How to Make Fabric Signs

1. Intro to Fabric Signage: Hi and welcome to my course on how to make fabric signs, fabric science have definitely become a trend, especially in the wedding industry. And I personally loved them. I did a wedding stationary, so I've done tons of signage and I just it really kills me to see these huge boards being thrown in the trash. And I think that cloth signage, especially when you're using something that's recyclable, like cotton is a really good alternative. Plus there just so pretty and they're easy to ship and all that stuff because they're so light. So anyways, this course is going to show you how to make cloth signage that I want to be clear. You are not going to be learning how to do it by hand. So I'm not gonna give you a piece of earth. Show you how to do a piece of fabric and write on it. This is all going to be done digitally. We send them off to my vendor, they print them for us and send them to us. It's a really smooth process. And personally, it takes me a lot less time to do a sign on cloth this way than doing it by hand. This is a beginner level course. So I am taking you through everything from the beginning to the end and I am going to share with you all the mistakes that I made just so you don't have to make those mistakes. This is a super valuable course, especially if you've never done a cross sign before. This is when the isaac recently. And it's a little rightfully, but I love to make, I mean, you can make home decor as well. You don't have to make just wetting the science. So this course is for anybody who is, maybe you're in the wedding industry and who want to expand the signage offerings that you have? Maybe you are getting married and you want to do your own signs, and maybe you're looking for home decor. There's tons of options here. And I've done a lot of cloth signs and show you a some of them now from welcome signs to seating charts to bars signs. There's so much you can do. And like I said, it doesn't have to be wedding related, but I'm just going to show you how you make the class science. We are going to be using Illustrator. So part of the Adobe suite, I loved the Adobe suite, but whatever design software you have is fine as long as you can export in JPEG format. But I won't be showing you how to use other softwares. I'm just going to be showing you how to use Adobe Illustrator and also going to be using my iPad with Procreate because I'm gonna be doing some calligraphy. But you don't have to do your own calligraphy. You can use fonts, whatever you want. That's just a little side thing that I added on. So I'm super excited to teach you guys how to make your own class signs. And we're gonna get started. 2. Starting Your Design: The first thing that we need to do when we are designing our fabric signs is we need to get on the website that we're going to use. I like to use contralto.com. They are fantastic. I, some people use Spoonflower, I think is the other one, but I don't use them. I use contralto. So contralto is a company based in the UK. So just think about that when you are designing and ordering your signs. I live in California and the United States and it typically takes three to four days for them to ship it to me. Obviously, if you're somewhere closer or you are in the UK, it's probably gonna take a lot less time. I like to Pat about two or three weeks when I order my sign. I don't know when you'll be listening to this, but I'm filming it in January of 2022 and we are still in a pandemic unfortunately, and things are just taking longer, the supply chains are being affected. And I just like to add as much time as possible. Contralto has always been fantastic for me, but I will say there was one time last year where I did not receive a sign in time for a wedding. And that's because I was expecting their typical turnaround time of about five days and it took more like three weeks because of everything. But I don't blame not on them. It is a crazy time right now and I know that they are just trying to do their best, so I do contact them. Now what I'm going to be printing assign Hey, I need this by X date and then they're aware that I need it as well. So they are still a great company. It's just crazy right now. All right, so we're on the website and the first thing we're gonna do is go to print your own. So we're gonna click on that. And how I like to do my signage is I do buy fabric type. There's a lot of stuff over here. Fabrics by usage fabric. So I property but load law, I want to choose it based on the fabric type. And as you can see, there are tons of fabric, like an insane amount of fabric, and it's completely overwhelming. So what I suggest doing is ordering their sample pack. I think let's see where can you get that? Okay, I had to find are the sampled packets. Okay, So when you start designing, definitely if you have time order there swatch pack because there are so many different fabrics. So how you find there swatch pack on here is you're gonna go to fabric printing. Then you're gonna go under labels, tags and samples, and go to swatch pack and order one of these. And it will have all of their different materials in there. So they have a classic pack, a natural path pack, a leather and a paper swatch packs. And like I said, there's an overwhelming