Another new (old) fabric design

 Spoonflower is having a contest for black and white designs, entry deadline May 3. I made this on April 21.

I was looking at my designs wondering which would be good in black & white. I wanted a bold graphic, one without too much expanse of black background, since blacks at Spoonflower don't print really dark, and may fade in the wash.

I wanted a variation in the texture, the size of the black and white areas.

Which ones would do? The ravens? The cat drawings? The new sea turtles virtual batiks? A quilt-style combination of all of them? Hmm, that's earth, air and water, just need fire...

Although this one was drawn as leaves, long ago when I was learning to draw by playing on the computer, once I had redrawn it as a vector drawing, with a black background, it looked like stylized flames too.

I may do those others in black & white too as companion fabrics, but I love the bold graphic effect of this one. And yet it's organic, not quite symmetrical. I would buy this in the fabric store.

And now that I've redrawn it, I can do it in lots of colors, with companion fabrics in those colors.

Of course the newest design one has made is always the most wonderful design in the world....

Global Warming T-shirt

This is my new design at my Cafepress shop, WRW Color by Design. I thought of the idea when I was wondering about buying a cute little batik stamp with a sun design on it, but at first I didn't think I'd use a worried sun. (Batik stamps are amazing — every expression you can imagine is on a sun face.) And then I thought, "What would a sun be worried about?"

This is a drawing rather than using a scan of the actual copper tjap, like I've done before. I did it in a brighter yellow and orange color, which works on white tees too, and light colors like the organic tee. But I like the lighter color too, which looks more like batik on the darker tees, like this green.


Long ago I was an Oceanography major. The idea of a few degrees warmer temperatures in the oceans sounds minimal and is catastrophic. Plankton, which are the basis of most food chains in the sea, live at specific temperatures. They can't migrate.

Warmer water holds less oxygen for fish & invertebrates to use. Stopping the sinking of cold, oxygen-rich water around Antarctica doesn't just mean stopping the climate conveyor belt that warms Europe. It means those deep seafloor waters have less oxygen. And it stops the upwelling of cold nutrient-rich water off South America that used to support major fisheries. Fisheries are already crashing all over the world, mostly from overfishing.* This won't help.

*And penguins are starving both from lack of fish due to overfishing (in the Falklands), and from icebergs blocking their path to the sea (in Antarctica). Warmer seas mean more icebergs breaking off. And nutrient-poor water means less plankton and even fewer fish.

No wonder the sun is worried.

The fatal law of gravity

When you're down, everything falls on you.

Val & Cleofatra & 2006

Here's Valentine in happier days looking at Cleofatra. (The background was an ancient concrete wall in the basement.) We lost Cleo (aka "Yo Fatso") early in the year. She was almost 16.

She and her sibs were born on my bed. Waking up in the morning to squeaking down by my feet! Beautiful kittens. Their mother was Kate, who had been abandoned half-grown at a local park. We were there the last weekend of the season. She spent the evening going around to the campfires and sitting on laps. I was going to take her home and try to get her adopted. But by the time I got to the truck, holding her, she had a name.

I kept 2 of the kittens, Ariel and Miranda. Miranda used to sit outside the window and toss her head in an imperious way, asking to come in. She looked like an Egyptian cat. So she became Cleopatra Miranda. When the kittens got old enough, I locked them inside until I could get each of them fixed. She instantly became fat, and I thought "Too late". But it was just inactivity. By the time I figured out she wasn't pregnant, she was going into heat every other week. By the time she could finally go out, she was permanently fat and timid from being kept in so long. (Cleofatra was a Garfield joke.)

When she started losing weight, I didn't think of it as something wrong — she seemed healthier, and happy. But then she got very skinny. The vet didn't figure out what was really wrong, she just went down very suddenly at the end.

