The Best Girls Project

After the success of my first whack at fabric design I started feeling a bit more confident about the process and wanted to do more. I don’t remember what gave me the idea but I decided to do a line of border print fabrics inspired by my best girlfriends.

The goal for this project is to challenge myself and my design skills by creating fabric based on the personality of the person who the fabric design is inspired by. I started this project by sending out a short questionnaire so that I would have something to inspire and point me in a direction.

#1 What is your absolute favorite color?
#2 What secondary colors do you adore?
#3 Are you a flower kind of girl or do you lean more toward shapes and patterns?
#4 Do you prefer the vintage look or modern look?
#5 You have a piece of clothing made from this uniquely you fabric; what activity do you see yourself doing while wearing it?

I loved the answers that I got to these questions, especially the last one! These answers were the only thing other than my view of each of my girlfriends involved in the project.

For these designs I did all of my sketches by hand and then scanned them after outlining the sketch with a Sharpie. I them placed the image in Illustrator and added color, pulled out portions of the design to repeat in the pattern, and resized the images in this program.

I have the first four designs completed and up for sale on spoonflower; below you will find images and a brief description of each.

This design is called “Bettilicious”. The colors are more true to the top image from the spoonflower website. For some reason my camera just doesn’t like this color combination and I was unable to tone it down as much as I would have like in photoshop. My friend Betty prefers reds and flowery prints that aren’t to girly or fussy. I wanted something vaguely sensual about her fabric and I feel like I pulled it off well. Betty absolutely loves this and that is the real test.

I created this fabric for my friend Robin. “Robintastic” was to be flowery, with purples, greens, and blues, and more vintage than modern. Robin was very happy with this design and I really like it as well.

“Aliciarific” is designed for my friend Alicia. This one actually took me quite a long time to figure out. She is a gal with very specific tastes and although I feel that I know what she would like I was very unsure of this until she saw it. I will be helping her make a skirt of this fabric before the end of the summer as she is absolutely adores this design.

This design was by far the most challenging for me. “Mogasmic” was created with my friend Molasses in mind and although we have been friends for close to two years now, I have never actually met her in person. I met her through my friend Betty on facebook (we enjoyed each others obnoxious commentary on Betty’s page and eventually friended each other). Of all my friends Mo and I have the most differing tastes by far. I really don’t like the design very much but because these fabrics are not about me and I had challenged myself to capture my friends personalities in the designs I knew I had to show it to her before deciding to scrap it and start over or not. I couldn’t have been more surprised by how excited she was and how much she loves it.!

I still have four or five more designs in this series to do and as soon as I have finished the designs and am able to order the sample swatches to proof them I will post with the rest of them. Until then you can still see all of my designs for sale and those that are in the my public gallery but not yet for sale on my designs page at spoonflower.

My First Fabric Design

My newest adventure in design is fabric design. I have a very strong interest in doing this professionally some day! I love to sew but often get ideas for a dress or skirt I would like to make in my head and the walk into the fabric store and end up completely dismayed at the fact that no one has ever created the fabric that I envisioned for the project, which is why I am so enthused about this process.

My good friend Alicia told me about a website that allows you to upload your fabric designs and will print them for you as well as sell your fabrics to the public if you wish to do that. It took me a while to work up the guts to give it a try but not I am addicted to this pastime!

You might recognize this design if you have poked around my blog at all. This was originally an assignment for a digital design class that I took but when I did it I filed it away in the back of my mind as something that I might like to see on fabric. This is a birder print design that would be used for things such as dresses and skirts, or even drapes. I currently have four yards of this sitting on my desk just waiting to be turned into the beautiful sundress that I am crocheting a matching bolero sweater to match.

I will update this post when the dress is complete!

 

 

You can view and order all of my designs at the spoonflower website by searching for katie_cahill or following this link  to my design page.

Bad Cahill’s Barbershop Display

I made this display case for my husband back when I was taking Concept Development. We did a lot of packaging design but this was the final project and the only one of our projects that we were able to build.

He needed a display case for the product that he carries in his tiny little barbershop that would not take up too much counter space as his is very limited. He use to carry a different product line and still had their display but it was far too deep and still had the old product logos on it.

This was actually a very unique experience for a class project because I had a real client to work with, granted he is my husband and more than willing to give me artistic license (he actually prefers it that way), but I did get to work with an actual human being with specific design requirements.

Bad Cahill’s Barbershop is a small one man operation that really focuses on an “old school” feeling. It is a man’s kind of place. My husband wanted a display that was in keeping with the look and feel of his shop but practical.

