Hamburger Liebe's Supahero wins best cartoon fabric

 
Congratulations to Susanne Firmenich of Hamburg, Germany. "Supahero," her fabulous cartoon fabric design, won last week's Fabric Of the Week contest.

Full voting results are here, but be sure to check out Susanne's blog (it will be helpful if you speak German) and her shop on Dawanda.

Vote for Mythical Beast fabrics! New Year's Fabric O'the Week Contest

New Year's Eve seems like the perfect time to celebrate dragons and other mystical beasties, so before you pop the champagne this evening be sure to vote for your favorite fabric designs in this, our mythical-beast-themed fabric of the week contest.

We had 40 designers submit their work and, while you can visit the voting page only once, while you are there you can vote for all the designs you like.

The poll closes on Tuesday, January 5. Good luck to the designers!

• Mythical Sea Hooping by Barbra Ignatiev
• Flower Fairy by Beena Singhal
• Green dragons 2 by Carol Bruce
• MerShiim by Cate Anevski
• dgtale by Cathy McLeod
• Tooth Fairy_Coins by Craft Belle
• minotaur...lost in the labyrinth...full tilt by Elizabeth McKenzie
• Tiny Gold Visitor by Ellen Morrow
• Mermaids on Mopeds by Emily Whittaker
• La Belle Femme De La Mer by Gretchen Schroeder
• girly mermaids by Jen Addotta
• Sweet Lorelei by Jeni Paltiel
• Tiny Sentry by Jennifer L Nilsson
• Saint George Frightens the Dragon by Jessie Lawson
• unicornbookedit_copy by Jo Clarke
• Moondragon by Johanna Pless
• Beautiful Big White Horses by Julie Shaw
• French Beasts by juliet wayne
• mythical mermaid by karen cox
• Horned Octopuss by Katherine Labate
• Einhorn by Kati Meden
• Cuteasaurous - tile by Kerry Youde
• mermaid's tail by Leanne Lonergan
• LochNess swimmer by Lisa Howard
• Fantasy in the Sky by Lori Howe
• Fire Lizard by Lyell Rodieck
• Crunchy Cookie by Melia Newman
• Seaworthy 3 by Nalo Hopkinson
• Merlions by Natalie Kelsey
• Dragons Holding Medallion by Pam LaReaux
• Green Monster swarm! by raquel coelho
• Nika's Dragons by shout4joy
• Jewel Encrusted Mermaid by Sylvia Ion
• "bubbles" by Terrell Dorfeo
• Curiquingue by Vib
• vll dragon fly 1 by Victoria Lasher
• unicorn by vo by vo
• Jordan's Cockatrice by Wendy C Allen
• My little Pegasus by Yih Chwen Poh
• the odd couble:unicorn and dragon by zoe morrow-zomo

New fabric contest themes: birds (palette-restricted) and toile de jouy

We're not giving you much lead time on either of these (pressure kicks your creativity into high gear, right!), but we've got two new themes for the Fabric Of the Week contest ready to go. The first is another color-restricted theme, and the other is something new for us -- a spin on a traditional textile design form called a toile.

Birds: Using the specified palette [download as an aco file or Download as an HTML file], create a fabric design using birds as the design motif. Deadline is Monday, January 4, 2009, at noon EST. The entry form is HERE.

Toile de Jouy:  A toile is an 18th-century French style of textile design consisting of "a repeated pattern depicting a fairly complex scene, generally of a pastoral theme such as (for example) a couple having a picnic by a lake. Toiles also often consist of an arrangement of flowers." [Wikipedia]  These designs usually use a very restricted color palette -- white or off-white background and a foreground using a single, dark color such as black, dark red, blue, green, brown or magenta. Deadline is Monday, January 11, 2009, at noon EST. For examples, Google is always handy. The entry form is HERE.

Full rules and Q&A for our contests can be found here.

Vote for your favorite cartoon fabric design

This week's fabric of the week theme is fabric designs using cartoons. Up until Tuesday, Dec. 29th, you can vote for your favorite designs HERE. We'll announce the winners next week. Merry Christmas!

