Sewing with Spoonflower Fabric
It’s been a dream of mine to design my own fabric and then turn that fabric into quilts and clothes.
When I came across a Spoonflower Magazine (Spoonflower is the company the prints fabric, wallpaper, and wrapping paper designed by artists), that offered a free pattern for making baby hats, I was tempted. Then, some friends having babies, further encouraged me to get sewing.
So, I went to work on some tiny designs for baby hat fabric. Now that I am learning to draw digitally on an iPad Pro with Procreate and Apple Pencil, I was able to learn how to make a repeating pattern digitally. So exciting! Fortunately, Spoonflower’s magazine had instructions on how to do this, too! So helpful!
While designing, I decided to make some non-baby fabric patterns for t-shirts for me. 🙂
I have a favorite t-shirt from Uniqlo that has unfortunately shrunk, while I have simultaneously grown larger. In analyzing the garment, I noticed that it was fairly simply constructed and decided that I could try to copy it.
Until now, I have only made dresses from patterns, which some other brilliant sewist designed.
I entered into this project with that feeling of not knowing how much I didn’t know, but as usual I just jump in with fingers crosses.
Below, I show the process of making the hat and a little tale of making the shirt.
All of these fabric designs are printed on organic cotton knit ultra, but you can choose from a variety of fabric choices when you print with Spoonflower.
Also, I prewashed my fabric before sewing.
Check out my Spoonflower shop!
Baby Hats
I then made more in various prints. See them below. Which one is your favorite?
T-shirts
For the t-shirt, I bought two striped cotton jersey fabrics from Joanns, with which to practice.
To make my pattern, I folded my Uniqlo shirt in half length-wise. I traced the permiter of the folded shirt onto pattern paper.
I decided to use 1/2″ seams and also added 2″ to the width and 2″ to the length. So since the pattern represents the shirt folded in half, I added 1 1/2″ to the side, 2″ to the bottom, and 1/2″ to the sleeves, shoulder, and neck.
I cut my pattern twice (one front, one back), and I notched the front pattern to create a slight scoop of a neckline.
I also cut two tiny slivers of patterns for reinforcing the neckline.
After I made the first shirt, I created the remaining three in an assembly line fashion.
The Fashion Show
The Takeaway
Some things that I learned:
- The striped jersey had more stretch to it, making it a little more tricky to sew with.
- Something happened with my neckline that made it too tight to pull over my head. So, I had to take out some stitches and make a custom, notched collar.
- Next time I will order more than a yard of fabric for this project. I did not have enough fabric to allow for the print to line up. For instance, for the eye fabric, I was able to run the eyes horizontal on the front, but I had to align them vertically on the back. You can kind of see this in the photo.