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.
Maybe other desi parents will find my fabric too, and be delighted to
find something culturally appropriate for their own children.
And I have such plans for what else I might draw – Indian palaces,
definitely. Elephants and banyan trees. Monkeys, no doubt. Did you
know Spoonflower will let you print wallpaper too? And decals? It
turns out that I can spend even more time daydreaming about images
I might draw as I ever spent reading about someone else’s drawing.
Writing avoidance behavior wins again!
[Photos of fabric and scarf:
http://www.mamohanraj.com/journal/show-entry.php?Entry_ID=8629]