Tag: fabric

Find Geeky Fabrics at Spoonflower

Doctor Who headband by Costume Wrangler

Have you heard of Spoonflower? It’s a company/site that allows you to create print-on-demand fabric, wallpaper and giftwrap. Which makes it a geekcrafter’s dream, both for designers and general crafty folk. You can upload your own designs to print on fabric and such, or browse the thousands of patterns created by others. There are a bounty of categories, including Geek, and pretty much every fandom you can think of is represented, including Doctor Who (see also Whovian), Star Trek, Firefly, Sherlock, and Hobbit. I’m personally eyeing this swirly Doctor Who fabric by Risarocksit to make a skirt in the near future. (I actually took a skirt making class, just so I could use this fabric!)

I recently met a geekcrafter who uses Spoonflower to print her designs and then creates items to sell in her Etsy shop – Elinor Parker, aka The Costume Wrangler. I purchased a cool Doctor Who headband (pictured above) from her at a local craft fair, which features her custom design of TARDISes spinning in the cosmos.

Have you created anything with Spoonflower fabric? Or purchased anything made from custom-designed fabric? Link us up in the Comments section below!

 

Geek-Theme Memo Board

Geek Memo Board

It’s been a while since I shared one of my own projects, so I thought I’d share my most recent geekcraft – a Geek Memo Board.

Using this tutorial for How to Make a French Memo Board, I wrapped an 18×24 canvas with batting and fabric and stapled it to the frame, and added ribbon and buttons. Knowing most of my memorabilia was space-themed, I used this fun fabric from Jo-Ann that had a blue swirly background with little stars.

blue swirl fabric

Once I had the board all assembled (it took maybe an hour), I added my geek fandom references:

I have this memo board on my desk at work where I can gaze upon its geeky loveliness often. What geeky homages do you have at your desk/cube at work or home office?

Fabric Decoupage Star Trek Shoes

Fabric Decoupaged Star Trek shoes

I recently made myself a pair of awesome Star Trek shoes by decoupaging fabric onto some canvas sneakers. I followed a tutorial that I can’t for the life of me find again, but I’ll see what I can remember. (if you happen to know where the tutorial is, please link us up in the Comments section below!)

What I thought was clever about the tutorial was that you made a pattern for the shoes using duct tape, instead of just cutting pieces of fabric willy-nilly to fit.

Materials:

  • canvas shoes
  • 1/2 yd fabric
  • duct tape
  • fabric Mod Podge
  • small soft paintbrush
  • scissors and/or X-acto knife
  1. Place a piece of duct tape along the side of the canvas shoe and trim the excess off with sharp pointy scissors or an X-acto knife until you have a master pattern piece. Repeat for other side of the shoe.
  2. Remove the duct tape from the shoe. Place on fabric and cut around the pattern piece.
  3. Brush on fabric Mod Podge to shoe and carefully apply fabric to shoe. Smooth out any wrinkles.
  4. Allow to dry 30 minutes to overnight (follow instructions on bottle)
  5. Apply a coat of Mod Podge over the fabric to seal. Let dry.

I got the fabric at Jo-Ann’s – they have several patterns of both Star Trek and Star Wars fabrics.

Robot Skin!

How cool is this? Check out this AMAZING open source robot skin from Instructables Member Plusea.

 

Of course it would be awesome for robots to have skin. I can see this also for a lot of other uses. Maybe a body suit video game controller. Maybe a sweater that keeps track of your body temperature and outside temp. What can you think of?

 

Space Invaders Quilt Plan

My PMQG guildmate Elizabeth Hartman just posted about her plans for piecing a Space Invaders quilt for her nephew. She used one of the Kyla May video game prints I also loved (found at Cool Cottons here in Portland) as inspiration, and she’s hand-drawn a blueprint for a super-unique pixelated quilt top made with Kona solids and prints…

From her post:

I played around with a couple of different ideas before I determined that I didn’t actually want to use any of the print on the front of the quilt. Instead, I decided to play with the pixelated look of the print and make the quilt top into a super-enlarged version of the fabric.

I can’t wait to see this quilt project unfold!

 

Geek Fabric Tins

My friend Amanda Perl (who I met at my World of Geekcraft signing at Powell’s, when she made a rad comics magnet) gave her husband Steve a super cute set of handmade geek tins for his birthday recently. She picked up tins at SCRAP and covered them with video game prints from Cool Cottons (both stores are here in Portland, come visit us). I love how simple and cool they are. I’ve been holding out on that Pac-Man fabric but I think I need to snap some up!