Most of these are designs I created with my own artwork or photographs. I like BIG BOLD designs and they are hard to find in the fabric world so I use Adobe Photoshop or Illustrator to create my own and have them printed by www.raspberrycreekfabrics.com on their lightweight double-brushed poly. They offer a wide variety of fabrics but in recent years I have only used DBP -- every outfit feels like pajamas!
I learned to sew in 1973 when my grandmother paid for my sewing lessons at the Piece Goods shop in town. I sewed off and on throughout my life but since 2016 I have sewn 99% of my wardrobe. After a lifetime of not finding pants in the stores long enough for my legs, taking up sewing again has allowed me to have all the pants I want! And boy oh boy, do I! I usually make pants and a top or cardigan out of the same fabric, sometimes all three so I can mix and match with other pieces.
The custom printed fabric isn't cheap but I like getting exactly what I want. It fulfills yet another creative urge and really makes the outfit totally my own! The fabric and color-fastness holds up great through many many many washes!
I create a 150 ppi Photoshop file that is 56" wide x 36" high (the dimensions of 1 yd of this particular fabric). The file size has to be less than 20 mb to load onto the Raspberry Creek site.
Watercolor Doodle Squares
A sheet of my watercolor doodles that I scanned, chopped into squares and rearranged.
Random Rocks
Created in Illustrator. Inspired by a picture of pebbles.
Pink Blossoms
This is a sketch of tree blossoms I sketched years ago. I scanned it, took it apart, and then rearranged pieces to make a repeating pattern.
Mary Belle's Diary
These are scans from my Grandmother's diary from her marriage to the birth of her first child. It was a little plain with just the text so I put a subtle pattern of one of my other doodles behind it.
("the most adorable baby in the whole world" referred to here is now nearly 95 years old in an Alzheimer facility in California.)
Garden Flowers
These flowers were photographed by a friend in her garden. I borrowed them to make a repeating mosaic.
Individual Watercolor flowers
Each of these simple flowers was painted individually, scanned, and then combined into a repeating pattern.
Fall Leaves
After creating so many multicolored patterns I made three solid color pant-cardigan outfits (olive green, eggplant, and dark teal). So then of course, I hade to make designs to coordinate with them.
Turquoise Marble
On a vacation I saw gorgeous turquoise marble on the side of a building. I took a bunch of photos, cropped squares out of them, and built this design in InDesign, saved it as a PDF and output it to a JPG in Photoshop. I added a bevel edge filter to make the squares look like tile.
Multi Squares
This was created by using the pixel filter in Photoshop on the Watercolor Doodle design from above. After converting it to pixels, I manually changed from of the colors to break up areas that were too much the same.
Spirograph
I loved my Spirograph as a child! I got one about 10 years ago and made some designs that I scanned, arranged, and put a bevel and shadow on.
Bold Watercolor
The original watercolor was a vertical design so I repeated and flipped it in Photoshop to make it 56" wide.
Bright Watercolor Flowers
I painted a sheet of watercolor flower doodles, scanned it, brightened up the colors, and added a dot pattern (made in Illustrator).
Orange
I smeared bright acrylic paints (one was a metallic teal) with a credit card and scanned it. I repeated and flipped the design in Photoshop to make it wide enough. This design does not seamlessly repeat at top and bottom so I had to cut my pattern pieces accordingly to hide the split as much as possible.
Pink Plaid
I made this plaid to match a sweater I crocheted and then also I made a solid dark pink fabric and bought textured white and gold solids from a vendor on Etsy (Milan Fabrics -- nice stuff!) and made a capsule wardrobe for a vacation.
Clouds
Pittsburgh clouds are usually wispy nothings or complete cover but in the summers of 2024 and 2025 we had lots of huge puffy clouds. My phone was full of pictures of them. I turned this sky into fabric.
Gritty City
These are a collection of photos I took of crosswalk paint, rust, and old signage. I used Photoshop to make the collage.
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