Participating designers this week are:

Kate Martinez    Hot Air Balloons, Pink & Orange   
Phyllis Harris    Kitten   
Susan Faye    BIRD BRAIN No. 5...Twins In the Tulips6   
Moira Fogarty    SMOOlolz   
Linda Tieu    Little Monkey  
Anda Corrie    Three Friends   
Wendy C Allen    Pink Chesie The Cheshire Cat   
StudioFibonacci    Cartoon Japanese Countryside   
Jessee Maloney    Monsters On the Loose - Girl   
Nalo Hopkinson    Circus   
laura    Ducks   
Connie Kaiser    roboband2   
karen cox    Wobniar The Rainbow Dragon   
Susanne    Supahero   
Sylvia Ion    Fat Tuesday Cartoon Contest   
Katie Bailey    Smile Bears   
Tessa Roberts    Blue Monster   
JamJax    Chris 001   
Kitty Pink    img058   
Kim Niles    Tennis Pro Poms   
Sara Norwood    moo moo   
Amanda Kastner    Bouncing Baby   
Tara Crowley    Sunbonnet Sue Star Hearts   
Danielle  Hanson    children cartoon fabric   
Cynthia Frenette    La petite cartoon   
Lesli Pepper    A Snail's Life   
virginia    kitty cat fabric1   
Elizabeth McKenzie    peace is a balancing act   

UPCOMING - Mythical Beasts: Dec 28 Entry forms & details: HERE

Congratulations to the winner of Spoonflower's kids' clothing pattern contest

Congratulations to Annelie Hervi! She won our children's clothing pattern contest with a terrific shirt design  she put together using Inkscape, a free vector art program (with a bit of help drafting the pattern in AutoCAD). Originally from Sweden, Annelie now lives in Washington State and her blog is Craft and Cackle. The photo above is of her pattern on our 100% organic cotton knit.

What a terrific bunch of entries! If you missed the voting last week, be sure to take a look through the links below. The challenge was to design a clothing pattern that fit entirely onto a single yard of fabric, instructions and all. The entries were quite inspiring.

Voting totals were:

Sylvia Ion    www.spoonflower.com/explore/116243 503
Linn Bodur    www.spoonflower.com/explore/128097 241
jo ebisujima    www.spoonflower.com/explore/128632 209
danielle Hanson    www.spoonflower.com/explore/129442 403
Leigh    www.spoonflower.com/explore/129520/ 20
Victoria Lasher    www.spoonflower.com/fabric/123592 48
dorottya biborné veres    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130228 107
Monique Daley    www.spoonflower.com/fabric/125142 687
Daniela    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130270 246
Annelie Hervi    www.spoonflower.com/fabric/126020 710
Audrey    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130320 95
Rachel Galloway    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130322 298
Star Primm    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130391 528
Amelia Reising    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130301 458
rosanna bernstein    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130410 88
Rebecca    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130412 142
Antonia Manda    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130390 339

Tips for printing photos on fabric

Question: Can I use Spoonflower to print my photos on fabric?

Yes, digital textile printing is terrific for photos. Pictured here is a pillow -- a gift for a family member this Christmas -- that I put together with the help of photos from my Flickr photostream, Picnik's collage feature, and Kim's sewing talents. This pillow is made from Spoonflower's linen-cotton canvas, which makes for a nice sturdy pillow fabric, and a 16" pillow form (from Amazon).

First I set up a front panel on Picnik with 8 rows and 8 columns of photos, which at "high" quality produces a collage image exactly 2400 pixels x 2400 pixels in size. 2400 pixels conveniently prints at 16 inches using 150 dpi. [Note that the 8x8 layout is available only to Picnik premium members, but you can do the same thing in almost any image-editing program, including the basic program that probably shipped with your digital cameras.] After setting up a back panel the same way I saved both files to my hard drive.

To save a bit of time, I used Photoshop Elements to arrange the front and back panels into a single file, leaving room for a quarter-inch seam allowance on all sides (on Kim's advice). I uploaded that file to Spoonflower and ordered it on linen-cotton. Two 16" panels are slightly too large to fit onto a fat-quarter of linen cotton (27"x18"), but you can still economize by arranging several sets of pillow panels onto a single yard ($24.30). One of the advantages of using the linen-cotton canvas is that the fabric is preshrunk, so if you set up a 16" panel and wash it before sewing you'll get very little, if any, shrinkage.

Photos on fabric often turn out well, but it's important to keep a few things in mind when selecting photographic images for digital fabric-printing:

1) Start with a clear, high-resolution photo. A typical digital camera these days produces images that are 4000 x 3000 pixels or larger. You could print a 4000 pixel wide photo on Spoonflower at up to 26 inches across. Keep in mind that you can always reduce the size of an image that's too big (you'll see a size editor on the lower right of the Spoonflower fabric preview page ), but you can't make a small photo larger. Blowing up small images creates pixelation.

2) Find images with good contrast. Fabric can't hold the same level of detail that photographic paper can hold (which is why 150 dpi is our default resolution rather than 300, the resolution used by printers working with paper). Good contrast between the foreground and background is essential to make the subject of your photo clear when it is printed on the fabric. I've seen people do some lovely work with old black and white photos and postcards, for example. But if you have a lot detail that is lit the same way -- in mixed light and shadow, it probably won't print very well. In the detail photo on the left, the photo just to the right of the black & white portrait printed badly because the faces weren't well-lit and there wasn't enough contrast in the features to make them distinct.

