[ Lost in the Landscape ]

yet another (fun) total waste of time

Ser­vices that will print a cus­tom fab­ric for you have been around for a lit­tle while. Now there’s Short­omatic, a firm that will take a design or photo that you upload and turn it into a pair of boardshorts–just in time for sum­mer. Even if you don’t spring the $99 for the shorts, you can noo­dle around on their site and see what your pho­tos might look like turned into cloth­ing. I played a bit with some mostly gar­den photos:

The orig­i­nal photo, some var­ie­gated Agave amer­i­cana at the Hunt­ing­ton Library’s desert garden…

…And the photo imag­ined as a pair of shorts using the Short­omatic design tool. These have a bit of a lederhosen/bondage vibe. I’m not sure I could pull off this look at the beach.

Here’s a photo from last sum­mer of a sphinx moth hov­er­ing at night over some sage flowers.

…And the same photo turned into a pair of shorts.

A photo of the West Side of Los Ange­les, taken from out­side the gar­dens at the J. Paul Getty Museum on a cool, clear Jan­u­ary afternoon.

Board shorts with the sky­line used for a bor­der at the base of the leg openings.

This is another suc­cu­lent photo, using the “find edges” fil­ter in Pho­to­shop, a huge cliche if there ever was one. And then I took the photo and tilted it towards the red end of the spectrum.

And here’s what it looks like turned into shorts.

Oh good, another black hole where you can throw your spare time…

May 24 2010 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: fabric design • fabrics • Shortmatic • shorts | 10 Comments »

botanical fabrics and quilts

One of our fab­u­lous wed­ding presents was the offer to make us a quilt. We could pick the design. We could pick the fab­rics. How gen­er­ous was that?

That got me look­ing at fab­rics in a totally dif­fer­ent way. One of the things I real­ized was how many of the designs had botan­i­cal ori­gins. Here are just a few of the plant-based ones that I found inter­est­ing. Some are fairly real­is­tic, some are so styl­ized that you have to look hard to see the botanical-ness of the inspi­ra­tion. But no mat­ter how abstracted from the orig­i­nal, the gar­den lives on in the fabric.

And after por­ing through all the fab­ric choices there was the issue of the design. There were so many options…traditional quilts, dou­ble wed­ding rings, strip and curves designs, water­color quilts…books and books filled with inter­est­ing designs. And then I ran across the online cat­a­log of the 2002 Quilt Visions quilt exhi­bi­tion at the Ocean­side Museum of Art here in San Diego County.

Liz Axford. Bam­boo Boo­gie Woo­gie I,60″ x 44″, hand-dyed cot­tons, machine pieced, machine quilted. [ source ]

The quilt looked like it wouldn’t be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult to piece. How­ever, being an art quilt, it had lots of over-the-top labor-intensive details going on with it…stuff that to me looks like there’s hand dye­ing and pos­si­bly hand-printing involved. Unfor­tu­nately, the museum site didn’t list the specifics. And they didn’t even list the artist! I did see the print cat­a­log of this show, and I’ll post the artist as soon as I can research who she was. [Note: Thanks to Linda, I’ve got the cat­a­log in my hands, and I’ve now been able to fill in some of the infor­ma­tion the web­site lacked.] I found it inter­est­ing that the brief writeup in the cat­a­log said that she had been inspired by bam­boo, and that she was a mem­ber of the Inter­na­tional Bam­boo Society–You can really that influ­ence in her design.

For­tu­nately, what I was most inter­ested in was the con­struc­tion method. Commonly-available fab­rics could lend a sense of the orig­i­nal but also take the design into dif­fer­ent ter­ri­tory. I played with dif­fer­ent fab­rics com­bi­na­tions and ended up with a ten­ta­tive first draft selec­tion of thir­teen fab­rics, includ­ing two of the ones pic­tured above. And play­ing with the basic con­struc­tion method and enlarg­ing it I came up with the Pho­to­shopped mockup below.

At this point I’m just play­ing. I sus­pect that almost everyone’s first quilt attempts may not have a lot of sub­tlety to them, and I worry that this is a lit­tle that way. But like I said this is just a work­ing draft that will prob­a­bly change when looked at by a sea­soned quil­ter. What’s fairly easy to do on screen may be ridicu­lously dif­fi­cult in real quilt­ing life. And these are fab­rics thrown together from look­ing at them online. I’m sure that actu­ally select­ing real-life fab­rics will change the result.

But gosh all this is so much fun–You can eas­ily see why quilt­ing is a $3.3 billion-a-year industry!

September 01 2008 | Categories: art • gardening | Tags: botanical designs • fabrics • inspired by nature • quilts | 7 Comments »