Moving!

We just shipped our last from-home shipment of fabrics a couple of days ago and I find myself in a contemplative mood this morning as I consider the fact that we're moving into our official Spoonflower office space this week!  While I won't miss our house being turned upside down, doubling as a business space and mail center, there's something...I don't know, a little sweet about having had Spoonflower running out of our home with the kids oohing and ahhing over their favorite fabrics.  Those days are done.

Today, there's a cleaning crew there removing--bless them!--the inch thick layer of grime on this former sock mill's floor, along with the debris from the air-conditioning installation that just got finished up a few days ago.  I'm meeting a sitter up there tomorrow to talk to her about watching my girls on-site for me while I'm (cough) working.  Part-time working, but still working.  Maybe that's the real rub.  So far this hasn't felt all that much like work.  Bet it will once we open the proverbial floodgates and allow people to create accounts without an invitation. (So sorry to be keeping so many of you on the waiting list for an invitation while we finish up this move!)

Pictures of the new space to come soon!.  Y'all can suggest some ways to spruce it up because apparently I'm not allowed to dwell too much on decorating just now.

Quick Update

We're shipping fabric these days not just to US addresses but to crafters in Great Britain, Australia, Ireland, Canada, Brazil, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, Italy, South Africa, the Virgin Islands, Aruba, and elsewhere, so it's worth noting here that Friday is a holiday here in the States. Our office (currently Kim and Stephen's back porch but soon to be the more elegant environs previewed in our most recent video entry) will be more or less closed until Monday. Consequently:

1. I probably won't be able to respond quickly to help emails and questions for the next few days.
2. The next big batch of fabric orders won't ship out until next week. If your order is in "processing" status (on your account page) then it hasn't shipped yet.
3. We have about a thousand people on the waiting list who haven't yet received invitations to create a beta account. Hang in there a bit longer. We'll get back to sending invites soon. Thank you for being patient.

My attempt to keep up with Spoonflower buzz has faltered somewhat, but if you're interested in getting a sense of some of the great things people are either making, or thinking about making, with Spoonflower fabric, scan through these Google blog search results for Spoonflower.

Happy creating.

Get your fabric orders in before Monday morning!

Those of you who have received beta invitations and are planning to order fabric this week through Spoonflower, be sure to get your order in before tomorrow (Monday) morning 8 am Eastern time. We've had a handful of people confused by the checkout process, which offers a choice between using a Paypal button and completing checkout on a PayPal page, or completing the order on the Spoonflower page using a credit card number (which is still processed by Paypal, by the way). All of the people who've gotten hung up here clicked the Paypal button. If you make an order and do NOT receive an order confirmation/receipt by email, then your order didn't go through. In that case, go back to your account and go through checkout again -- being sure to click through all the way to the confirmation page. We'll make this process smoother soon!

NOTE: You'll still be able to order fabric after Monday morning, of course -- but it won't be printed until next Monday. My advice is solely for those in a hurry to see their designs.

Trouble signing in to Spoonflower?

For those of you who received invitations yesterday (Thursday) but had trouble signing in last night, the Spoonflower site is back up to speed today. It was dragging for a bit under the weight of all that imagination.

Thanks to the folks at ReadyMade Magazine for the nice mention yesterday. Long live the fabric revolution!

Spoonflower News

• Crafty Ginger received her first Spoonflower swatch and posted pics. If anyone else wants to post or send pics of your fabric, please let me know. I'm especially looking forward to seeing pictures of projects created using fabric printed through Spoonflower.
• We sent out another big batch of invites this morning. Hoping to get through the entire beta wait-list soon. If you're impatient to get yours feel free to email me. If you signed up weeks ago  but haven't seen an invite yet it might also be worthwhile to check your spam folder for anything with Spoonflower in the subject line.
• Shipping out our next batch of fabric orders tomorrow or Thursday. We'll post another video since some of you seemed to enjoy the first one (despite my wife's complaints about the cinematography).
• Our shopping cart currently allows just one fabric order at a time, which is frustrating to some of you.  As soon as we can we'll revise the cart to handle multiple orders at a time. The fabulous Rebecca posted a handy workaround for this in the comments on our shipping FAQ.
• Thanks to WhipUp for the shout-out this past weekend (doing my best to keep up with Spoonflower buzz here).



• If you've never seen it, take a look at the Australian magazine Living Creatively. Even though we're still in beta mode and a bit publicity shy, the trend-savvy folks there have taken an interest in Spoonflower -- which is very flattering.

Bug update

Updates for any of the testers who have tried to purchase fabric this week:

• The Paypal checkout option is now working for those of you using Internet Explorer as your browser.
• International orders are NOT working at the moment but we hope to fix that soon.  Fixed!

Thanks again for all the help!

Updated file preparation instructions

Just want to make everyone aware that we've updated the instructions for preparing your image for fabric printing.

