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Fresno Nightcrawler Houndstooth // Fabric Design for @shapeshiftersvt and The Cryptid Collection

Remember way back a few weeks ago when I posted the Squonk poster and I said that once I'd designed the fabric to go along with it I'd start posting the fabric designs here? Well guess what! It's time!

For those who don't remember or who didn't know, I am the co-owner, site manager, and graphic designer for @shapeshiftersvt. 2024 marks our 10th anniversary and we wanted to do something big and special and new to mark the occasion and my partner, co-owner, head tailor, fashion designer, and founder, Eli, pitched a fashion line themed around cryptids. We call it The Cryptid Collection and it features six of our and the internet's favorite cryptids: The Fresno Nightcrawler, Mothman, the Jackalope, the Jersey Devil, Champ, and the Squonk.

My parts of the collection were designing the posters, and creating fabric designs for our very own, truly Shapeshifters designed chest binders and sports bras. But since we utilized Spoonflower to have those fabrics printed, they're also available through the Spoonflower marketplace for anyone to buy for their own sewing projects.

And now that all of the fabric designs are done and uploaded and proofed and listed, I, as promised, am posting them here to talk a bit more in-depth about them, the thoughts and inspirations behind them, and the design process.

Starting with the Fresno Nightcrawler.

Part of the reason I'm starting with the Fresno Nightcrawler is because this was the very first design that I finished. When we were planning out the fabrics, it was the most solid design concept I had that wasn't just adapting the poster design to fabric (mostly because ... I hadn't done the poster yet). It was the first one I really came up with, the one I was most excited about, and the one that pretty much stayed the same from concept to execution.

I love houndstooth. Which is weird to say when I don't think I've ever owned a single garment or accessory in with a houndstooth pattern? But I do, I love it. I love the teeny tiny classic version of the pattern; I love a blown-up graphic version of the pattern; I love plays and variations on it. So when I was trying to brainstorm what kind of fabric pattern I could make inspired by a creature with such a simple shape whose only colors were white and black, the idea came pretty quickly: A houndstooth. Or a Nightcrawlertooth, if you will. It was a trick, though, and a real learning experience, especially with this being my first design.

Getting a pattern to repeat smoothly is a skill unto itself. Basically you have what's called a tile, and the tile contains the part of the pattern that you want to repeat. Then, when your pattern is created, the original tile just gets essentially copy-pasted over and over so 1) you don't have to draw the whole yard of fabric, and 2)all of the repeated parts of the design are identical. But by doing it this way, you have seams you need to take into consideration. If you think of putting the pattern together, it's sort of like making a basic quilt: You start with one square (or rectangle), then attach four more squares to each side, and then just keep doing that. Each one of those seams (top, bottom, left, right) is a place where the pattern might not match up, which means when it's applied to a yard of fabric, it's not going to look like a smooth, seamless pattern.

Of course there's ways to avoid this altogether. If you're doing a simple stripe, using the line tool in your drawing software will keep your stripe a consistent thickness, and holding SHIFT while you draw it will keep the line straight. Or, even easier, you can create a pattern where the part that repeats doesn't straddle a seam; like a polkadot pattern, where the dot(s) can be centered on the tile and seams only cut through a solid background.

The trouble with a houndstooth, though, is that not only does the tile need to repeat, it's made up of repeating figures that interlock. I can't just center the white Nightcrawler on the tile and call it a day, because then the black Nightcrawler straddles the seam. On top of that, they needed to be shaped in such a way that the negative space between the white Nightcrawlers left a shape that was also recognizable as a Nightcrawler and similar enough to the white one that the pattern is mostly seamless.

I fully admit that I was not able to do this on my own. Enter: Eli. Eli is, among other things, a math nerd who enjoys an excuse to break out the graph paper. They found a tutorial online and got to graphing and shaping and, in just a couple of hours, had gotten the shapes down. I took that tile, illustrated it, cleaned up the seams (shoutout to Eli for also finding an easier way to do this than just manually copy-pasting), and voila! A Fresno Nightcrawler houndstooth.

Now, you might look at that image up there and say, "Well that's all well and good, Pents, but they're kind of blobby and the lines are wobbly and it's all a little uneven." To which I say ... yeah, that's true. It's also kind of intentional. Like, I'm not gonna sit here and claim I got the basic pattern done and wasn't exhausted. But also I could've left it and come back to it the next day to clean up the lines and shapes a bit more, make everything really smooth and even. But, like. Look at this guy.

He's just a weird kinda blobby little dude. So I left the pattern kinda weird and blobby.

Even if I'd cleaned it, it's such a blobby little shape that's so at odds with the classic houndstooth that's all straight lines and sharp angles. So I made a deliberate choice to not polish it up. To kind of lean into the kodama vibes:

I am really so so proud of and pleased with this design. It came out almost exactly how I pictured it; it was really the most true design collaboration between Eli and I; and I'm just so pleased, after a lifetime of being a houndstooth lover, to now also have designed a houndstooth.

If you'd like a custom-sized, handmade, made-to-order binder or sports bra in this houndstooth like the one in the photos, you can find those listings (as well as the poster listing) here, on the Shapeshifters website. There are three pattern size options, the classic teeny tiny version; a somewhat bigger medium size; and a super graphic large size. Our binders are the most comfortable and effective on the market thanks to our finely graded internal sizing system. Because we're a small operation that makes every garment to order, both our binders and sports bras are highly customizable, and can be made to ALL measurements with flat pricing across sizes.

If you'd like to purchase the fabric yourself for your own sewing projects, you can order it through our Spoonflower shop, where we have it listed in the same three pattern sizes.

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