Frog Toile, and some other patterns

In 2021 I got back into making repeating patterns after not having made any since textiles class in college about 4 or 5 years ago.

I like it a lot. I missed doing repeating patterns. I hadn't done any since college mainly because I had no way to edit them, but then I learned about photopea.com and started using that. It's a bit glitchy sometimes (save multiple backup psds!!) but it's free to use and has an offset filter, so it works for my pattern making purposes.

I've been putting all my patterns up on Spoonflower, Redbubble, and MyFabricDesigns.

The first one I did was this monster pattern. I drew 24 little monsters in my sketchbook, using a newer pen for the outlines and a pen that was running out of ink for the texture.

I scanned them and arranged them like this. It's pretty easy to make small motifs repeat - you just put some in the middle of your blank image, use the "offset" filter to make the edges shift around so the middle has moved to the outside, and then you can put more things in the middle and keep doing that until it's all filled in.

I did 9 different colour versions of this one.

The next pattern I did was much bigger. Spoonflower has weekly design contests, and the one at the beginning of last November was "Quirky Amphibians". The prompt spoke of them wearing outfits and doing everyday activities, so of course I had to submit something. I decided to do a toile featuring frogs in 18th century clothing.

I spent a good portion of October working on it. I made a private pinterest board filled with a couple hundred reference images of pond life and 18th century objects, and once I'd done some sketching and decided roughly what the design would be I sketched the full layout at the final size on 6 large sheets of paper. I held them together with some painter's tape on the back while drawing, and switched the pieces around to fill in all the edges so it would repeat.

In order to do ink drawings of them I transferred the lines onto nicer paper. I don't have a light table, so I used a sheet of glass laid across 2 boxes with a light underneath. 

If you're going to do this make sure it's with a light that doesn't get too hot! Incandescent bulbs are not suitable, they'll get way too hot very quickly! 

My makeshift light table.
This is the glass from a picture frame,
but I've since brought home an old window pane that's bigger & stronger.

I traced the drawings lightly in mechanical pencil and inked them with dipping pens.

I hadn't any experience drawing with dipping pens, but I got a cheap beginner's set from Michael's and practiced a bit, and I quite like them. 

Being able to vary the line thickness makes it much closer to the look of engraved printing than I can get with my usual pens.

I did 6 frog scenes.

This one's my favourite. I think the shading and composition turned out really nice, and that the idea of reading bedtime stories to a cradle full of eggs is quite funny.

I filled in the spaces between them with these little clumps of weeds, and there's a crayfish, a giant water beetle, and a few snails in there too.

A few of the frog scenes were a bit too big to fit onto my parents scanner and I had to scan each end and edit them together, which was a bit tricky. When I finally had them all scanned I arranged them all together on a background the same size as the 6 papers I'd done the sketching on (33" x 28" in total).

I took a photo of the 6 papers together and used it as a guide to show me where to place each of the drawings. Sometime in this process I also darkened up the pen lines (they always look a bit washed out when you scan them) and erased all the yellowish paper background.

A bit more than a full repeat of the frog pattern.

I finished it just a few hours before the deadline to enter it in the Spoonflower contest, and it won! (I wish I'd submitted the blue version, but I didn't do the different coloured ones until after, and I'd stayed up all night editing it so was just glad to have it finished.) I did 10 different coloured versions.

Here are my spoonflower samples!

Along with the patterns I also put all the individual frog scenes up on Redbubble.

A little while later I ordered 2 yards of the green on a linen/cotton blend from MyFabricDesigns, which I intend to make into a jacket. 

It's lovely quality and I'm very happy with the colour green that printed but ooghhh, the shipping and duty fees were exceptionally horrible on this one.
I think next time I want some custom printed fabric for me that isn't Spoonflower proofing samples I'll get it from DesignYourFabric, since they're right here in Canada. (Sadly they don't have a public marketplace though. And frustratingly they only take credit card, and I still haven't got one of those. Ugh.)

My lovely green frog toile that was so many dollars to ship.

Overall I'm pretty happy with my frog toile, but I'm excited to someday draw much more dense toiles. With this one I was limited by what I could fit onto the scanner, but I have recently borrowed a drawing tablet and once I get a bit better at digital drawing (and get a better drawing program) I'll be able to make big repeating drawings without being thwarted by the edges of paper.

The next pattern was not one I had planned to do, but multiple people asked for it.

Way back in surface design class when I was first learning how to make things repeat, I practiced with this little dinosaur doodle. It was not meant to be a proper pattern, and I don't think it's very good, but when I found it in my folders and posted it on the dinosaur pages I got a bunch of people asking for it to be real fabric.

Well I certainly wasn't going to put that in my spoonflower & redbubble shops, one dinosaur in the same position repeated endlessly on very repetitive scribbles looks awful, so I made a bigger pattern with the same general style. 

I drew 14 distressed looking dinosaurs in sharpie.

I drew a full page of scribbles with pencil crayon and made it repeat by using the offset filter and copying little chunks to fill in the gaps.

And then put 4 of those scribble repeats together and arranged all my black dinosaurs on it.

I didn't much like the way it looked with most of the colours I tried, so only ended up doing 3 versions of this one. Red scribbles, grey scribbles, rainbow scribbles, and a purple watercolour & coarse salt texture I made back in college. 

I might try some more someday, after I make more repeating textures. 

My spoonflower samples.

And finally, I made a hygienic bathroom dinosaur pattern. I mean to eventually do some more domestic dinosaur patterns, but I had hand washing on my mind at the time, so started with this one.

I sketched out the design on paper first, just like the frog toile, and used a photo of it as a guide. Drawing over these digitally took so long, because I hadn't borrowed a tablet yet and had to do it all on a trackpad with my finger.

