The Crafter's Guide to Patterns: Create your own hand-printed designs

May 2015

This book is all about creating patterns by hand. It's jam-packed with inspiration and guide for making patterns by different methods, including rubber blocks, cyanotype and stencilling, plus how to build up a pattern repeat and the different types of repeats. It also includes 20 free, striking motifs for you to use. So whether you want to design your own wall stencil, or handprint one of the supplied motifs in the book on to your greeting cards and cushion covers, this book gives you all the information you need to create a masterpiece!

December 2014

The Crafter's Guide to Patterns by Jessica Swift includes 20 free motifs and also shows you how to create a pattern cut out of virtually any image. Whether designing your own wall stencil or hand-printing one of the supplied motifs onto your greetings cards and cushion covers, this book gives you all the information you need. The motifs are printing in the back of the book and are also available to download so that readers can adapt and use these to create their own patterns.

July 2015

Written by illustrator, Jessica Swift, this is another book in the `Crafter's Guide'. Here we look at creating hand-printed designs by learning all about patterns and repeats. The book is split into three sections - Planning Patterns, Making Patterns and Using Patterns. Planning Patterns starts at a very basic level, looking at how you can get inspiration from around you. This includes a note on copyright and what to be careful about when planning a design. The three main motif styles of geometric, floral and novelty are introduced and this section is very useful, as each has a diagram and an illustration of that pattern being used in a design. Making Patterns includes step-by-step tutorials on making the straightforward three main repeats - straight, half-drop and brick. There are lessons on stamp carving, cutting stencils, cyanotope printing plus another fantastic tutorial on how to go digital and create a repeat pattern in Photoshop and Illustrator. I followed the tutorial in Photoshop, convinced it would go wrong, and it worked perfectly. The Using Patterns section concentrates more on practical printing applications for making cards, gift wrap and patterned homeware. If you are looking at creating patterns from a textile design point-of-view, then this part is probably of limited appeal. However, there are tutorials on several techniques that would prove useful in any kind of textile art application. It is a useful book to have if you are thinking of designing textiles with repeat patterns as a clear overview is provided and the design tutorials are fantastic.