3) Look for evenly-lit subjects. Especially if you're printing photos of people, look for subjects with good, even lighting, like the baby in the photo on the right. Textile printing systems are designed to handle one-to-one color matching very well, but don't do as well reproducing subtle gradients, which is the forte of photo printers. You can get around this issue by choosing photos that don't rely so much on gentle transitions between light and dark shades of color to reproduce well.

Lots of people write us to ask how they can learn to design their own fabric, which is sometimes a challenging question to answer. Textile design is, of course, something many people spend years studying. But if you make the question a bit simpler, there are lots of ways to create lovely designs on textiles. Many, many people have access to digital photos these days and some familiarity with doing simple edits and uploading them to web sites. Creating a photo pillow -- per the simple instructions above -- is one way. Creating fabric using a scanner and some simple objects -- leaves, for example -- is another. The best way to learn is to experiment. One of our goals at Spoonflower is to make digital textile printing easy enough, fast enough and affordable enough to make that sort of experimentation possible.

Have fun!

The winners of Spoonflower's Dec. 18 Friday Fabric Giveaway are...

Subscribers to our weekly newsletter had a chance yesterday to enter their names for a drawing for 2-yards of free Spoonflower custom fabric. We run our drawings through Random.org (record of drawing here) and thanks to their service we have the pleasure of announcing this week's five winners:

Katrina Brown
Amy (SuryaDesigns)
Rhonda Warner 
Laura Bucci
Colleen Evans

We'll email all of the individual winners with details. If you're not a subscriber to our weekly newsletter and would like to participate in this sort of thing in the future, you can sign up below. Hey... it's snowing in Mebane, North Carolina right now! Happy holidays.

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Vote in the hardest fabric design challenge ever: kid's clothing pattern in a single-yard

Our Fabric Of the Week competition this week was so difficult that I wasn't sure we'd have more than one or two entries, but -- true to form -- in the end a whole team of designers in our community rose to the challenge. So you now have seventeen original kid's clothing patterns to choose from. Vote for as many as you like (voting closes Tuesday) and look for an announcement of the winner next week.

Thank you to the participating designers!

Sylvia Ion    www.spoonflower.com/explore/116243
Linn Bodur    www.spoonflower.com/explore/128097
jo ebisujima    www.spoonflower.com/explore/128632
danielle Hanson    www.spoonflower.com/explore/129442
Leigh    www.spoonflower.com/explore/129520/
Victoria Lasher    www.spoonflower.com/fabric/123592
dorottya biborné veres    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130228
Monique Daley    www.spoonflower.com/fabric/125142
Daniela    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130270
Annelie Hervi    www.spoonflower.com/fabric/126020
Audrey    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130320
Rachel Galloway    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130322
Star Primm    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130391
Amelia Reising    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130301
rosanna bernstein    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130410
Rebecca    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130412
Antonia Manda    www.spoonflower.com/explore/130390

Good luck!

Spoonflower Holiday Shipping Deadline For US Customers: Today

Reminder: To guarantee delivery of your fabric by Christmas in the domestic United States using our standard shipping, please place your order no later than today (December 14). The holiday deadline for International orders has already passed.

In either case -- domestic or International -- you can continue to use our RUSH option through the end of the week and expect delivery by December 24.

 

 

New Fabric Of the Week Contest Themes: Cartoons & Mythical Beasts

New fabric design contest themes:

• Cartoons: Create a fabric design based around cartoons or cartoon-like characters. You'll see lots of examples of this sort of design on Spoonflower already and they sometimes get eclipsed in our competitions so we decided to give them their own. Deadline is Monday, December 21, 2009, at noon EST. The entry form is HERE.
• Mythical Beasts: Unicorns, dragons, mermaids, minotaurs -- create a fabric design based on some sort of mythical creature of your own choosing. Deadline is Monday, December 28, 2009, at noon EST. The entry form is HERE.

For those already working on something, keep in mind that the deadline for our 1-yard Children's Clothing Pattern contest is Monday, 12/14/2009 at noon EST:  Entry form can be found on the contest page linked below.

The general rules for our contests are here.

And the Winners of Spoonflower's Friday Fabric Giveaway Drawing are...

Those of you who subscribe to our weekly newsletter had the opportunity yesterday to enter your name for a drawing for 2-yards of free Spoonflower custom fabric. We just completed the drawing (courtesy of Random.org: record of drawing here) and congratulations go out to our five winners:

Kathryn
Colleen McDonell
Montrice Miller
Jaclyn Keough
Elisa Karp

We'll email all of the above individuals with details. If you're not a subscriber to our weekly newsletter and would like to participate in this sort of thing in the future, you can sign up below. Happy holidays, everyone!

