Heather Ross Fabric Design Workshop in NYC
The weekend before last I flew to New York City (for the second time ever) for a Photoshop for Fabric Design Workshop with Heather Ross. That Heather. She is just amazing. I'd read about the first fabric design workshop she taught in Portland a couple years ago and thought it would be so SO cool, but honestly felt a bit intimidated by the whole Photoshop thing. I'd been messing around with design software for about 5 years with my own set of paltry self-taught skills, but was using the cheapest software I could find just to try it out (specifically Inkscape, which is vector-based, basically a poor man's Illustrator. Also happens to be free). I finally bit the bullet and bought the Adobe Suite last spring and opened up Illustrator a few times but Photoshop scared the pants off me. It's just not really that intuitive.
I was really excited to discover how fun and easy it is to use Photoshop for fabric design. Heather is really a fantastic teacher; she really breaks it down into simple steps, and between her and our Photoshop whiz/assistant Ava (pictured above with me and Heather), we all managed to put together some really cool designs.
This is Aimee with her awesome hedgehog/woodsy design. Aimee is awesome. She lives in Wisconsin and bought the house next door to hers so she could turn it into her very own crafting studio. JEALOUS!
This is Sarah of Bluprint Textiles (who blogged here about the workshop here here and here). It was so much fun to hang out with fellow fabric lovers and chit chat.And a bunch of other workshoppers, hard at work...
The good news is that even if you can't ever make it to New York for one of her workshops (there's another one coming up in November though!!), she's written an entire section in her new book that breaks it down, nice and simple, for you as well. I am still no Photoshop expert, but I now know enough to turn a sketch into a repeating design, which is cool. I really want to show my finished design to you. But then I sortof want to wait and make a whole set of coordinating prints and razzle-dazzle your pants off. We'll see.
The workshop was held at Tekserve which in addition to having a Mac Lab where we could work on our designs, was full of all kinds of fun old tech stuff from days gone by:
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[miniflickr photoset_id=72157629638905158&sortby=date-posted-asc&per_page=7]On Saturday some of us took a field trip over to the New York Public Library, where Jessica, the assistant curator in the Rare Books division gave us a primer on the digital archive and brought out a few really neat old books for us to ooh and ah over. Loved the old fashion books:
and the book of endpapers was really inspiring in terms of graphic designs.
Of course I had to make a stop at Purl...
Saturday night I ended my visit in Brooklyn with a lovely dinner with my cousin Shawn and his wife Lisa and their adorable baby and a surprise guest who happened to be Shawn's brother Joel who was in NYC for a conference. Fun family reunion!! Of course the trip was far too short...but that just means I'll have to come back again soon! Right?