Create A Tea Towel From Scratch - With Your Artwork On It!

1. Introduction: Hi there and welcome to this class on how to create a tea towel from scratch with your design on it. If you're an artist, illustrator, or surface pattern designer like me, you probably have a lot of art laying around. And why not put some of that art on a lovely handmade products like this? This is a product you can showcase in your portfolio within your shop, or perhaps give us a lovely gift to someone. My name is Hannah, and I'm a Swedish designer. Running is selected design, which is a small design studio specified in patterns. I loved designing for fabric. In this class, I will show you one of my favorite and super-simple suing projects that you can create with your artwork. I will take you through my entire process from preparing the design for print, setting the right colors, ordering some custom fabric, and then show you how to create the tea towel and give it a pretty label. The class project for this class is to create a detail of your own with your gorgeous art on it. I will be working in Adobe Illustrator. So you need to be a little familiar with that program to be able to keep up. The Sioux in part in this class is super simple. So don't worry, if you're just a beginner, you will be able to do this. Alright, with that said, let's start creating our tea towel. 2. Prepare Your Design: So the first step is to get our file ready for printing. This is my finished repeat of the pattern I'm going to use for my tea towel. If you have created your pattern in the pattern tool in Illustrator, you can access your repeat by going to the swatches panel. You'll find it under Window and swatches. If you don't have it open. Then just click on your swatch, drag it out to the art board. And then you can start working with it. I'm going to start with making sure the corners in my art work, alright, and ready for printing. Sometimes the colors of a design can look one way on your screen and come out totally different when it's printed on fabric. I've been there many times and it can be really frustrating and expensive since you might need to change the colors and place another order. And that's what I want to avoid. To make sure I get the colors. I want. I'm going to work with a colormap that I have ordered from the printing company. I'm going to buy my fabric from. Before I head over to the physical colormap, I'm going to line up the colors in my design so I can see them clearly. The easiest way to see which colors you have in your print or design is to create a color group based on your artwork. To do that, I'm selecting the entire repeat and then head up to the swatches panel and click on the little folder down here that says create new color group. You can name it if you want to. I'm not going to bother here. Just click Okay. And as you can see, I got all my colors line up here in a new color group. My pattern holds for colors, but it can of course be many more, depending on how many colors you have used. I'm going to create some squares and fill them with my colors so I can see them more clearly. I'm using the rectangle tool, creating a square by holding down the Shift key while I drag it out and filling it with my first color, duplicating it three times and filling them with the rest of the colors. The last one is a white one. So I'm giving it a little stroke so I can see it better. This is the four colors I'm going to locate in my colormap. So let's head over to that and see what we can find. Here is my colormap. I have ordered it printed on classic cotton. Since that's the material I'm going to create my tea towels in. How a color looks printed can differ pretty much from one material to another in my experience. So I highly recommend that you order a colormap printed on the fabric you want to work with. If you have the option. As you can see, the map pass all of these lovely colors to choose from. Each. And one of them, with their hex code printed beneath. A hex code is six symbol color-code that you can specify and work with in programs like Illustrator and Photoshop. And of course, many more places. Make sure your colors are just right. Now. I'm going to locate some colors similar to the ones from my repeat. I have them here on my iPad so you can see a little better. Normally, I just do this from my computer screen. This is just so you can see what I'm doing and nothing you need to do as well. I'm going to start by finding a match to this beige, peachy tone. I think maybe something like that one. Moving this a bit closer. I think maybe this one. When I find a color, I'm happy with. I just mark it with a pen and write the code down later. So I have it. Then we have this brown color. Maybe that one put a pin in that too. Then we have this mustard, yellow one. I think that one. And depending on how many colors you have in your artwork, this part can take some time. But if you're asking me, totally worth it, since you're getting the right colors for your fabric right away. My left corner is a clear white one, and I'm not going to bother locating that one here. If I just put it as a clear white in Illustrator, that will print two white on my fabric. To now, I'm going to take these hex codes and change the matching colors in Illustrator to each