5 Easy Steps to Turn Your Art into Wovens

Designing for woven fabrics requires both creativity and practical thinking. Having a creative vision for your work is just as essential to understanding how to set it up in such a way that the mechanics of a loom can translate it to fabric. While that may seem daunting, it’s really not when you understand the concept a little better. Which means, your fabric dreams are only a few simple steps from coming true:

Step 1: Start with the End in Mind

Think about it like this: when you jump into your car to drive to a location you’ve never been, you don’t just hit the gas and start in any direction you like. You have a starting point, GPS on your phone, and a destination you type in. When you’re turning your artwork into a woven, you can’t get there from here without a similar plan. That means you have a clear picture of what you want to end up with, whether it's a small pillow, a big blanket, or yards of upholstery fabric. Knowing your end goal is key before you begin so that you can set your file up to the proper loom parameters and end up with the result you hoped for. Choose your end product first, then set your file size to meet that product requirement.

Step 2: Choose Your Colors

Color sells. In fact, it’s the number one reason consumers purchase. But, unlike prints, you don’t have unlimited color options in a woven.  You need to be more strategic for the impact you want to achieve. And since in a woven, each color represents a different weave in the final fabric, most wovens are designed with no more than eight colors in the artwork. If you have more than that, the woven fabric could come off as “muddy”, too busy, or simply not well planned.

Step 3: Clean and Crisp

Once you know what your end product will be, and you have your color palette chosen, you will need to create a file that is crisp and clean. Those colors we mentioned? They have to be solid areas of a single color with no stray pixels. If you’re using a vector-based drawing platform, this is easy as vectors are based on solid areas of color. If you’re using a raster-based drawing platform, however, you will have to narrow each area of color down to a single solid color. Using indexed colors and making sure your anti-aliasing is turned off, is one way to meet this need.

Step 4: Turning Square Pixels into Rectangles

Now, here’s a little something to stretch your mind. In most digital formats, pixels are squares. In fact, if you were to zoom in far enough on anything digital, you would eventually get down to the base point, made from tiny squares. But in wovens, pixels are rectangular in shape. Why? Because the yarns that are being woven on the loom are typically two different sizes and the point at which they cross over each other actually creates a shape that is rectangular. Also known as your pixel aspect ratio, this number can be calculated by knowing the loom set your manufacturer uses and inserted into a program like Photoshop. Once you have this in place, you can resize your artwork so that it is the correct proportion while maintaining the correct pixel size.

Step 5: The Right Partner

While prepping your artwork is the largest part of the process, there’s still more work to be done in order to make your art communicate with the loom. From this point, you can upload your artwork to platforms that will automatically do this, or you can work alongside experts like those at Kindly Woven to strategically design the technical aspect of your vision. Kindly Woven offers Studio Intensives that walk you through the artwork to woven phase, as well as Private Label Developments where we can take your concept from idea to completed product line.

So, as you embark on your woven journey, remember this: your fabric dreams are within reach, waiting to be woven into reality. With a little creativity, a dash of practicality, and our expert guidance, there's no limit to what you can create. From picking colors to understanding pixels, we've got your back.

Let’s weave something amazing together!