Then last summer Cheesecake lost a lot of weight — I could feel all his vertebrae, although with all that long fur he didn't look too different. I started giving him canned cat food, and he picked up again. Just a week or so ago I noticed he seemed all recovered. No backbone knobs. Thick pretty fur. Happy and healthy. Sleeping on the bed and kneading the covers and purring at my face, like when he and Miranda and Ariel and Fussy were kittens, having a purring fest.

When Valentine, who was young, started losing weight, I thought for too long that it could be fixed with better food. Now, just a week after losing her, Cheesecake is suddenly very sick.*

2:20 AM Jan 1, 2007 The coyotes are howling in the orchard. Happy New Year.


*I think Cheesecake had an early dose of that poisonous cat-food ingredient from China, before the news was out. Luckily he survived, but he was never as healthy again.

Baby Sea Turtles virtual batik

This is a new design I just finished. Virtual batik, which I think I invented, is based on a real copper batik stamp. I scan it, in a darkened room with the cover up, to get a dark background. Then it goes into Photoshop for some playing with color to get nice bright light colors, that will shine against a dark background, like real batik. In this case, the design is meant for the new dark colored tees that Cafepress has just added. Some colors, like this one, look brighter on the web than they will in print. Others, like the gold, proof pretty bright, so they might print that way on tees too.

It was only while I was working on this, making about a dozen colors, that I realized how appropriate it is for a crawling age baby. But of course any sea turtle friend should also like them. The other colors are coming, I only have two up so far, at WRW Color by Design. Next I have to do the mama sea turtles. Since I don't have an adult sea turtle stamp, that will be a little trickier… Photoshop here I come.

Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore"

While I was walking down the hill from school last week or so, I heard a musical, liquid chuckling noise from behind and above me; the noise perhaps that is described as like molasses gurgling out of a jug. I looked back, and there was a raven sitting on the lamppost I had just walked under. It was a most unexpected noise from that source, though maybe I had read about it and forgotten. I tried to take a picture, though none came out well enough to use, but they did show clearly enough the shape of the bill and the curve of the throat feathers, so I could be sure it was a raven. And when it flew, the angle of the tail confirmed it.

I had learnt those details about ravens while researching to do these drawings of them for a class last spring. At that time, I had not seen any close by, but they've been in the yard since, sitting in the trees quite close to the window. Still no pictures — they fly away when I open the window to try. They're too smart for me.

When Cafepress brought out these new colorful tees, and I started putting my designs on them, the ravens came to mind. I had not originally put any ravens on kids tees, thinking "Who'd want to put pictures of ravens on their kids?" Then I thought about Poe's raven, who said "Nevermore", and it reminded me of a 2-year-old who has just discovered the power of saying "No".

(In an "ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny' sort of cultural evolution, that seems to be similar to the power discovered by the medieval Arabic mathemeticians who discovered the concept of zero.)

And it seemed to me that having the raven to symbolize that eternal No might be funny. (My little niece is just two, so I am thinking about this.)


And then I thought about the holiday curmudgeon type of family member, who might appreciate a raven t-shirt as camouflage and defense against, and comment on, the seasonal festivities. These new dark tees are perfect for that, especially this green. The Fall-colored raven drawing looks almost cheerful on the new women's brown tee. Especially in comparison to the almost sinister look of the Spring-colored raven with the green leaves on the green tee.

And I'm still wondering, since I haven't ordered one to try it out, if the rather blue-black raven feathers would show in an interesting way against the black tee. Perhaps people who would like that would prefer that there not be any of those confounded colorful leaves to interrupt their black gloom. I might have to try a version of that.

Peacock Album

Over at Dressaday I said I would write more about wearing wide sleeves, but it's not going to be tonight. Since I failed to find a photo I can use in my files, I'll need to wait for daylight and photograph a dress or few.