and one of them. So let's go ahead and do that. We're back in Illustrator. And now I'm going to change my colors to the hex codes I found on my colormap. I'm duplicating the color boxes so I can fill them with my new colors. And at the same time see the difference. Again. I'm starting with the light peachy color, selecting it, going over to swatches, and double-clicking on the little fill box to open the color picker window. Here marked in blue is the hex code of that color. I'm changing that to the code from my colormap, the beige one I found. Up here, you can see the difference between the old color and the new one. Not that big of a difference. Actually. I'm hitting okay. It may be got a little darker or cooler perhaps, but I'm totally okay with that. Moving on to the brown one. Selecting it, double-clicking on the Fill box, and entering the new hex code from the colormap. As you can see, it also got a little cooler, darker, but that's fine. The yellow one and the white one. I'm just going to leave as it is. Now, it's time to re-color my repeat with this new colors. And the easiest way to do that, I think, is to just select the color I want to change with the direct selection tool. I'm hitting a on my keyboard to access it and then go to Select Same Fill Color. Then I have every little surface with this color selected. And I'm using the eyedropper tool to change it to my new color. You can access the eyedropper tool here in the panel. Or by hitting I on your keyboard, then just click on your new color with the eyedropper to change it. As you can see, it got a little lighter. But that's fine. Doing the same thing with the other colors. Selecting a area with that color, go into Select Same Fill Color. And I dropping from the new color box. And that's it. I select my repeat and drag it into my swatches panel again to save it. And there is my new pattern with the right color codes. Deleting this since I don't need them anymore. Now I have the correct colors in my design. And the next step is to trim the repeat of it. As you can see, I have some motives falling outside the edge here. And to be able to repeat this nicely on fabric, I'm going to trim them by making a clipping mask. To do that, I'm selecting the background with the Direct Selection Tool, hitting a, making a copy of it by hitting Control C or Command C, if you're a Mac user and pasting it in front with Control F. Then with the cop is still selected, I right-click, go to arrange and bring to front. I'm making sure all of my motives is laying beneath my background copy. And they seem to be if you have any motives on top of the copy, you need to move them backwards before you moving on. Otherwise, the clipping mask won't work. When I'm certain my copy is in the very front. I'm selecting everything and making a clipping mask by hitting Control Seven. Here, illustrator wants me that this object is very complex, but I want to mask it anyway. So I'm hitting Yes. And as you can see, I now have a clean repeat without any motives hanging outside. Now it's time to export the repeat so I can upload it on the printing side. Depending on the printing company you want to use. They might have different requirements for the final you want to print, but all of that information should be available on their site. Factory I'm using, It's called Casper design. Recommends me to work with a JPEG at 150 ppi resolution. So that's what I'm going to export my repeat us. By some reason, this step of exporting my repeat is always a hassle when I'm working in Illustrator. When I simply export my file in the right format directly from Illustrator, JPEG, in this case, I get this thin white lines around my repeat that. I absolutely don't want and I don't really know why I get them either. It doesn't matter which file format I'm exporting in. I still get them. I can show you if I just exported here by going to File Export, Export As and choose JPEG, naming it JPEG to explore. Here I can choose the resolution. I want 150 PPI. So that's okay. Then if I'm opening it in Photoshop, you can see when I'm zooming in, I get these white lines here. These lines will also show on the fabric as well. And that's not something I want at all. The only way to get around this problem that has worked for me, at least, is to go back to Illustrator. Saved my file as a EPS, naming it EPS to hitting Save. Then opening that EPS file in Photoshop. There it is. Here. You can set the resolution. I want 150 PPI, so I'm leaving it as it is. Now. If I zoom in, you can see that I didn't get any white lines here. So from here, I can export my file as a JPEG. I'm choosing Save as a copy. I'm choosing Save as a copy. This is in Swedish, but just go for Save as a copy. And then jpeg, naming it JPEG. Again. I want to overwrite my earlier file with the same name. So I hit yes. I'm saving it at maximum quality. You think, Okay. Now I have a finished pattern repeat here that I can upload on my printing side. So I can order me some fabric for my tea towel. So that's what I'm going to do next. Some fabric from my type. 3. Order Fabric: Okay, so here is the Casper design site where I'm going to order my custom fabric from. She was seeing print on fabrics since that's what I'm gonna do. And clicking on fabric types. As you can