New high-quality quilting-weight cotton

As noted in today's Spoonflower email, we're going through a transition right now in our quilting-weight cotton. Starting this week we've printed all quilting-weight orders on cotton with a slightly different thread construction: 78x76 rather than the 60x60 we have used in the past. The decision to change our most popular base fabric is being driven by our determination to find a source for fabric with quality that is perfectly consistent from one batch to the next. Based on the testing we are doing right now to all our fabrics, we may well change again before we settle on a permanent replacement.

Above is a photo that shows the old quilting-weight cotton on the left and the new on the right. They're very similar in weight, but the new quilting cotton is slightly denser and softer than the old. Feedback on the change is welcome!

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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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.

If you're a last minute holiday-shopper (like me), you can always buy a Spoonflower gift certificate from Paypal, which can be printed and presented as a gift, or emailed on a date of your choosing.

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]

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.

Belated good-bye

Spoonflower staff
Originally uploaded by Secretsugar

It's a little quiet around here this week in the shop. Of course, the printers are going full-blast on a healthy queue of designs, but Spoonflower is down a couple of awesome employees as of last Friday.

Rachel, pictured center front, has gone off to try her hand at law school after cracking the whip over Spoonflower finances for the past few months. We'll miss Rachel's organizational gifts, but I hope it won't offend her if I say that I'll really miss her sense of style and unbelievable shoe collection. It was always a treat for me to see what she had on her feet when she arrived for work--a different pair every day, though a particular pair of purple leather flats with leopard buckles stands out in my memory.

Allie, pictured at the far right front, was a summer intern with us who has left us to finish her degree in fashion and textile merchandising at N.C. State. Allie had the most solid work ethic of any person her age I think I've ever met--or perhaps of anyone I've ever met! Allie ran the printers from the wee hours of the morning til the late morning crew showed up. Then she'd move over to the cutting table and bust out bin after bin full of packaged fabric--all without a single complaint. Ever.

We've been very lucky to have attracted good folks to Spoonflower, and are very sorry to see these two go! Good luck, y'all!

Yikes! Paypal is down

Problems with Paypal seem to be fixed.

The Paypal site seems to be experiencing problems, which means that you will not be able to checkout on Spoonflower until it is fixed. You can follow Paypal's updates here: http://announcements.paypal.com/us/

We'll keep you posted.

Upholstery-weight Testers

Update: Those of you who signed up on our tester list over the weekend should now see upholstery-weight cotton as an option in your Spoonflower accounts on the preview/purchase page.

Intermittent Site Outages

Fixed!

This morning we have discovered that -- due to some network shenanigans on the part of our Internet host --  the main Spoonflower site is inaccessible to some of you. The affected areas are scattered, but our site  seems to be down for most of Europe, and for a random number of other areas. Hopefully all will be well soon. Apologies!

Error on home page when you sign in

Fixed. If you've signed in to Spoonflower today, you may have noticed an error message on the user home page... sorry about that. We should have it fixed shortly, but in the meantime you can still get to your Designs page by going directly to: http://www.spoonflower.com/designs

Spoonflower down for maintenance tonight

Done! Our planned maintenance last night didn't go quite as planned, so we're going to try one more time tonight. So for a few hours, Eastern time (Nov. 19-20), the site will be down. Apologies!

In the meantime, if you haven't seen them yet be sure to check out the new half-step and half-brick design options.

News: Centering designs, favorites, new fabric, contest

Lots of Spoonflower news this week, some of which you may see again in an upcoming email:

• When you order a piece of fabric, you can now choose to center your design OR repeat it against the area (one yard, for example) of fabric you're planning to buy. Among other things, this makes  printing photos or individual designs much easier.
• You can now bookmark other public designs by selecting them as 'Favorites,' which then show up on your Spoonflower profile. You can see mine here.
• We're about to discontinue the Kona cotton from Robert Kaufman in favor of a very similar cotton broadcloth. I'll hold off on the final announcement until we've had a chance to do some testing, but I think everyone will be very happy with the new fabric.
• We're planning a contest in which the community will vote on a design that they'd like to be able to buy. Only designs submitted specifically for the contest will be eligible and each winner will get five yards of free fabric. Spoonflower will then offer the winning design for sale for exactly a week - no longer - to anyone and everyone through its Etsy shop. More details to come.

