Final Revision
Alright so now I have to come up with my own patterns!
And I’m only left with less than a week to do so!! Ahhh!!!
I still really like the yellow flower pattern that I found on Pattern Jam though. So what I did was to take that motif and tried to replicate an exceedingly similar pattern :p After which, I also combined it with another flower motif I drew myself and added some dots to create another pattern. Hence, my final piece was created using only two patterns. However, I played with scale and colours so that it would still have visual interest.
Ta-da!
I decided to leave the square plain and only made it look like a patch for I was afraid that the patterns were already too much on the eye and more designs on the center would confuse the viewers instead. Also because my references tells me that patchwork quilt fabric squares usually looks similiar:
Problems
For all my previous mock-ups, I found that alignment was a huge issue. I had not thought that working with triangles would be so difficult before this project. It really took me till the last revision to finally straighten out my triangles and made sure that they were aligned properly digitally.
The next problem was printing alignment. I realized that even if the double-sided printing came out just a teeny bit off, it would affect my entire card because my designs were strictly triangular and there was no room for any bleeds or errors!
The worst thing was that my previous test prints were all on 80gsm paper which was already the easiest to fold. That had me worrying sick that a higher grammage would be too difficult to fold. One word: STRESS!
Printing
Okay so finally the day for printing has come. I geared up with cutting mat and penknife and 30-cm ruler and headed to Sunshine Plaza. Tried out a 170gsm paper first and it gave me this:
The paper was too thick so the card did not fold well even after scoring. I then tried a 140gsm paper. This grammage folds well and the card sat really nicely. But :
So I headed to the other print shop highly recommended by all my friends for their awesome double-sided prints. It was really expensive (double the price), but considering the wonderful finish, I would say, it’s a small price to pay 🙂
Improvements
Right after the uncle sent my design to the printer, I realized I could have tried printing on fancier paper such as those with cloth/fabric textures. But it was too late and I didn’t want to spend more money :p But it would definitely have been fun to explore the other paper choices.
If given more time I would also like to work a little more on my patterns because I feel like pattern design is a huge thing even on its own and it would be great to come up with motifs and designs which are uniquely mine.
Takeaway
1. It is hard to digitally draw perfect triangles
2. Alignment is affected by EVERYTHING – calculations, paperweight, printing quality
3. Good double-sided printing is expensive but so worth it
4. Scoring requires some thought and folding, some patience