When in Manila, there’s no better way to spend an afternoon than to get down and dirty with your hands to create something that’s totally unique.
For Alessa Lanot, crafting has become as easy as breathing, so we were lucky enough to be under her tutelage in her newest crafternoon: Pattern Design and Fabric Crafts. For two days, our group of about twenty sat in the always delicious Pino on Jupiter Street, painstakingly creating our patterns and coming up with different things to make with our beautiful patterned fabrics. This workshop is not for the faint of heart, but trust me when I say that the end result is worth it. Keep reading for When in Manila’s tips and for a closer look at how we made our own fabric!
DAY 1: Hand Drawn Pattern Design
The first day, our group gathered and Alessa taught us the basics of creating a patterned design: it’s not as easy as drawing a design on a piece of paper, but it’s not as complicated as physically replicating our work on paper a hundred times over. It was a matter of drawing, cutting, rearranging and cutting again. Trust me when I say that our table of crafters were definitely challenged when it came to this part. Our tip? Come in with an idea of the pattern you want to create! It’s much easier to play around with the colors of your Sharpie set when you kind of know what you want.
So how were we going to place our drawings on fabric? Enter the magic of Adamant Eve, a company specializing in digitally printing designs on synthetic fabrics. They took our patterns and took note of the scale we wanted for our fabric (I chose 1:1 because it looked better bigger) and eagerly awaited day 2 of our crafternoon.