number of options here. So definitely get one of these. I'm going to show you my packs right now so you can get a little bit of an idea of what different materials they offer there. So many literally any material you think of they have. For me, my favorite materials that I typically use are the bowl denim, which is chi, and I think it's about 10%. That's kinda like a thicker canvas. I did a seating chart recently where there's a lot of watercolor artwork. And I wanted the fabric to be really tight so that the artwork looks really crisp. So that worked well for that. And then the other one I like to use if I want one that's a little more flowy is the Panama flow. And I like to use that if somebody who's looking for a little more whimsical look or we're going to be hanging something off of a bar top and we want it to kind of fold over the bar because the bull denim is really thick. It's almost like a gene, but it's white obviously. And that would not flow so nicely over something like if it's draped over some things. So I'm going to show you those fabrics right now. All right, So these are the fabric swatches. And I know I said paper in the last video, but we do not need the paper on. We're doing class signage. So this is a classic fabric swatch pack and I hate taking out of this thing because it's such a mess. But like I said, there are tons of fabric and they have so many. But when you're going through these fabrics, something super important to look at. Um, I don't know. You might be watching this video because you work in the wedding industry, which is what I do. And so I have that perspective in mind. So I don't really want something this thin unless I'm doing an art CPS. But I want something that is going to really be clear. So that's something to consider. And I loved that they prints these patterns on here because it really helps you to see how crisp the writings of you're doing something like a seating chart or a welcome sign or a bar sine, you want the writing to be crisp. So look at that when considering this one, as you can see is little more blurry. This, I would probably never, ever used that fits. This is super, super light. You wouldn't be able to read anything on here, but you might be doing some artsy thing and you want this fabric. But there are tons of fabric. So just go through these, feel them, feel the texture. And also keep in mind that you're going to be having this at a much bigger scale. So if it is a heavy fabric, it's probably not going to flow as much as it is in this little teeny square. Whereas this is a loose knit Jersey which I would never use because look how I'm Chris, but this is, but this is going to be really flowing. So tons of options here. These are natural, sorry, these are their classic fabrics, and then they have natural fabrics, which from my understanding, these are more easily recycled. They have silk, which is also a really cool one. I've used this one before. This silk sat in. Another thing to keep in mind is look at the color of the fabric on the back. So for example, these two, this is really white and this is more cream or natural color, and that is going to affect your colors. So you're gonna have something more Chris and clean and your colors more true to what they look like on the screen, then something like this organic cotton, which is a much more natural color. But this might be really cool if you're doing something vintage or you have a bot, how bright or something like that. So get the swatch pack, It's gonna save you so much like heartache. And then they also have a leather one, which I've never used the leather but I want to and these are this is called double, but that's funny. I never realized that. As you can see, these ones are a lot thicker. Leather would be super cool depending on what you need it for. And you can see it's super, super crisp. So that is my suggestions. Get the swatch books and then makes sure you're paying attention to how the pattern is printed and also the feel of the material, and that will help you select your material. Now that we've talked about the fabric, hopefully, you ordered a sample pack or you probably haven't already because you're watching this video. So once you know what fabric you want so you can make the decision, You don't have to have the swatch pack, but I really, really suggest getting it. You're going to come back to contralto and you're gonna go print your own. And this is something that I need to decide on before you start design. Because if you don't know how big the canvas is that you can work with, then you could design something, Let's say that six feet wide and then come in here and discover that, oh crap, that fabric isn't available in six feet wide. So make sure you do this before you start design. So I don't go fabrics by type. And then let's just say I'm going to use that 10 percent denim. You're going to hit Start design. And as you can see right here, it says they ship in one to two days. They are typically really quick, so just keep that in mind. I like to just like I said before, send them a quick email to let them know, Hey, I need this by next Saturday or whatever. So star design. And then there's the Bolden m, which is a little heavier or there's just the right or denim. And keep in mind, the