From sketch to sock….

Hey y’all,  Happy Cinco de Mayo!

One of my favorite parts of this business is the actual design.  As you’ll see in the example, I am not good at drawing……at all.  But I still appreciate the creative aspect, the color choosing, the mash up of imagery, and just seeing a design and instantly knowing, “yep, that’s the one.”  To show you some of the steps involved I’m going to use our Monkey sock as an example.  I first started with a sketch.  I knew I wanted some sort of monkey hear no evil, see no evil type of thing.  Some cute monkey doing something that everyone recognizes, and everybody loves listening to music, right?  So why not a cute little monkey face wearing headphones?  I drew a couple sketches, got out my colored pencils to notate out some specific colors, and came up this:

Then I sent it to a professional designer, many of which are from right here in Portland.  They redraw the imagery in Photoshop or Illustrator and make something that looks like this:

From here we make a couple changes to pattern density, add or subtract details (in this example we added knobs to the outside of the headphones so they looked more like headphones and less like ear muffs) or we mess with the color until we come up with something we are happy with.  Once we have all the details finished, we assign each color with a special number that tells the manufacture which specific color to use and, voila!  We have a finished product:

Pretty cool huh?  Now this isn’t the only way it happens, but its one of the ways.  Maybe in one of the future posts I’ll show you examples of designs that didn’t turn out so great.  Since designs are stitched into the fabric there are some limitations and therefore can’t be as complicated as say a 7 color screen printed t-shirt.

Happy looking and if you’re out there could you drop me some kind of hint?  Like just type a period in the comment box or a simple word that has nothing to do with the post.  I’m curious to see if people are reading this, if not, there is no point for me to continue.

Happy happy day!

Carrie