Miscellaneous Archives - Kate Derosier

Canvas fabric with bright pink, yellow, blue, and green hand-drawn patterns scrunched up a little to show drape/weave.

Chalk Doodles fabric now available!

Look! Look look look! I designed a fabric and got it printed for a project, and if you like it YOU can order it too!

Canvas fabric with bright pink, yellow, blue, and green hand-drawn patterns folded up and stacked on matching solid color canvas.

This design is called “Chalk Doodles” because it’s supposed to look like (a professional rendition of) children’s chalk drawings.

I’m planning to make some toddler backpacks to sell, and I thought having my own lining fabric would make them extra special. I got some help with color matching via instagram polls, and then did my best to make something happy and fun, that would make you smile every time you opened the backpack.

This is my first official foray into surface design, although I’ve been filling up papers with doodles and patterns for most of my life. I’m really happy with how it turned out, I think it’s just as cheerful and energetic as I wanted it to be.

I got my fabric printed at RealFabric.com, on their cotton canvas. I’m really happy with the quality of both the print and the fabric. The colors are bright, the lines are crisp, and I think this canvas is going to be just right as the lining for the backpacks I want to make – it’s lighter than the canvas I got for the exterior, but still nice and sturdy.

ALSO, the most exciting part for me is that RealFabric approved the design for their marketplace, which means that you can order Chalk Doodles on any of their fabrics!

Painted post

The other week I participated in a fun community art project! The art center in my town supplied blank wooden posts. We had a couple weeks to decorate them and return them, and then they were put on display by the town’s visitor center.

I have never done a group project quite like this before, but I thought I’d give it a try. The biggest challenge for me was working with exterior paint on wood – I don’t have much experience with either of those materials, and I found it tricky to get clean lines. The white paint especially was quite runny no matter how much I stirred it. It didn’t give even coverage, and even when I used painter’s tape, it had a tendency to leak through. I corrected it as best I could in the time I had, and I think in the end it looks really good (as long as you don’t get too close)!

Book binding experiment

I saw a thread on twitter about how to make your own sketchbook and thought, “Hey, I have all the supplies needed for that! Let’s try making a book!”

I have since lost the tweets in question, so unfortunately I can’t link you to the guide I followed, but it turns out that book binding is much easier than I thought it was. It took a really long time though, so I don’t think I’ll get into doing this regularly.

The cover is a lightweight canvas wrapped around cardboard, and the pages are watercolor paper that I had lying around.