denim is white. I know we're so used to having blue jean denim, but normal denim is white. They just diet for genes. So 10 percent Denton. I'm going to select this one. And they also print samples if you guys want a sample of something beforehand, of course I will add more time to your project, but if you need a sample, you can do that. Now this is the important part here and we need to know what is the full width. So if you're not sure, sometimes you're already sure like the size that you need for a science. So for example, let's say I'm doing a welcome sign for me, a welcome sign. Do it two feet by four feet. So I wanted to know what the full width is here. So if you need to know what the full width is and what the fabric is capable of hit full width, as you can see here, this is about 50 inches, so that is the widest that your sign can be when you're using this 10 percent denim. Now I know that the Panama flow, the widest you can do is 54 inches. And I think that every fabric is different. So that is another reason why you need to get in here and check before you design your piece because I would hate it if you designed your piece and then you get in here and you can't even printed size. So make sure you check that. And then as far as printing length, I'm pretty sure they'll do just about any length, which is crazy. So 500 inches, you would never, I mean, you might need something that long, but the length is is pretty long, but I always just like to come in here and check just in case. So again, we're doing custom dimensions. I'm going to do 24 inches by 48 inches. So that's the two feet by four feet. We're just doing a simple welcome sign as an example. And we're not going to go over this is important the edges here, but we're not going to go over that right now. We're gonna go over that once we design. And let's see. So this is your most important, we know what our most important thing before you start designing. We know what our dimensions are and we know the fabric. So now we can go into our design software. I am using Adobe Illustrator. I love Adobe products. They are what I designed with. But if you don't have Adobe products, you just basically need to be able to export as a high-quality JPEG or PNG. So every software you have, you can use that. But I will be using Illustrator for this video. 3. Designing : Alright, now we're gonna get into the design portion of your sign. Now, I'm not going to get too crazy with design because I'm just showing you the basics and I want you to be able to make assign yourself. So I'm using my iPad and I'm going to do just a simple Khloe and calligraphy. If you do have an iPad, you have to have an iPad Pro. But if you do have it, I highly recommend getting Procreate. It is an amazing tool. It saves me a lot of time in my business. But I love it, especially because I can do calligraphy on it and then just AirDrop it to my computer and then digitize it from there. If you don't have an iPad, you have a couple options. One, if you do do calligraphy, you can scan in your calligraphy and digitize it. And then the other option is you can just use fonts. So there's tons of fonts. You can get a script font online. You can use places like Creative Market, even at C cells fonts but side-note, be careful and FC because sometimes people steal other people's fonts and then sell them for super cheap. For example, if you see a font for $3, it's most likely been stolen and you're buying a stolen font. So thus was inside no, on that it happened to me. I made it right. I mean, I didn't do it on purpose, but I made it right in, got the font from the real person who created it. So just keep an eye on that when you're an Etsy, but Creative Market is a great place to get fonts. So I'm just going to do a quick quote here, just as simple loved code that one of my couples might use for their wedding and want it on a cloth sign. If you are using Procreate, I recommend doing 2000 pixels by 2000. And then I like to go to my Canvas, put the drawing guide on. So I have a basic grid. So I am going to write out the quill and I'm going to speed this up so you don't have to watch. You can do this for the next 20 minutes. So I'm happy with this. I'm going to go ahead and AirDrop it to my computer. And I'll bring it into Illustrator and I'll be able to digitize it or not digitized. I'll be able to vectorize it. In Illustrator. This is the design software I'm going to use and we need to set up our What's going on here. Sorry. We need to set up our document. I don't know why other we go. Okay. So we're going to call this cloth sign. And then we remember how we looked on contralto to see what was possible. And we're going to do 24 inches by 48 inches. I am going to change this a little bit because my quote is more squares. So I'm going to make this 36 inches, so it's two feet by three feet. And for artboards, I recommend you can either do one, which I know kind of exactly what I want to do here. But if you want to try different things with your design, I recommend doing multiple art boards. It's really helpful in designing. And then we do not need a bleed. Typically when you print something, you do need a bleed, but contralto does not need a bleed. And then for your document mode, we are going to be using RGB. Now, RGB is