Fabric design
Since I can't wear geeky t-shirts to work, I now print and sew my own geeky business casual, with inspiration drawn from medieval Slavic, open source, manuscripts, and bizarre alphabets.
Where there's no license restriction (e.g. Creative Commons non-commercial licenses), all the fabric designs are for sale on spoonflower.com; the rest of the designs are available for anyone to download and print for their own non-commercial use.
Project website:
potential projects
Oh, this is going to stick around in the back of my head as another project now! I'm so bad about finishing projects, I really shouldn't even think about all the potential uses for this... yeah, too late.
I have some photos I took in the V&A in London in their wrought iron collection - I thought when I was looking at them that they'd be fun to do with batik on fabric, but since I have no experience in batik or indeed any other kind of printmaking, wax-resist or otherwise or fabric dyeing, I knew that project idea was unlikely to go anywhere.
But now I'm really tempted to start vectorizing the patterns from those photos and fiddling with this.... sigh...
- Emily (not sure why I can't change from Anonymous on this post when I could on your android post...)
tablet
That would make for an awesome fabric! If you find yourself getting hooked, and with a bit of extra cash lying around, you can get a tablet with a stylus for pretty cheap these days. I've been using one (albeit of the huge, old clunky variety) to trace manuscripts and other things where straight-up vectorizing was proving to be too great a challenge.
tablet option
Oh, sorry, I didn't see your reply until I just came back to share your stuff with someone else. My brother is a web illustrator and has a Wacom at home he is occasionally willing to let me borrow, so I may look into that. I have some other illustrations I want to get traced soon for my own website, so I may prioritize that first. I'm used to vectorizing by mouse with Illustrator, though, and the ironwork is pretty simple curves, so I don't think it would be too awful.
Also, since I'm going to share your post with another fun crafter person, I might as well make it mutual. She's trained as an engineer and sells amazing custom made tiny plushy creatures on etsy, I have a feeling you guys would like each other. Here's her spoonflower post: http://jefita.com/blog/2010/09/spoonflower-fabric-goodness/