Chisai pattern collection

This is my latest pattern collection called Chisai, which means small in Japanese.

It started as a challenge I set for myself to create an entire collection of small prints and a thought of wouldn’t it be cool to make a quilt completely out of fabrics designed by me.

I gave myself three rules:

1. My motifs had to be hand drawn on my iPad. My tools of choice ended up being Adobe Draw and the Apple pencil
2. Each pattern could only include one motif and two colours
3. Each pattern had to be created using the pattern tool in Illustrator

My reason for the restrictions was to try and create simple patterns. The patterns I tend to gravitate towards are very simple and yet what I was creating in the past was overly detailed.

In what turned out to be a little backwards, I started with the colours first and created quite an extensive colour palette to work with. I wanted a range of hues and brightness, which was necessary for a quilt when there was no standout pattern.

On my iPad I played around with developing a bunch of motifs. I discovered that drawing with the eraser produced some happy accidents. Mostly my drawing on the iPad stops there and I have trouble seeing the potential in a single motif, but I was persistent.

Motif drawing on the iPad

Finally I exported these doodles to Illustrator and set about choosing ones that would work. The advantage of the pattern tool in Illustrator is how easy it is to create half-drop or brick repeats. To me that is probably where the advantages end. I think it’s a great tool for simple repeats but anything more complex becomes laborious. It’s also quite time consuming to export a pattern so as to be able to upload it to Spoonflower.

Almost all the collection are available for purchase from my Spoonflower store. I say almost all because I added three extra patterns over the weekend and I am waiting of the proofs to be printed before they are available for sale.

I have chosen quilt pattern that will be perfect for this collection, so I’ll keep you posted on my progress.

I also have a couple of posts planned on using the Illustrator pattern tool, especially how to export the pattern tile.

If you have any questions, leave me a comment.