see, this company offers 26 different fabric types that you can print your design on. I'm sure this waffle fabric would be pretty great for tea towels actually, or maybe a linen one. But I'm going for classic cotton this time. So I'm clicking on that here. You can read a little bit more about the fabric. See that it's got certified, which is super great and eco-friendly. I'm clicking on Customize. Here. I can upload my repeat file. Here's the jpeg repeat that. I've prepared it open. I need to check this little box to confirm that I have the rights to use this material, which I do hitting yes. And here you can choose between a couple of different tile types. I want mine to be repeated as a simple grid. So I'm clicking on the option called repeat. Here's how my design looks. Repeated over a fabric just over 140 cm wide and 1 m long. And here you can get an idea of how many towels you can get out of 1 m of fabric, which is the minimum length. To order from this side. I want my towels to be 40 cm wide and 60 cm long. So I can get 123 towels from 1 m. Should I make them 50 cm long instead, I could get the double amount actually. So that's something to think about. I'm fine with how the pattern looks. If you feel like the scale feels wrong, you can change the size of the repeat over here and see what happens. Making it a bit smaller and bigger. Oh, I can't make it bigger. Not bigger than the original size. It seem probably not without losing quality. But smaller works. I like the original size though. So I'm going for 45. 45. And when I'm happy, I'm just adding my fabric to the basket, paying for it. And then patiently or not so patiently, if you're like me, waiting for the fabric to arrive so I can start suing. 4. Measure & Cut : So this is the finished fabric that has arrived freshly printed from the factory. I'm really happy with the result. The colors look super lash and the fabric quality feels really great. I ordered the same fabric in a green, two things I wanted to make some different towels that you could mix and match. But in this class, I'm going to create a towel in this yellow one, saving the green for later. So what I'm going to do now is to cut a smaller piece of my fabric. I actually ordered 2 m of each, since I wanted to make several tea towels. And from that smaller piece, I'm going to cut my towel. This is a smaller piece of my fabric. And this is the shape I'm going to cut from it. It's really simple shape actually, just a rectangle that's four to 4 cm wide and 64 cm long, including seam allowance. This template is available for you to download on the class page if you want to use the same measurements as me. I have made it in both inches and centimeters. I'm Swedish and used to the metric system. So I'm using the centimeter one. The darker rectangle is the finished towel. And that will be 40 by 60 cm. The lighter one is the one with the seam allowance to centimeters on each side. I will double fold the edges 1 cm times to the interests version has 1 " seam allowance on each side and you double fold that half an inch two times. What I'm gonna do now is to mark this rectangle on my fabric. I'm using a long ruler that has this very helpful angle here that will give me a nice and straight shape. I'm drawing with a treat marker, which is my favorite marker. This one is from prim. It's a felt-tip pen that vanishes by itself after a day or two or directly. If you just dab it with some water, It's really handy and I just love it. So let's draw our rectangle and then cut it. And there we have it. Now I'm going to fold in the edges of my towel 1 cm at first, and then fold that again another centimeter. I'm doing that with all of my edges all around and then pressing them. 5. Press & Pin: When folding my edges, I'm starting by measuring out 1 cm at first on every side of the towel using a measuring tape. And my trick marker again. Now unfolding this the first time using just my nail to press it. That's the nice thing about using classic cotton. As you can see, it stays folded even without it. I'm doing that on all my edges. If you're working with ingests, this should be half an inch that you're folding now. Now I'm folding it over once again. Another centimeter. Keep on pressing it with my name. I'm doing that to all of the sides. Again. I get two creases like this. You can of course do this step directly with an iron. Two, if you're working with another type of fabric, I just think it's super handy to do this. First when you're working with the classic cotton, as I do. When you get to a corner, you need to open or unfold the edge on the other side and then fold the new side. Okay, now I'm heading over to my iron board to press this with some heat. As you can see, the edges stays pretty folded without ironing. But I like to be thorough, so I'm pressing them here too. It's also easier to get the corners straight with heat. And I will show you in just a bit. First, let's press the edges like that. This is a pretty simple suing project. The only part that can be a bit tricky is to get the corners nice-looking. So I'm going to show you how you can fold them so they end up sharp and pretty. I'm starting with the upper corner of my long side. This is the top short side. With the long side double folded. Open up the short