Surprise! My long anticipated much procrastinated shop is finally up and running. And what am I selling you may ask; well, remember that vintage fabric find that I came across months ago? I just couldn’t bare the thought of cutting up the fabric to make pillows. So, I’ve scanned the fabric swatches and printed them on high quality (recycled of course) matte paper. I’m so excited with how they came out. You can actually see the gorgeous texture of the fabric in the prints themselves, it’s almost as if you have the original! You have the option of purchasing just the print or a framed print. It was tough picking out the perfect ones to launch my store with. Really, I have hundreds of different patterns to choose from.
Here’s how the agonizing process of choosing began…
1. First I had to painstakingly remove the fabric from each booklet. Now remember, these are vintage fabric swatches, so the large staples holding each booklet together had been there for quite some time. But with the help of some pliers, my husband, and loads of patience the job was finally completed. In this picture you can see the fabric booklets I was working with.
2. It took a few more weeks are staring at the fabric on my dining room table to muster up the energy to sort them by color. I came up with 9 basic color categories; blue, green, red, orange, purple, pink, yellow, brown and black. Then, I went about placing each fabric in the appropriate category row. Quite a few of the swatches had duplicates, so that made the sorting process a bit easier. Please excuse the blurry iphone photo below..In my excitement of finishing, I neglected to take a good photo!
3. It took another couple of weeks of the fabric sitting on my dining room table to start the next process. Choosing! Not an easy task. I finally decided it would be best to go color by color and pick out my 4 favorite from each group. Then, I scanned them into my computer and thus began the test printing process. Armed with a new printer/scanner/faxer (really, it does just about everything, thanks santa!) I was ready to print. The photo below shows the first approved print (it took some testing to get the color profiles just right). Again, please ignore the awful iphone photo. I never seem to reach for the Nikon when I should.
4. The final step was to photograph the frames and get them ready for viewing (and no, I did not wait another two weeks to start). I just love how the photo shoot came out!
Just to give you an idea of what the frames look like in action, here’s my workstation. I framed one of my favorite prints for inspiration (it’s in the lower left corner).
Here’s a sampling of some of my favorite prints.
I hope you guys enjoy them as much as I do!
Happy shopping!
{ 1 comment… read it below or add one }
Oh wow, those came out beautifully! Trust me, I share the pain of trying to get my prints to come out just right (I paint watercolors) and boy, once you do the result is extremely satisfying.
Peace,
Emily