Design your own fabric

I'm not really into shameless plugging companies, but this is super fun. Spoonflower will take your design and print it on fabric for as little as $18/yard. If you have a small class or an art club, you could take this one step further and do soft sculpture or fashion design using student-designed fabric. Project Runway did this a couple of times.  Mondo, a former contestant, designed this print for the pants fabric and then designed an outfit around it.

Project Runway contest, Mondo, designed the fabric first and outfit second

The possibilities are endless: print fabric labels on one yard and cut them down to size, design fabric and make a sculpture using wallpaper glue to stiffen it up, use embroidery floss to create a composition on the custom fabric, create soft sculptures, line the back of shelving units in furniture design, create custom upholstery for furniture, fashion design, handbag design, book covers, altered books, dolls, jewelry, publish photos and mount them on stretcher bars, etc. SO many ideas! At the very least, you could do some high contrast black and white photos, put them on a colored background, and voila! you have a Warhol-inspired piece of custom fabric.

Check out some of these samples from the Spoonflower site:

patterns

faux granny squares

faux wood

tetris

 

pencil illustration

pantone color chart

high contrast black + white photo