Some Thoughts on Designing Repeats

This little napkin used to hang in my studio for the longest time. Its not particularly fancy or remarkable, just an $8 short-lived Fall Crate and Barrel Flora napkin. What's so lovely about it is how it thinks about space in the repeat design.

It is tempting, when creating a repeat design, to create one or two motifs and space them out equally on white fabric and call it a day.
Flora's designer approached things in a different way. Instead of placing one floating image across the fabric, the designer was more concerned about occupying space. One way to approach this is to increase the density of our motif.
By adding in a few more flowers and having them bump into each other, instead of floating, the feeling of density is increased and more coverage is obtained. It also helps to add a background color.
Note that the fabric color is still visible. Your ground color is a free color you don't need to print, don't waste it by covering it completely! At this point, the repeat still feels like some floating flowers over a heavy background, so lets break it up with some leaves, taking advantage of our fabric color.
What a difference that makes! No new color, printing less physical ink, and its now way easier to break up the repeat for printing.
The print is feeling a little busy now (arguably a valid criticism of the original Flora print, I go back and forth about it, personally), so lets tone it down by dyeing the fabric a closer color to our inks. Buying a fabric with color, dyeing before or after printing can make your reveals of the color seem that much more deliberate and less obvious.
To finish things off, I integrated that background taupe into some of the flowers and added a second red. At this point, we're at four colors with a reasonable repeat that can be printed on a grid and easily registered by hand once the first color (probably the taupe) is laid out.


With some patience and diligence, you can take your repeats to the next level, whether through this approach or any other countless ways you can learn about here at Lillstreet. Keep your eyes open and look at the patterns in your life. You never know what may inspire you to create something new!