One lesson that I learned with this project is that you absolutely get what you pay for when you purchase foam-core board at the Dollar Tree. I had to take this apart halfway through and repair/rework my design because the poster-board coating on the foam-core bubbled and warped after being painted and glued. I did manage to work around it and used what bubbling that I couldn’t get rid of to my advantage in creating a faux wood grain on that portion of the display.

The top part of this display is made from balsa wood and was carved by me with my Dremel tool (lesson #2 of this project: Balsa wood dust if very fine and blows up under the lenses of ill-fitting eye protection. It also makes a sort of wood putty when combined with the moisture in one’s nose).

This was all painted with acrylic craft paint and I also used Mod Podge as a topcoat/finish. The balsa wood portion has a crackle medium applied to it in order to give the display an antique look.

It is hard to notice in these photos (they were taken by my husband with is cell phone camera in his barbershop) but the inside of this display does have LED lights installed to showcase the product.

One of my husband/client’s biggest requirements for this project was that he be able to change product without needing a new display. He does not like dealing with the beauty supply reps and they really don’t want to bother with him because he does not move the amount or kind of product that they want that is beneficial to a long-term distributer/barbershop relationship.

I focused the display design on the barbershop itself and then made a little panel in the front where he can print up and slide in a new product/price list whenever he needs to. My client was very happy with my work and is still using the display over a year after its completion and he still gets compliments on it and his “clever little wife”.

Playing in Photoshop

The first thing that I did when I got my software package from school was bust out a box of old family photos and try my hand and learning my way around Photoshop. These are my first attempts at photo restoration and although they aren’t excellent quality restorations, they are not bad for a first time user.

These were all done back in December of 2009. My skills in Photoshop have improved considerably and I am very excited to start my Digital Image Manipulation class in July so that I can learn even more about the tools available and techniques that I might use to achieve some of the high-end cool Photoshop work that I have seen.

This is a photo of my grandma (my mom’s mom) with one of my uncles. The biggest issue with this one was just the fact that it is very dirty. There wasn’t a lot to do here.

The next photo is of my mom when she was about six years old. She was all dressed up for some sort of Christmas program at school and I believe she was a snowflake or something like that. This is a negative and is on very flimsy paper that has quite a bit of age related damage. There is a spot on the face that I wasn’t able to fix very well but it did turn out OK. My mom had me print this so she could frame it for my grandma for Christmas that year.

This last photo is of my great-great grandfather (my grandma’s grandfather on her mother’s side… he is the handsome fellow on the left). As you can see in the before image, this is a very badly damaged photo. I did my best with this one but there were a couple of places that I just could fix with the stamp tool. All in all it does look much better.

Really Old Photo Play

These are some very old images that I created using Microsoft Publisher long before I ever dreamed of going to school for graphic design or took my art seriously in any way. I would have to say that these are at least five years old, some of them older. Now that I use the Adobe Creative Suite to do things like this I can hardly believe that I was able to do as much as I managed to do in Publisher.

Some of these are from a project that I did for Christmas and some were just playing around to see what I could do. I guess after so many years of only having Publisher and Paint to work in I was bound to pick up some nifty tricks along the way.

"Barbershop Solo" published in Alter Bits Mixed Media Art Zine

This is the piece that I mentioned to you all a while back in my “Chicken Whisperer” post. I am very excited to be sharing it with you now because I love it and have been waiting on pins and needles to show it off but mostly because this means that my very dear friend  Alicia Caudle of Altered Bits has finished the very first print version of her Altered Bits Mixed Media Art Zine  and it is now available for purchase.

I would like to first thank Alicia for all of her hard work (100+ hours!) and dedication in getting this zine to print. She worked with 21 artists and painstakingly designed each page in an effort to honor the work of each contributor in a way that only Alicia knows how. Awesome work lady, I am super proud of you!

I would also like to thank this great lady for giving me the amazing opportunity to have a piece of my work published and for always believing in me, even and especially when I don’t believe in myself! It is so wonderful to have people in your life who lovingly push you to do more than you think you can do because they know you are capable.

The piece that was selected to go in the zine (in the letters and symbols theme section) is titled “Barbershop Solo”.   I made this as a birthday gift for my husband and it currently lives on the wall in his barbershop. Obviously, he and his profession were the inspiration for this piece. This is mixed media on canvas and the texture was created in the same method used in my “Chicken Whisperer” piece.

I hope you all enjoy this as much as my husband does and I also hope you all check out the Altered Bits Mixed Media Art Zine! You can purchase a copy in print or digital.