Still having problems with thumbnails

Just a very quick update to let folks know that we are still having problems with previews of designs uploaded to Spoonflower. TIFs in LAB format are still showing up as black boxes. We're working on it!

Thumbnails are broken!

UPDATE: We're back up and running, but thumbnails of TIFs in LAB color format remain broken. In place of a lovely design, instead you'll see an ugly black box. This problem is confined to the display of your deisgn, however, and does not affect your original file. Eventually we will fix the previews and all will be well.

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The thumbnail previews of designs on Spoonflower are temporarily broken. So whether you are uploading a new design or looking at designs in your account, at the moment you probably see some kind of error where a lovely image ought to be. Our engineers are hard at work on fixing this, hopefully very quickly. We are very sorry! This will not affect any orders, by the way. All of your orders are safe, regardless of whether or not the preview is broken.

Invite a friend to join Spoonflower

Those of you who are using the Spoonflower beta site may have noticed that we released a few new features this week. One of them -- Invitations -- allows you to send new Spoonflower accounts to friends who don't already have accounts. Nifty, eh? Note that if you are not logged in to your Spoonflower account, the invitation link will just take you to the login page. Once you are logged in, you'll see an Invitations link in the page footer.

Also of note, a page that allows you to Explore some of the great fabric designs on the site. Only designs that community members have made public are visible, of course.

Up & Down & Welcome

We sent out another big batch of beta invitations this morning, so a lot of folks who've been on the waiting list are finally getting a chance to upload their designs today. Welcome!

As a result, the site may seem slower today than usual, and we may have to reboot it once or twice, which will mean a minute or two of downtime here and there. If you try to log in to Spoonflower and find the site down today, please just check back in five or ten minutes and all should be well.

Danielle and another whole cloth quilt

Remember this woman?  Our intern, Danielle?  Sound the trumpets because she's now our first official Spoonflower hire!  Woo-hoo!   I can't tell you all how nice it is to have a female around here who doesn't throw temper tantrums or need to be plied with pb&j sandwiches and goldfish crackers to be happy.  Oh, and she's also really nice to talk to about sewing, design, fabric, and the like.  We're so glad to have you here more often now, Danielle!

Before we ship out all the fabrics that Danielle has been printing this week, I just wanted to show you all another lovely cheater quilt design.  It's from one of our users, Betsy Childs, who saw Angry Chicken's cheater quilt and was inspired to create her own. It printed up beautifully and Betsy says that this is the first time she's tried anything like this.  I, for one, am very impressed! The imagery she used in some of her squares reminded me of old books we had around the house when I was a kid.  I've seen similar fairy tale-related public domain images here and there on the web and found them appealing, but wasn't sure how I might use them in a crafting context.  Now I know!

Latest Updates to Spoonflower

Update, 9/24/2008: We've fixed the issues mentioned below, but if any of you who are beta-testing encounter other errors on the site please do let us  know. Thanks!
___________

Some of you who already have Beta accounts may have noticed that we released a few changes to the Spoonflower site yesterday, including the ability to create a public profile and public designs. But you may also have noticed that not everything in the new release is working perfectly. Some images, as it turns out, can't be made public or re-named. And if you uploaded an image to use in your profile, you may find that it has disappeared the next time you log in. Oops. There are a few other issues as well. Please rest assured we are working on fixing these little glitches, none of which affect your ability to upload designs or order fabric.

And for those of you still waiting for an invitation that will allow you to log in to the site and upload your own designs, thank you again for your patience. As soon as we work through this set of issues, we're going to resume sending out invites for new accounts.

And I know we owe everyone a new video. Working on it.

Visual changes to Spoonflower

Update to my update: Contrary to my earlier note, our changes are now live!

If you happen to visit the Spoonflower home page today, you may notice a few subtle changes. We've updated the header at the top of the page (which means we'll have to fix the header on the blog soon, too, so they match), but more importantly we've fixed a few of the small bugs in the shopping cart checkout process, including a very silly one that rejected the state in your address as 'invalid' if you happened to enter it in lower case. Less amusingly, folks using the Paypal option to checkout are now less likely to encounter problems. Thanks, as always, to those of you who take the time to tell us about these things. And thanks for your patience. More exciting changes are on the way.