My First Fabric Collection: Why Immersion in 2024?
The dust has settled after completing my online course Immersion in May and I finally feel like I am ready to share about the experience. Over the next several weeks, I am going to take you through my journey completing the Immersion course, which, spoiler alert, blew my mind. From March through May, spending anywhere from fifteen minutes to hours at a time, I worked my way through the course materials and completed my final project of designing a fabric collection. It was a lot. Sometimes I was so excited, I couldn’t stop talking about what I was learning or the possibilities I was discovering. Sometimes I was so insecure and overwhelmed I was almost in tears, thinking “what the heck am I even doing.” But I stuck with it, and by the end of May, I had (mostly) finished my first fabric collection: TREAD.
This series will cover:
Why Immersion in 2024? (keep reading 🙂)
Gathering Inspiration
Workflow & Accountability
Creating the Work
My Final Project
Prepping My Collection for Spoonflower
Let’s get started…
Why Immersion in 2024?
Original carabiner sketch.
You might think that story begins back in February 2024 with my enrollment, but it actually begins in December 2022, when I took Bonnie Christine’s free online mini course, Start Simple in Pattern Design. This course actually popped up as a sponsored Instagram ad. I had never heard of Bonnie Christine and I only vaguely understood what the ad meant when it said surface pattern design. The course was free and boasted that I would learn how to turn a sketch into a repeating pattern for fabric or stationery using Adobe Illustrator in under 20 minutes a day for five days. I don't even know what ultimately motivated me to sign up, but I did, and over the course of that week, I turned a simple sketch of a rock climbing carabiner into a repeating pattern using Adobe Illustrator and got actual fabric printed and shipped to my apartment.
Repeating pattern in Illustrator.
I truly cannot emphasize the impact that this mini course had on me at the time. It was like a door opened to a world that I did not even know existed. I had never heard of terms like POD (print on demand), or drop shipping (direct to consumer from a manufacturer), and had never considered that people could create whole businesses by essentially creating digital files for products. It unlocked new ideas for what I could do with my art. In 2022, I was definitely focusing on my art more and more. I was no longer just watching tutorials, but I was painting my own pieces and I had a permanent space set up in the living room to work. While I was spending more time painting, I had no firm ideas for what kind of artist I wanted to be. (Honestly, I’m still figuring that one out.)
Like most experienced marketers, Bonnie Christine uses her free mini course to entice people to signed up for her more intense Surface Design Immersion course, her (and I quote):
8-week online training program for those who want to learn Adobe Illustrator, the art of surface pattern design, how to become a licensing artist, & build a career as a creative entrepreneur.
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I was one hundred percent intrigued, but at the price tag of almost $2,000, it was not something that was remotely in the cards for 2023, but the seed was planted.
Printed fabric from Spoonflower.
Taking that free mini-course in 2022 was one instigating force that led me to pick the word consistency as my word of 2023. I knew that if I wanted to really focus on my art and try to move in the direction of an art business rather than an art hobby, I was going to have to come up with some consistent workflows to make steady progress while also working full time. My gut at the time told me that my pillars of consistency needed to be:
Painting regularly and creating a lot of work to develop my style.
Documenting the process.
Expanding my online presence beyond Instagram.
Practicing Consistency
So in 2023, that is what I did. I launched my website, my blog, and my email list. I painted regularly almost every week and created more finished paintings than ever before. I consistently showed up on Instagram. I also started trying to build my business knowledge by learning from entrepreneurs like Amy Porterfield and Jenna Kutcher, as well as art entrepreneurs like Sarah Watts and Stacie Bloomfield.
I also started to plan for the course financially. I knew that beyond the cost of the course itself, I also was going to need a subscription to the Adobe softwares I was going to use, a laptop to work on (and I wanted a Mac), and I also wanted a quality scanner.
Finally I began to think through time management. I knew that this course was going to take a significant investment of my time just when my full time job was starting to ramp up (March-May). While I would have access to the online Immersion course for life, I wanted to be able to complete it in real time. I wanted to complete the modules and homework as they were released and to take advantage of the live community and real time feedback. To accomplish this goal, I saved up vacation time so that I could take one day off per week for the duration of the course.
When it came to completing the course, I just wanted to keep up. I did not have a goal beyond that because I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. I had ideas of hopefully developing a fabric collection, but I didn’t want to put any expectations on myself. A big reason to take this course, beyond developing the skills, was to understand what was even possible. I wanted to be around a group of people who had similar goals and dreams to mine, and people who were leaps and bounds ahead of me in terms of their businesses and their art.
Taking the Leap
Immersion 2024 workbook.
So in late fall 2023, I closed my Immersion savings account to get myself a MacBook Pro laptop, a scanner, and a black friday sale on an annual Adobe Creative Suite subscription and when enrollment opened on February 13, 2024, I took the leap. From then until graduation on May 13, I feel like Immersion took up every spare bit of my time. It was A LOT, but it was also so good.
While the course included eight specific modules, it ended up being closer to a twelve week project. It included prep lessons to learn about how to stay accountable and gather inspiration, there were implementation weeks to give yourself a chance to catch up, and I was very thankful to be part of an amazing study group that kept me motivated and accountable to my goals and perhaps, more importantly, my dreams.
Next up on the blog: Gathering Inspiration
Introducing: TREAD
Hey you! Can’t wait to get to the end of this six part series? My first fabric collection: Tread is available now on Spoonflower. One FREE way that you can support me is by favoriting those patterns that you like.
TREAD is a collection that celebrates the roads we travel and the marks we leave behind. This collection is inspired by historic automobiles, vintage fashion, and art deco designs.