But finally it was done! I wish I'd made it a half drop, I don't like how square things look when the repeat is small.

I put a big and a small version on Spoonflower, and no other colour variations. Multiple people have bought it in shower curtain for off Redbubble!

My spoonflower samples.

In one of my sample orders I threw in my bird print from 2017 fairly last minute. This was one I did for a 3 colour screenprinting assignment and I still have all the files, so I added some colour and texture, and a plainer version with just the outlines.

I did a fall, a winter, and a nighttime version. (I tried a summery one with green blobs, but it looked horrible because the lineart is of bare trees.)

I added my other old repeating patterns too. I'm not thrilled with all of them, but they're ok. After my samples came I changed the colour and scale of a few of them.

My older monster drawing style has changed a bit since these.

The bismuth one is definitely the best of the ones I did for this assignment! I drew all those lines with pen!!

Here it is with an actual piece of bismuth.

Phew, now I'm finally caught up on 2021 blogging! It was perhaps a foolish idea to wait to do my year in review post until after I'd caught up, because I'm a terrible procrastinator and it's now mid February.

Hand Sewn 18th Century Shirt

 I'm almost caught up on 2021 blogging! I wrote that sentence a few weeks ago and this post is still saved in drafts and now it's February, alas.

I made this shirt around the end of last summer.

It's made of white featherlight linen from Pure Linen Envy. I only had 158 cm, so it's a bit shorter than I would have made it otherwise.

After all the shirts I've made over the years I thought I finally had the construction down pretty good, but no! It turns out I'd been doing the gathers wrong all this time. I was looking at some closeup pictures of an extant shirt shortly after I started this one and I noticed that the gathers were sewn from the outside using a whipstitch, with one stitch going through each gather.

I tried it and found it was so much easier getting them even and neat. No wonder mine always looked awful when I backstitched them from the inside like a normal seam.

I did the gathers like this for the collar, sleeve heads, and cuffs.

The rest of the construction is mainly the same as described in my shirt construction post, aside from the fact that it's all done by hand. Originally I had intended to do some seams by machine, but I was so happy about the gathers that I just kept on hand sewing.

The front slit reinforcement.

It's all sewed with fine linen thread from Burnley & Trowbridge.

Because the fabric was so fine I was able to get quite narrow seams.

Half a centimetre! Not the tiniest ever, but not bad.

Attaching the cuff.

Hemming the open bit at the side.

Sewing on the reinforcement gusset,
which I'd basted in place.

I usually use DMC cotton pearl for buttonholes, but for this one I remembered I had some vintage crochet cotton, so I tried using some of that instead. It snapped at one point, but seemed to be in mostly good condition and fairly strong.

I did Dorset knob buttons. I still wasn't sure if I was doing them "correctly", since all I had to go on the first time I made them was a diagram of the stitching with no information on the base. There still isn't much information on the internet about them, but I looked again and found a picture of the underside of one where a horn base is clearly visible. It looks like it's covered a bit differently, but I like mine better because the fabric goes all the way around. I describe how I made mine in more detail in this post. 
(The extant one linked above has a spiderweb pattern of threads, but I've also seen ones with detached buttonhole stitches like the ones I'm making.)

I'm using small bone moulds and linen thread from Burnley & Trowbridge, and tiny scraps of my linen fabric.

Aside from it being slightly shorter than ideal, I'm quite happy with this shirt! It fits well and is very soft and comfortable.

I wrote down the dimensions of each piece as I cut it out, and the pattern pieces are as follows:

Body - 75 x 158 cm (would have been at least 180 cm long if I'd had more fabric)

Sleeves - 60.5 x 60.5 cm

Collar - 43 x 14 cm

Armhole binding - 44 x 3.5 cm

Underarm gussets - 13 x 13 cm

Cuffs - 19 x 5 cm

Shoulder strips - 21 x 3 cm

Neck gussets - 8 x 8 cm

Hem gussets - 5 x 5 cm

I left 16 cm closed at the shoulders when I cut the T shaped opening, and the slit down the front is 25 cm long.

Here it is with a pair of the sleeve links from my sleeve link video.

This is the only thing I entered in the Historical Sew Monthly challenge last year.

What the item is: A man’s shirt

The Challenge: Zero Waste. The pattern is all squares and rectangles, so there were only a few small geometric scraps, which I saved and can use for any number of things.

My thread clippings and teeny tiny scraps and trimmings were also set aside for my parents, who have a fireplace and can use them as kindling. (I keep a paper bag near my sewing area and put all my useless tiny cotton and linen scraps in it.)

Fabric: White "featherlight” linen from Pure Linen Envy

Pattern: More or less the same set of dimensions I use for all my shirts. Exact measurements are written above.

Year: It’s so plain and basic and shirts change so little for most of the 18th century that I think it could work from at least the 1710’s-70’s. If I were to add ruffles the width and placement of them would narrow the date down considerably.

Notions: Linen thread, vintage crochet cotton for the buttonholes, two small bone button blanks.

How historically accurate is it? The most accurate shirt I’ve ever made! It’s completely hand sewn, and I’ve learned a lot of new things since I last did one all by hand. Just a few tiny nitpicks - I didn’t do a laundry mark on the corner, and I’m not sure if I did the Dorset knob buttons correctly. It also came out a bit short because of the aforementioned smallish amount of fabric. It was the end of the bolt.

Hours to complete: I neglected to track the time for this one, but based on previous shirts I’m guessing 40-something.

First worn: September 6th, 2021

Total cost: About $25 (Canadian)

Ok, I think that's all the 2021 garments blogged! With the exception of two leafkerchiefs which are going to be in a video tutorial so won't be blogged about until I finish filming and editing that.