material obsessions

I've long been obsessed with fabric design and repeat patterns. And while I've had little time for creative pursuits recently I'm determined that next month I will finally send a design off to Spoonflower.
To this end I've been playing around in Illustrator and Photoshop, getting familiar with the technical specifications and colour constraints of their system. I've also been trying to work out how to set up a design repeat. I've found some great information online. I'll share what I've learnt and some great links for this soon. It's fun, but slow work, I wish I had more to show for it, but maybe soon!
So far I have only managed to upload this simplest polka dot pattern to their site. The wonderful thing is though, once you've loaded a pattern you can play around with how it repeats and how it looks at different scales.


Speaking of which, I found the Material Obsession site the other day. Have you seen their great online shop. It's amazing! Not only can you search for fabrics by colour, designer or theme, you can upload a photo and get the program to match the colours. Once you've chosen a stash of fabrics, which you can save to your own account, you can then choose a quilt pattern and see how they look in that design, moving and refining your fabric choices as you go. Wow, what wonderful software. I could play with this all day.
Lucky me, the physical shop is quite near me in Sydney. I've not been yet. Too many other projects and ideas to complete before I place such temptation in front of me! I can feel a winter project coming on though, and I know just the friend to take shopping with me!