Meanwhile, here's a bonus image, just because I came across this one while I was looking for a version of the costume pic. Did this in Photoshop class last summer. The images are made on a scanner. Wouldn't it be lovely to be able to get fabric like this? I can print on 8.5x11 pieces of fabric, of course. I'm thinking of taking two of these (with the second one reversed) and putting them on the bodice or yoke of a dress. Full-length, maybe dark peacock blue?

Or I know - I think I still have some very dark green panné velvet, with a diamondish textured pattern. If I scan that, I could use it as a background for the peacock feathers, print that, and use it on a dress made of the green fabric. That would be fun.

I added the images from the last 2 posts to some t-shirts and things at Cafepress. I like the flowery Mead tote, and there are some tees as well. And the three dresses without the background went on some tees, including these new colored infant tees. This design, though it looks good on blue as well as white, would probably have to be for non color-coded kids. Not too many people would put pictures of dresses on their little boys. But as someone who hated pink, even as a kid, I wonder if some would like the blue tee, as well as pink & white, for their little girls.


I'm experimenting with overdying the printed Cafepress tees without ruining the design. So far it's working very well, and I'm liking the dusty muted colors I get because of the technique I'm using. If only the warm dyeing weather had lasted a few weeks longer. Most years I'd have another two to four weeks, and in the last few years this has been prime dyeing and dye-painting season. Every afternoon after work or school for a month. The leaves for leaf-dyes haven't even started to fall.

A Flowery Mead

The flowery mead(ow) was the medieval ideal for sitting out in the garden instead of grass. They made garden seats with flowering low herbs growing in them, like thyme. This picture, which you can tell was created in Photoshop, since it is symmetrical, also follows a medieval pattern design style which might have been used on an embroidered or woven tapestry. So it seems to me to be an illustration of an idealized flowery mead.

You can also see that it's what I used as the background for the assignment in the previous post. In fact, I had a lot of fun creating a symmetrical picture which I knew would be covered up. (Although I think it will make a fun journal cover picture, and it will probably appear as one soon in my Cafepress store.) These wildflowers were photographed in Bridgeport CA in spring 2006.

What brings this to mind is that with the cooling weather, suddenly I realized that it is bulb-planting season. And that reminds me of the most successful bit of gardening I ever did — a flowering lawn. My attempt to create the look of this picture. It has old-fashioned violets, which have a fragrance strong as wine in February — they can be smelled from the roof 3 stories up! And lots of little bulbs, which start blooming in mid-January and finish in late May.

Soon I'll post some pictures of the real flowering lawn, and list my favorite little bulbs. But for anyone who wants to do it now — choose small spring-flowering bulbs which can tolerate summer water and grow in your zone. Plant them in early fall, while it's still nice to sit out on the lawn, if possible. And as for distributing them in a natural-looking way, don't bother doing anything fancy, like throwing them. Just dig out a weed and stick in a bulb.

Those with perfect weed-free lawns need not apply. Well, they wouldn't want to — they'd be putting poisons on the lawn to kill the flowering invaders.

(If you can't see this picture, let me know — I used a PNG for this image. I'll post a link to a JPG.)

Dresses Like Spring

This is the first rainy day of the season, though the nights have been cool and fallish since mid-Sept. This cold spell is at least 2 weeks early, maybe a month. We can usually count on warm weather through mid-Oct, and I don't expect the first frost until Thanksgiving, when I'm standing under the persimmon tree waiting for the 3rd frost to ripen the persimmons.

But, this is the assignment I just did for class, "Dresses like Spring in a Meadow" a fictitious advertising postcard for a totally imaginary dress designer.

The fun thing about this is the way I thought of to illustrate a dress design - draw the outline, and fill it with a photo of a batik fabric. The photos were taken with the dress lengths of fabric thrown over the clothesline. This seems to be an unexpectedly good idea - throw your fabrics over the line and stand back. It's a good way to see what the fabric looks like in daylight, at a realistic distance. I, at least, tend to think of the fabrics in their close-up, inside the sewing room view. This clothesline view gives a preview of what the dress might look like.