your screen colors if you're not familiar in CMYK or you're printing colors. Because contralto, they don't really, they actually recommend that you would do RGB because they don't print Pantone colors. But if you have a specific color that you need to get printed, they say reach out to them and they can try to help you. They can get you samples and all that kinda stuff. So we are using RGB. To be honest, I use RGB all the time. I'm a watercolor artist and I just think that it gets more, it picks up more colors than all my stuff turns out great. So I'm happy with a and then you definitely want to be at least 300 ppi. You want to have a high-quality print, so create. All right, so now that we're in the document, a couple of things that we need to do here. So if you aren't bringing in your own calligraphy, then you're going to use your textbox and do whatever quote you want. But one thing is that we need to get our rulers out here. So I'm gonna do Command R. And I'm going to have four inches of space on each side. Now, just a general rule of thumb when you're designing something, you never want it to go all the way to the edge. I mean, there's very few things. If you were doing a pattern, maybe you would. But you want when you're doing signage exceptionally with texts, you need to have these areas of negative space or your designs is going to be a hot mess. So that's the first thing we're going to deal. And then another thing that we need to decide, this is kinda of your general layout, is how much space do you need at the top? Do you is it's going to stay on top of a bar and there's going to be maybe like some bottles holding this app, maybe you need about 12 inches. So six inches will actually be on the bar and then the rest of the six inches will just be some open header space before you get to the quote. Another thing to consider along the lines of how is this being displayed. If you're going to use a copper frame. How big is that copper frame? What's the diameter of it? So let's say the diameter is, is an inch then you probably want to leave about three inches of space up here so that you can get this hand basically, so you can put the pipe through it and then however much open space you want here before you get to your quote or your artwork, seems simple, but those are definitely things you need to consider so you don't run into big issues. I'm going to grab that graphic that I created with calligraphy. I'm just gonna do a simple image trace. I'm coming up to Window, going to image trace, sketched art. This is how I like to bring in my artwork. Make sure Ignore White is on and then I'm just going to expand it. So now it's vectorize. I can make it any color I want. I can make it as big as I want and I'm not going to lose the quality of it. I want it to fit just nicely in between these lines because this is four inches of space on this side and four inches of space on that side. If you wanted to add a background color, contralto is great about basically it's just a full bleed, so they're going to print what is there. So they're not using white ink or anything like that. And I want this to be let's just do like a dark blue. Obviously we can't see our words right noun. So what we wanna do is right-click. Again, I'm on a Mac, so this might be different if you're on a PC and it's especially going to be different if you are using Illustrator. So I'm, I need to push this rectangle back, so I'm going to arrange and then send to back. And then here is my quote, and I am going to make this white now. Okay? And I might make it just a tad bigger. And it's hard to see your art box here, but you want to, I just like to bring this in a little bit. One thing to say about this is you want to make sure this is your line right here. Back this blue box back here extends past that. So essentially do have a bleed, but I just don't want you to export this. And then you accidentally have this little white line on your print job which would suck. So just make sure it goes past that. But you're not going to export it with a bleed, but it's going to export the full it's going to be blue all the way across the back. So I'm pretty happy with this. You can do whatever you want here. Like you can add artwork. Here's a little oops. My client, I painted them a little dog. His name is beam. So you can put watercolor artwork on here. As you guys saw him a seating chart with all the national parks. I added a bunch of watercolor or work. You can do that. Whatever is on here is what's going to print. So things to consider like a said, is how will this to be displayed? And obviously you need to know the size. And once you have that, you just are going to export this as a JPEG super-simple. And then make sure it's RGB. We're going to do maximum quality. You could do high-quality and you you'll be just fine unless, yeah, high-quality is still 300. I like to do max quantity or max quality if I can. One thing that I do want to mention that's super important is, let's say you're doing a seating chart. So, oops, I'm gonna get rid of this really quick. And I'm actually going to get rid of this blue background too, just for teaching purposes right now. So I'm doing a seating chart. So let's say this is way too it Let's make this like 55 point. So table 1, Miranda Smith, John