side. Then take the corner or the long side. And as you can see, we have two creases here, the first and the second. And I'm going to fold the corner in angle to the second crease like that and press it. Then I'm taking the edge of the short side, folding it and pressing. Then unfolding this side over again. So it's in angle with the long side. Giving it a press and pending the corner down. I'm turning my tea towel and repeating this on the next corner. Folding the side, double. Fold this corner now opening up the following side. The other long side, in this case, folding this corner over in angle to the second Greece. Pressing. Then unfolding the edge one time, again. Pressing. Now it looks like this. And then unfolding it over again and pressing a pin in that too. Now, I'm just doing the same thing with the other two corners. I'm pinning down the sides as well. So they will stay in place when I'm at my sewing machine. Alright? The last thing I'm going to do before I start suing is to place a hanger in the middle of my upper side so you can hang your towel up if you want to. As a hanger, I'm going to use this fabric labels that I've ordered with my logo and brand name on them. You can use a cotton ribbon or any other band you like here too. You just fold them in half. And as you can see, they work pretty well as a little hanger. And placing it in the middle of my upper edge. So I'm measuring out the middle. Somewhere there. I think. I'm tucking it under the folder here and pinning it down. Now, I'm going to sue along the sides, pretty near the edge, pivoting in the corners. And then the towel is actually done. So let's head over to the sewing machine. 6. Sewing: I am at my sewing machine. And here I'm suing with a straight scene, 2.5 long. And I'm suing pretty close to this edge. I'm letting this little tip of my presser foot follow the folded edge here, which places my scene somewhere here. When I get to the corner, I'm suing all the way down and stopping exactly when I'm on the diagonal fold here. Then with a needle steel in the fabric, I'm lifting my presser foot and pivoting to the other side and keep on suing. Here. When I come to my hanger, I'm going to sue back and forth a couple of times to really secure it. And here we have it. The thing is done. The corners look pretty neat. There's the little hanger. Oh, there's some threads that I need to trim like that. Now I'm just going to press it one last time. And then my towel is actually done. And I can focus on the last step, which is making my label. 7. Label Measurements: So now I'm going to measure how big my label will be. I'm starting by folding my tea towel. I'm folding it in half first. And then I'll folding and the sides towards the middle like that. And then folding it in half once again. Now I'm using my measure tape to see how big the labels should be that I'm going to wrap around my towel. Maybe 10 cm wide. Yeah. And for the length, I'm going to wrap the tape around the towel like this to see. I want it to be overlapping so I can secure it well in the back. So maybe 25 cm. If I make it 25 cm long, I'll have 3 cm overlapping. And that will do. I think my label should be 10 cm wide and 25 cm long. I'm going to design it in Illustrator. So let's head over there. 8. Label Design: Alright, now it's time to design the label to my tea towel. This is a really great thing to do if you're planning on selling your towel or giving it as a gift, it can give it a really nice touch and looks very professional. If you're asking me. I have created a new document in Illustrator with the same measurements as the papers I'm printing in my printer, which is A4 size. I have also imported my logo here, since I know I want to include that on my label. Now, I'm going to create the label background. And I know I want it to be 25 cm long and 10 cm wide as I measured on my folded tea towel before. So I'm making a rectangle in these measurements using the rectangle tool, clicking anywhere on my art board. And here I'm entering 250 mm width and 100 mm height. I'm giving it a white fill and a black stroke so I can see it better. Then I think I want a border on top of my label. For that, I'm going to use the brush tool. You can choose between paintbrush tool or the blob brush tool here. I'm going for the paintbrush. I'm just drawing a somewhat straight line up here. Like that. I don't want it to be just a brush stroke like this. I think I want like a floral band. So I'm going to use another brush from illustrators library. I'm selecting my stroke, going to Window and brushes. And down here I can choose between a lot of different brushes. Maybe something under here. Let's move this up a bit so you can see what I'm doing. I'm going to decorative and elegant and Floral brushes. And here you'll find a lot of brushes that I think would look pretty neat on a label. I want something with leaves. Maybe that one. Yeah. But not so big. Perhaps. I'm changing the scale by going to the properties panel. If you don't have it in your side panel like this, you will find it under Window and properties. And here you can change the stroke size of your brush. If I'm increasing it, the leaves get bigger and decreasing it. I get more and smaller leaves. Something like that. Maybe. I want to straighten it