I am self taught at both image manipulation and sewing, but I like to think that I’m fairly proficient in both of them – at least I pretend to be! It wasn’t until this evening that I actually combined the two.

A few weeks back I ordered some Hungry Caterpillar Fabric featuring the illustrations from the Eric Carle book (searching for “Hungry Caterpilar” at Fabric.com brings up the whole series for you to browse) with the intention of making some cushions to go on the sofa (that we have yet to buy) in our play/family room. The fabric arrived and I tore into the package all ready to go and then discovered that at some point I’d miscalculated the size of the panel and instead of being 50cm from top to bottom of each design, it was only 40cm, meaning some redesigning was required if I was going to cover my 50 x 50 cushion fillers.

The fabric immediately got pushed to the back of my stash and I ignored it, not wanting to cut into it without a definite plan and no longer being able to do my original design (shown to the left) I just didn’t want to cut into it and waste the small amount of fabric I had.

Tonight I pulled out the yardage I did have and sat down to consider my plan of attack, I spent almost an hour staring at the fabric and working out what would look best without looking like I’d screwed up my measurements somewhere, drawing out little sketches and then throwing my notepad across the room when nothing seemed to visualise properly, and then my husband, or “Action Man Dan” as I like to call him, jumped into the rescue with a few simple words “why don’t you just do a mock up on the computer?”. A quick copy and paste of the fabrics I had, ten minutes in Photoshop playing with a layout and I finally had the look I wanted, clear, defined, and no more staring at my scribbles trying to work out exactly what I meant when I scrawled my notes across the page.

I have a feeling I may be the last person in the world to pick up on this, but I just wanted to rave about how awesome it is to see your design so clearly. I could see this being so useful for everything from quilting to clothes design, where you could just layer your chosen fabric over your initial sketch to get a better idea of how it would look. I just can’t believe it took me until now to take advantage of the wonders of modern technology.

Of course, this doesn’t mean an end to the notes and half drawn sketches, they’ll still be there, mocking me with their illegible scribbles, but I have a feeling that there will be slightly less scraps of paper flying around my craft room in the future.

(Oh, and if you’re interested, I picked the middle design )