Use a Fabric Design Service To Create Or Modify Fabric Designs for Miniatures:
Create and Print Your Own Miniature Fabrics From Your Printer:
If you prefer, you can design fabrics with your computer software, or a free open source program like Inkscape and print them on fabrics designed to run through ink jet or laser printers. These designs can be taken from printable wallpapers and fabric designs, as well as made from your own artwork. Suitable fabrics include EQ Printable Cotton Lawn and Jacquard Inkjet Silk Habotai or silk organza. Many of these printable fabrics are available by the roll or in standard letter sized sheet for ink jet printers.
Help With Miniature Upholstery and Design of Small Scale Fabrics:
How to Upholster Dolls House Furniture - Reupholstering dolls house furniture is not particularly difficult. You can view how a commercial dolls house chair was refinished and reupholstered to match printable wallpapers in this tutorial on reupholster a doll's house chair. If you prefer to create original furniture pieces to upholster, a good reference book for beginners is Jane Storey's Making Upholstered Furniture in 1:12 Scale.
Samples of Custom Upholstery - There are a wonderful set of photos up on Flickr Photostream, posted by Ken Haseltine of JBM USA, who has used a range of upholstery fabrics on standard JBM and Jiayi dolls house furniture. Many of his pieces use fabric from Spoonflower designers Jane Walker Illustrations(who is also building a steampunk dolls house) and Kristopher K. Design
Creating Custom Fabric Designs- Detailed tutorials for creating repeating designs for paper or fabric can be found on many digital scrapbooking or design sites. An excellent series of tutorials specifically using the Spoonflower fabric site can be found on Mama made designs using free opensource software, The GIMP (photo software) and Inkscape a free vector software similar to Adobe Illustrator. The Spoonflower website has a comprehensive help section on how to upload and manipulate your designs to make fabrics. Designs can be uploaded as JPG, PNG, GIF or TIF (8 bit uncompressed) files which must be less than 30 MB in size. Designs uploaded to the site are private unless the owner chooses to make it public.
Once uploaded you can choose to center designs, put it into a basic tiled repeat or create a half-drop of brick repeats that stagger the design throughout the fabric area. The design area of Spoonflower also features a simple design system using Picnik.com's clipart and text which allows you to experiment with designs and layouts without needing graphic software. Spoonflower fabrics can be printed on cotton lawn, or silk Crepe de Chine at $5 for an 8 inch square 'test' swatch or between $11 and $20 for a 21 inch by 18 inch 'fat quarter' Other fabric weights for regular upholstery or quilting projects are also available.
Scaling Fabric Design Sizes on Spoonflower - It is possible to scale patterns on Spoonflower, making a huge range of fabric designs available in miniature. To scale the designs you must first enter the items in your shopping cart. Once the design appears in your cart there is a small edit link beside the fabric thumbnail. If you click on that edit link you are taken to an area where you can scroll down through the fabric size options 'design size'. If you click on the 'edit this' link beside the design size option, you can click the 'smaller' button and check the measurement rulers alongside the view of the design to get the design to a size suitable for your miniature project. Changing the listed DPI (dots per inch usually 150) to double the DPI number (say 300) will reduce the design size by half.
Fabrics for Doll Clothing - Also available via Spoonflower are printed doll clothing designs by several artists including Daniel Bingham designs several of which are offered in 1:6 or playscale for fashion dolls. It is also possible to scale down these printed doll clothes, (doubling the dpi is the easiest way to reduce the design by 100% but you should make sure the pieces which result will be a manageable size for your 1:12 scale doll. Not all doll clothing fabrics are suitable for reduction due to construction details.