Snow, Terry, why she's like random names? Frank Smith. Okay. So a question that I get a lot is, how do we know if this is going to be legible for somebody, for a seating chart, and this is my little hack what I do. So all fonts are different, right? So I might be doing this and this myriad in size 55, but if I move to Mrs. IV, it's a lot smaller, but it's still 55 points. So I can't tell you the exact point to use or exact size. So what you need to do is test it out. I'd say start at around 40. And then what you're gonna do is print this. So just print it and make sure you're printing out a 100%. And then a take it and I go and I tape it up on a wall. I'd step 10 to 12 feet away from it and see if I can read it. Now, I am 35 and I have 2020 eyesight. So if you are worried that there's maybe a lot of older people there, then make it just slightly bigger or maybe step away even further and see if you can see it further away. But most likely you want people to be able to read it from about 10 feet. Don't want people to have to be way up at the seating chart to be able to read their names. Another thing a really, really recommend with this style of seating chart. I mean, just any style of seating chart when you start to get more than a 100 gas, is do it alphabetically because it's way easier for people to see a large a or B over here and then 0 in on this space and no, Okay, when will my last name is going to be there? So this is an important thing to consider when you're doing a seating chart, you want to be able to read it so printed out at a 100 percent. And you can you can select when you're printing. Let's see. Okay, so right now you can't see any of this. My page setup is southern because I was doing envelopes. If I'm just doing a US letter size. Okay. So you can't see anything, but I can move it around until I can find it. And then just have your printer print this out. This is the size that it will be if it was a 100 percent. And then you can see whether you can read it or not. And then you kind of just play with that and, and discover if it needs to be smaller or larger or whatever, but super important, don't forget to do this step if you're making and seating chart, I would hate for your seating chart to come back to you print it and nobody can read it. And then in the next video, I'm gonna show you how to upload to contralto. 4. Displaying Your Sign: The last thing I want to talk about is how to display your signs. So this is something that you should have thought about before you designed it. Of course, as we discussed earlier, you need to know how much space do you need for, how you're going to display it. But there's a lot of different ways that you can display your science. So for example, this was a venue that has a gate over a window and it's a place where they do a lot of their seating charts. So for something like this, I just added grommets into the corners of the sign and then the planner was able to just hanging on the sign any sorry, on this AND gate any way that she wanted to. So grommets are probably my go-to for signs, especially if I'm not going to be there to set them up. It's super easy to install grommets. You just get the little tool on Amazon, I think mine cost $10 and then whatever colored grommet that you want. And then just do a quick YouTube search. And there is tons of videos on how to install those little grommets. They're really easy. I was nervous at first, but honestly it was so much easier than I thought it was going to be. So this is another sign I did grommets for, and this is a four foot by six foot copper frame. It's one of my rentals and I just tried it on with fishing line onto this copper frame. Now I will say that I kind of like the look of a hammer a little bit more because it's a little tighter. And I'll show you that in 1 second. But here is another sign that I did with the grommets. And just a note about this is that you're essentially creating a sale, a sale that goes on a ship. And if there's wind, it will blow over your piece. So I had to put a bunch of sand bags on the bottom of this copper frames so that it wouldn't blow over. So that's something to keep in mind. Let's just chat really quick again about the, the ham. And so this was three signs that the planner provided these little copper frames. And she just told me how big the array, sorry, the diameter of the copper frame which I think was an inch. That's how wide the little pipelines. And then I just went to my seam stress and she sewed a ham. I think I saw a hand that about three inches and you want to have the hand pretty tight because it makes it look a lot cleaner. Here is an example of a sign that I had no idea how big the pipe was going to be. And as you can see, that hem is just way too far down. It should have been a lot closer to the top. So I really recommend doing a tight ham and I think that the heavens just looks so good. And we did put grommets in the corners so that she could tie it down completely. Because if you don't tie it down completely, it's going to flow in the wind and that's fine. You might want that look, but just something to think about. So these are a few different ways that you can display. There's also the option of displaying it on a bar top or putting it over a table or whatever. And that, that's easy. You just need to account for how much space will not be shown. But other than that, it's really simple. If you guys have any questions, feel free to reach out to me in the discussion section. I am always happy to answer questions and I really hope that this course was really helpful for you. And I would love to see what you guys create. 