Hematology Fabric

Last year I stumbled across Spoonflower, a web based business that takes your digital artwork and prints it on a variety of different fabrics for you. I tried my hand at creating designs for my own use. It's harder than you think! Getting a complex design to tile properly is the hard part, and I fought with photoshop for many hours until I figured it out. It's a little bit addictive, really. It's bad enough that I have boxes in my studio stuffed full of fabric scraps. Now I can design my own? Dangerous!

One of the designs that I made a while back was something I thought would be fun to sew into a scrubs top I could wear to work. Since I work in hematology, I spend a good deal of time looking at blood smears under the microscope. I turned a digital image I took with a camera-scope into a repeating pattern and had Spoonflower print it for me. At right is the single tile image I made, it's what normal (healthy) human peripheral blood looks like. To see it repeating, click on the image and it will take you to my design on Spoonflower. I'm a science nerd, I admit it. I finally got around to buying a couple yards of this fabric for myself and I'm sewing the scrubs top tonight. I have grand plans for making other fabric designs like this using various hematological diseases that display characteristic morphologies. Then my co-workers can try and figure out what disease I am today! Did I mention I was a nerd? Yeah. I did.