw) on an online remnant site and sewed my

cushions. I was madly in love with the end result and feeling far more

confident in my sewing skills.

[http://www.mamohanraj.com/Pics/s.animalpillows1.jpg]

So I ordered a yard of my fabric. Now, here, I made a terrible

mistake. Two of them, in fact. First, I didn’t pay any attention to the

scale of the print – Spoonflower lets you offer your image in various

sizes, and I just bought the default size, which is quite a large image

on the fabric. I’d imagined lots of tiny little moths on what might have

made a charming skirt for my now seven-year-old daughter, but

instead, I got a few big moths, and that just looked kind of scary. I

didn’t want to give her nightmares. Mistake number two was just

guessing that ‘silky faille’ was the kind of fabric I wanted – it turned

out to be a slightly heavy polyester, which I’m sure is good for

something, but wasn’t what I wanted at all. By this point I had given

up on the slightly ambitious skirt and was envisioning a scarf, a light

little cotton thing, suitable for summer. Back to the website.

I discovered – too late – that Spoonflower actually offers, for a measly

$1, a little sample pack with all their fabric. I strongly recommend

you buy this first; it is lovely, cheap, and super helpful. It turned out

that what I wanted was the cotton voile – I changed the size of the

repeat to something a little smaller, and ordered again. $21.60 was a

lot for a scarf – but I was crossing my fingers that I could actually get

two light summer scarves out of a single fat quarter of fabric. About

$12 per scarf seemed much more reasonable. [Definition of fat quarter: http://quilting.about.com/od/stepbystepquilting/ss/fat_quarters.htm]

And in fact, it worked out perfectly. The fabric came. I pre-washed it

(with a load of laundry) and ironed it dutifully (as my sewing

instructor had insisted one do for decent results). And then I tore it in

half (making a slight cut first), width-wise. Always a bit nerve-

wracking, but it worked just fine. Literally ten minutes with my

sewing machine, double-folding the edges (my teacher would have

told me to iron them down first, but I didn’t bother), and sewing them

down with creamy white thread, gave me a finished scarf! Triumph!

I gave that scarf to my sister, whom I hope will like it as much as I do.

I’m going to keep the other for myself, and possibly stop by the fabric

store to get a bit of trim to add at the ends. I’m thinking something

dark green, with bobbles. I’m going to print the fabric again, with an

even smaller repeat, and try sewing a simple dress for my little girl.