5. Printing : Now we're at the fun part where we get to upload our design and get it printed. So you need to be on the contralto website. This is the web address, oops, right here. And we're going to print your own. And fabrics by type, 10 percent denim. You can use whatever fabric you want. I'm just choosing this one because it's wanna use often and then start design. We're gonna do this one. And my Internet has been a little slow today, so hopefully it will pick up a little. Now, you want to make sure you do custom dimensions and the dimensions that you used for your art board when you are designing it. So ours was 24 inches by 36 inches. And then it says, How would you like the edge? So there's several different edges right here. I always, now I do after I made a mistake, I always select the white over lock. Or if you're doing something like a block him, you could or like a black sign. You could do the black as well. So I chose the uneven scissors for and it, sorry, I didn't choose unbind scissors. I did the cut on the line and it turned out really just doesn't look good. I just want to show you guys really quick. So this was the piece that I had them cut on the line. And as you can see, it's kinda afraid on the edges. And, and honestly, this was my very first class sign. I didn't design it very well because you see how close it is to the edge. It could've used some more whitespace, but it doesn't have that clean hand look that I like. And so I don't recommend doing having them cut it for you. I like something to look really crisp and clean. If you want something to have kind of an unfinished look and you don't mind if it's not perfectly straight. I would say choose the cut on the line. They also have the uneven scissor cut, which is free. And I like to say you get what you pay for you to I'd just like to do the overall cam. I think it looks better. I don't care that it's slightly more in cost. It's only a couple of dollars and it's going to make your piece look a lot better and more thing I wanted to show you is this is an example of the overlap ham. So as you can see, they just take a little bit of the fabric and do a ham. But it's looks really good and string. And so I'm sure you guys are okay. So I choose this one, the white over lock him and yeah, so make sure you do that. I like I said, I don't recommend having them just cut out on the line and it never turns out straight to me and it looks kinda messy. Now we're going to select design. And it's going to lead us here where we can upload an image. So I am going to go to my messy desktop and select my cloth science JPEG. And it will tell you if your image is not high enough quality by R should because we export it as such, then you're going to select it, add one image to product. Here you go. So typically, when you design it exactly to size, it's going to be perfect on here. And you won't need to do any editing. But for some reason, if you need to move it over here or over here, you have that option. I don't wanna do that because it's perfect as is. And then it does give you warnings over here. So it says one or more images are near the product Edge. Please make sure your images cover the entire area to avoid whitespaces. I know that this is 24 inches by 36 inches and that's the size of my canvas. So I'm not worried that this is going to have any whitespace. Plus when I look on here, it looks perfect. If it was like this, then I would be worried because this obviously is not going to print this color that I need. And then okay, so I'm gonna save the design and order now. So add to cart, and that's it. It's super, super simple. I'm let's see. It's super simple. I have an account with them and I'm not gonna keep going because then you guys will see all my credit card information. But yeah, so this is it it's this easy and their delivery is usually one to two days. They usually use FedEx. But again, if you need that super fast upgrade, if you want to. But it's this is it's easy. And then I just go ahead and go to their secure checkout and I pay and the sign will be sent to me. It's really, really cool way to up your signage. And I think that it's definitely a trend that we're gonna see more of. 6. Class Project and Final Words: All right, I hope you guys enjoyed this course. If you have any questions at all, please feel free to reach out to me. I'm always available for questions and I'm happy to answer them. For the class project, I would just love to see what you guys create. So whether you're just doing one true self, a personal project, or you have a client that you're making a class sign for. I would love for you to post a photo in the class projects, and I just can't wait to see what you guys create. Thanks so much for watching this course. If you loved it, I went absolutely love if you could share it with your social network so your friends. It means a lot to me when you do that. Thanks again for watching.