Swatches and Yards of Fabric

It's a rainy day today, and my garden looks so green.  A perfect song for today is by Diana Krall.

I still get the same thrill that I had when I received my first fabric back from Spoonflower Fabrics.  Only the quality of the fabric and the capture of the look I want is even better.

Dress Shop Bunting Stripe is part of my A French Dress Shop collection.  I wrote a post about it here.

I love bunting.  Here is another design called The Scallop Sea, which is part of my collection called The Scallop Sea.  I wrote a post about it here.

Last week I wrote about the frog theme that Spoonflower was using for this week's contest.  I received the samples back and I love the way they printed.  The collection is called The Painted Pink Patchwork Frog.

I tried something new with some brushes that I created and I love the way the Shabby Chic Frog printed.

I am going to use this technique in future designs for my Shabby Chic fabric collections.

Organizing fabric is always difficult for me, because I need to have a way of photographing the fabrics when I am mixing and matching for new collections.  So I can't use the conventional methods which make a group of swatches permanently attached.  I needed a way that I could easily take the collection apart but a way to keep track of the collections.

AN EASY WAY TO ORGANIZE FABRIC COLLECTIONS

I printed a fabric collection and included my overview of the fabrics in the collection.  Then I cut out each 8" swatch with a pinking shear rotary cutter.

Then I stacked them, putting my overview as the top swatch.  This swatch shows me all of the designs in that collection.  It also appears on my Spoonflower collection listing, so that other people can see what is in that set of fabrics.

I simply punched a hole at the top and added a brad.  This enables me to take it apart easily when I need to play with the fabric for new collections, and for photographing.

Rainy days are meant for staying indoors and getting caught up on those things that get in the way when the weather is beautiful.

Another nice way of spending a rainy day is to stop by Mary's Little Red House and be inspired by so many wonderful Mosaics.