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Tea-towel calendar template

For any of you who would like to create your own tea-towel calendar and who lack either the time or expertise to make one from scratch, here is a calendar template you can download and use with one of your own design images. Click to download the full-size version. [also: Download htm file (editable in Word)  or download a rasterized Photoshop file]

By way of an example, below is a fun calendar I made using photos of contest fabrics as a background (compiled using the 'collage' feature of Picnik), and inserting a semi-transparent layer between the calendar text and the photos. I wouldn't offer this to anyone else, of course, without securing permission from the designers of the various pictured fabrics, but it's a fun idea.

Fabric of the Week: Celestial Stars

Congratulations to Deborah Mote of Middleburg, PA! Her Celestial Stars design won Fabric of the Week for the world's first digital fabric design competition based entirely on artwork that originates in a non-digital medium. The competition, as usual, was inspiring.

Final voting tallies were:

• Celestial Quilt by Natalie Kelsey 16
• Sun and Moon by Julie Shaw 35
• img059-ch by Jean 11
• here comes the sun by Pamela Corwin 68
• Starstreak4 by Candice Held 133
• Celestial_stars by Deborah Mote 333
• Celestial Doodle by Gretchen Little 112
• Atlantic_sunset by Lyn Slade 70
• celestial_sun by Jane Marlow 31
• Many_Moons by Jen Addotta 48
• startree by meghan 283
• Good Night Westies IV by Kim Niles 120
• sweet dreams van gogh by Elizabeth McKenzie 77
• Celestial Chandelier by Kolleen Fortenberry 69
• vll_blackholes_eat_everything by Victoria Lasher 46
• robots in space on blue by zomo 106
• Cats in Heaven by Gila von Meissner 52
• sun_earth_moon_jkp2 by Jennifer K Perrella 208
• ZodiacSky by kari 69
• dreesstarcube_unit by dedree drees 130
• Celestial Moon Goddess by Tara Crowley 50
• Winter Solstice Sun I by Cindy Eubanks 139
• Luna by Natalie Hamade 62
• planetary polka dot by raven erebus 174
• sun-moon-stars by Stefanie von Hoesslin 80
• Heaven and Wings by Angela 63
• cassini's division by Cat Kane 228
• Man in the moon by Jane Marlow 20
• Starry Night by Aimee Elisabeth 197
• CELESTIAL DEEP SPACE by Anne Edwards 58

Thanks to all the participating designers!

We'll post a list of upcoming design themes and deadlines later today.

Introducing Spoonflower's Linen-Cotton Canvas

Big news: Spoonflower is very pleased to introduce linen-cotton canvas, a really lovely blend of 55% linen and 45% combed cotton.

This is a lightweight canvas, about 5.5 oz per square yard, so durable enough for pillows and bags but also great for making apparel. $27 pr/yd is the regular price, but if you are a designer purchasing your own designs it's only $24.30 pr/yd.

One note: The cloth is natural white, but after we heat it (post-printing) it turns a slightly cream color. When washed, however, the cream comes back to white. [more photos here]

Notes on Upcoming Children's Clothing Themed Fabric of the Week Contest

Deadline for entering our upcoming Childrens' Clothing Themed Fabric of the Week contest is Monday, December 14th at noon EST. Entry form is here.

Notes;

• Some of you have asked if the clothing patterns have to be original as well as the surface designs. Yes, please submit only original designs.
• The question has also come up as to whether or not the one-yard requirement has to be on quilting-weight (width 42"). It's a good question. It would be much easier for us if ALL of the entries are sized for a yard of quilting-weight cotton, but in case you are already designing for an upholstery-weight yard (width 52"), we're going to add a field on the entry form that allows you to specify the fabric.

We'll post answers to any other questions that come up in this thread.

Friday Fabric Giveaway - 2-yards of free custom fabric for three winners!

It's Friday -- not just any Friday but a Friday in the middle of the holiday season, which means that in all likelihood you are extra worn out. You need a chance to win some free Spoonflower fabric!

--ENTRY FORM IS CLOSED - announcing winners shortly---

And the winners are:
Bronwyn Landvatter, Cameron Blazer, and Jennifer Perrella. Congrats!
Will email you all shortly. For a record of the drawing, see this page on Random.org.

Spoonflower Rush Shipping Option Is Live

At long last, Spoonflower now has an official RUSH shipping option that pretty much guarantees delivery of your custom fabric anywhere on the planet in under a week.

If you order before noon EST, your fabric will ship the next day. You can read all about it on our Rush shipping page.

Spoonflower's holiday shipping deadlines

For delivery by Dec. 24th, in the US place your order by December 14th.

Outside of the US, place orders no later than December 7th for delivery by Christmas.

In other news, we'll be rolling out a Spoonflower RUSH shipping option very shortly. Stay tuned for details.