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!
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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.

Vote tally

I think it's about time to push that fabric voting post on down, don't you?   We received nearly 40 votes via comments and many, MANY more of you emailed me with your votes.  Thanks to all of you who let us know your (sometimes very strong!) preferences for our second fabric option.  If I ever thought I would bore you all with the level of detail in my list of options, I know now that I can't be too fabric-geeky here!

The list is now whittled down to four potential candidates.  Your top picks were, in order of preference:  100% cotton canvas, the 55% linen/45% cotton blend, the medium weight 100% cotton (with the preference between brushed and unbrushed about evenly split), and the 100% organic cotton Kona.  Our next step is to order some rolls of these and get to some test printing.  We'll be sure to post our results when we've got something to show you!

Cast your vote for a second fabric!

Some time ago--like, so long ago that I'm not going to bother dredging up the post--Stephen asked you all to email me if you had any suggestions for what fabric we should offer next besides the Robert Kaufman 100% Kona cotton.  Since then, I've gotten maybe three dozen or so emails about what you all would like to see us carry.  I've heard a lot of suggestions for heavier weight cottons--"upholstery weight," "medium weight," and "canvas" are the specific terms you've used.  I've also gotten a lot of interest in linen and in organic cotton.  There have been some other odds and ends, too--rayon, microfiber, sheer silk, cotton lawn, and jersey knit among others. And just this morning, Danielle was trying to sell me on the virtues of bamboo and bamboo blends, though I haven't worked with those myself...

Now it looks like making a decision is going to happen sooner rather than later.  Stephen handed me an intriguing little booklet this morning of flappy little fabric samples to evaluate.  The plan is to put out another call for your input, order a few different rolls to run test prints on, and then make a final decision on our second fabric.

Okay, so are you ready for some options along with my brief impressions here?  Good.  One quick bit of shorthand:  each fabric option listed below is followed by a set of parentheses containing a number-slash-number, then a decimal number.  This refers to the width in inches from selvage to selvage followed by the weight in ounces.  So cotton twill (56/57, 5.6) means that the cotton twill is 56-57 inches wide and weighs 5.6 ounces per square yard.  (The Kona cotton we're printing on now weighs 4.35 ounces per square yard, by way of comparison.) This is just my own shorthand for what might be some tedious typing here.  Hopefully, you won't consider the subject tedious, though!

1. 100% cotton twill (56/57, 5.6); has a crisp feel that would be lovely for clothing or perhaps linens.
2. 100% cotton canvas (57/58, 8); feels heavy and strong and would work great in handbags, totes, or even some home-dec projects
3. a heavy brushed 100% cotton (56/57, 9.5) that seems suitable for hard-wearing home-dec projects
4. un-brushed heavy 100% cotton (56/57, 9.7) stiffer than the brushed, that would also be home-dec appropriate
5. medium weight 100% cotton, brushed (55/56, 7.2), or un-brushed (55/56, 7.35); another option  suitable for home-dec projects as well as bags and accessories
6. 100 % organic cotton (44/45, 4/3) that feels a teeny bit crisper than our current Kona, but is, of course, organic
7. 55%linen/45% cotton blend (42/43, 5/6); substantial without feeling heavy, my little 2" swatch appears to have a nice drape to it (though it's admittedly hard to tell with such a small piece)
8. 55% linen/45% rayon blend (54/55, 6); soft and supple and would work great in clothing
9. 100% linen (52/53, 6); downright meaty, less crisp than the linen/cotton blend, and probably what we all think of when we hear the word "linen"

That's a lot of options, I know, but I'd love to hear your thoughts on what sorts of items you want to make and what you'd like to make them up in.  Email me, y'all! And thanks in advance for your input.

Bug Update: International Orders

Bug update on our software release from yesterday (8-27-2008):
International orders now require a phone number -- which is a customs requirement and not something we made up -- but following the update yesterday our checkout process was not accepting phone numbers in International formats. That bug is now fixed. Apologies to the folks who got stuck in the error loop.

We also briefly had an error that affected folks checking out through Paypal. That was fixed about halfway through yesterday.

Thanks to the folks who have taken time to report bugs, and thanks to all the beta-testers for their patience.   

Improvements: Lower Shipping Rates, etc.

Those of you who are already in the beta site received an email early this morning about our first set of significant site updates, which include lower shipping rates, a new multi-item shopping cart, and a change to the maximum length of a single piece of fabric you can order.

New shipping rates are here.

We're still bug-squashing on this release, so please let me know if you encounter any problems. Thanks for all the encouragement from those who have sent notes.

If you are on the waiting list and still have not received an invitation -- and there are around 2,500 of you last time I checked -- we are really, really close to sending out another round of invitations so you, too, can order fabric. Thank you very much for your patience.

And last, but not least: Many of you already know Sister Diane of Craftypod, one of the hubs of the craft blogosphere. If you only ever listen to one of her podcasts, by all means don't waste your time listening to her interview me because she has loads of really interesting shows available on her site. But she did take the time to speak with me earlier in the summer, and the result is here if you are curious. In the interview I talk a bit about our future plans for Spoonflower as well as how it came about. She's really great even if I sound goofy.

[full text of email to beta-testers is here.]

Space to fill

Just for the sake of scale, here's a photo of Stephen (and the baby) in the new Spoonflower space.  I don't think the photo of Gart cleaning floors yesterday really quite gave y'all an idea of why it's taking us so, so long to get this enormous space cleaned and ready.  Oh, and for those of you wondering who the heck Gart is, he's our business partner, together with his delightful and crafty wife, Anne.  They've both been on our "about us" page all along, but just in case you missed them...

Cleaning the new space

Does this look like a place where beautiful fabric will be printed? We're working on it. Whew. (that's Gart in the photo, by the way.)