a little bit too. So I'm selecting my brush stroke, eating are for the rotation tool and just tilting it a little bit. Now it's time for some text. I want it to say tea towel at the top here. So I'm using the type tool, clicking anywhere and typing tea towel underneath. I want the measurements. So I'm typing 40 by 60 cm. I also want the label to tell which material the towel is made of. So I'm adding 100% cotton here. Okay, So this is the texts that I want on my label. Now I want to change the font size a bit, so it looks pretty. I want this to be much bigger. So I'm changing the size of it with the scale tool. Something like that. I want this one to be bigger too. I'm holding down the Shift key while I scale to get a proportional change. If I'm letting go of the Shift key, I can modify the size more freely. I think I want like a stroke care to not a flora one, just a simple brushstroke. I think. I'm going for the paintbrush tool again. Reopening the brushes window. Changing the stroke to maybe you can click around and see if you find anything fun here. Maybe. Maybe something like this. Oh, no, no, no. I think I just want a simple little line. Maybe. That one. No. How about that? Yeah. I like that one. Making it a little thinner. Selecting my line, going back to properties and decreasing the stroke a bit. Yeah, that looks pretty neat. The size of this text also needs to be a bit bigger. I think. I'm scaling with the scale tool again. Putting my logo down here. I want to change the fonts of my texts to. So I'm opening the Character Window. Go to Window, Type and character. Starting with the tea towel text. Here, I want something tidy and elegant. Perhaps this one. Yeah. I want to add a little bit more air between the characters too. So I'm increasing the number here until it looks good. I'm changing the font of this one too, the same as the tea towel. I don't really like that. The center media texts is bigger than the digits. So I'm going to make that text a little bit bigger. I'm selecting the digits and increasing the size here. Yeah, I'm increasing the space between the characters here to here. You can just play around with your texts to see what happens and what looks good to you. The material, I think I want to be in a kind of handwritten font. Maybe that one or that one maybe. Let's make it a little bigger and wider. Yeah, I kind of like this group of fonts together. So the last thing I'm going to do is to center all of the objects so that they are aligned in the middle. I'm selecting everything. Going to the Align window. You'll find it under Window and Align. Here. I'm choosing this one, horizontal align, center. See how that looks. Yeah, maybe I want this one to be a little bit smaller. Scaling it with the scale tool. And then aligning everything again to the center. I'm going to do a test print our best design on just plain white printing paper to see how it looks wrapped around my tea towel. And if I'm happy with it, I'll print it on some finer paper. After that. I'm just printing it directly from Illustrator in black and white. Nothing fancy at all. So let's go ahead and see how it looks on paper. 9. Final Step!: So here's the test label that I have printed out. It's printed on simple white printing paper. And I'm going to cut it out and wrap it around my tea towel to see how it looks. This little guy is now 10 cm by 25 cm, as I measured before. Placing it in the middle, wrapping it around and putting a little tape here. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. Actually, the purpose of doing a test label like this is to see if anything looks uneven, needs to be moved or be bigger or smaller. I think it's so much easier to see that when you're actually printing out your label and trying it on your tea towel instead of just looking at your screen. But I'm pretty happy with how it looks. Actually, I'm not going to do any changes here. I'm going to print the label again on this brown paper I got, I think it has a nice rustic touch and feel to it that will look really good on my tea towels. Here's how the label look printed on the brown paper. I printed two things. I'm going to make some more towels and want to save some paper. I'm going to cut it and then wrap it around my tea towel. Like that. Pretty nice. If you're asking me. I'm grabbing my towel and actually this this kind of wobbly. So I'm going to place a bit of this thicker paper inside of it to make it a little more sturdy. I've prepared a piece here that's a little shorter than the towel. Placing it inside like this. Actually, I'm going to place it underneath here so it doesn't show folding and unfolding. Now I'm taking my label, wrap it around gently and putting a tape in the back. There it is. My tea towel is officially finished and ready to be sold in my shop or at a market, or maybe be given away as a nice gift to a loved one. I made some towers in the green fabric as well. And I think they look pretty nice together Actually. That's it for this class. I hope you feel inspired to try this yourself. It's truly a magical feeling holding something that you have designed from scratch like this. If you have any questions or run into problems, don't hesitate to contact me and I'll try my very best to help until my next class. You take care.