The important change is that you should expect that size your image for 150 dpi (dots per inch). If you increase the resolution by making it larger, we will end up printing the image at a larger size than you intended.

Phew!

What a weekend!  If it wasn't apparent from his many posts about the site, Stephen spent  pretty much the whole weekend sitting in front of a computer.  For my part, I'm helping with idiot-proofing.  I'm positive that I'm the most tech-UNsavvy person helping start an internet company there is. 

That said, though, I'm a fast learner.  I'm getting the hang of trying to "draw" on a computer and managed to produce a little floral design that Stephen says got printed today.  It ain't fabulous, but it's mine!  I'm looking forward to seeing a fat quarter of my design when Stephen gets home this evening.  I forgot to set my resolution to 150 dsi and have no idea how pixels translate into inches--though I told Stephen a conversion chart might be a handy feature for us non-techy types--so it should be interesting...

Getting there

The site is back up this morning but there are still a few bugs to troubleshoot, including one involving purchases using Paypal. Credit card purchases seem to be fine. This afternoon I'll:
a) do my best to post something more interesting than site development news,
b) begin to beautify the new blog a bit...

More invites out this afternoon and tomorrow.

The joys of launch...

As of 10pm Eastern Time, the Spoonflower home page appears to be down...

Never fear! We'll get there.

Talk to us

This may be a bit maddening for all the folks who haven't yet received an invite (which is almost everyone), but I just want to ask the very few who have created accounts on Spoonflower so far to be sure to let us know when you encounter problems. We discovered one error today that was creating difficulties for people trying to upload designs using Internet Explorer, but it has now been fixed. Send a description of any bugs you encounter to help at spoonflower.com. Thanks!

A real web site at last...

I am positively thrilled to announce that we now have a real web site that works and is live at www.Spoonflower.com. A couple of caveats, however:

-- You cannot register for the site, you can only add your name to the waiting list

-- The waiting list (as of this writing) is actually down over the weekend because of maintenance issues at MailChimp, the list host

-- You cannot login to the site until we send you a password and invitation by email, which we'll be doing in batches over the next few weeks

-- Lots of stuff is still missing, links are broken, but we'll be working on that over the next few days.

That rumbling? It's the Spoonflower machine finally starting...

I have good news and bad news.

The good news is that sometime tomorrow (Friday) when you visit Spoonflower you will see the new home page of our beta site. Hurray! [We owe particular thanks for getting the machine up and running to a talented fellow named Clinton.] That's really good news.

The bad news, however, is a real downer. Even for those of you who have signed up for the beta (and thank you, thank you, thank you for doing that), until you receive an email from us containing a password for your account, you won't be able to register or login to the new site. That's frustrating, I know.

It's going to take us a bit of time to scale up our production capacity just to meet the demand from the beta group. While this bodes well for Spoonflower's future plans, it is going to mean asking many of our merry band of crafters to be patient for a while.

In the meantime I'm going to try to flesh out the FAQ section over the next few days to help answer some of the detailed questions that many of you have emailed. We'll have a new blog tomorrow as well, by the way. All of the old blog content will carry over with the sole disadvantage being that you'll no longer be able to tell which of the past posts were mine (Stephen) or my wife's (Kim). If it had anything to do with crafting, pretty safe to assume it was Kim.

Fabulous cushions, a print-a-day, and a Spoonflower update

Thanks to the keen eye of our friend Kim at the fabulous new fabric blog True Up, you can admire some stunning pillows made from digitally printed fabric (available through the French company Bonjour Mon Coussin) while planning your own future projects using Spoonflower. Kim at True Up points out that it is a mistake to get too hung up on learning how to create repeats & use special software to design patterns. There are an infinite number of cool, uncomplicated projects you can concoct without knowing the first thing about Photoshop & its ilk.

While we're on the subject of creating repeats, be sure to check out a-print-a-day, a blog a by Yasmine, a San Francisco designer who has set herself the challenge of  "creating a surface print every day."

Last but not least I am happy to report that the behind-the-scenes work on the beta version of Spoonflower is going swimmingly. Look for the excitement to begin sometime in early May, although at least some beta testers will be hearing from me before then. Thanks to all of you for the support and excitement you've shown so far, including the lovely folks at (the much admired) Wee Wonderfuls, who are welcome to "stalk" us anytime.
   

Looking for sample images

While we work on building the web site I thought it might be fun to set up a gallery on the photo-sharing site Flickr where folks following our progress can upload some of the images they would like to print on Spoonflower once we're live. A Flickr gallery gives us a chance to share designs, but it will also provide a pool of images we can draw from as we print sample fabric.

If we decide to pull your design from the Flickr pool to print as a sample, I'll email you first to ask your permission. I'll also send you a swatch so you can see how it looked.

You can visit the Flickr gallery for Spoonflower here. If you're already a member of Flickr it's quite easy to add an image to the pool. If you're not on Flickr already, it's free to join.

(For tips on preparing images for upload, see my previous post here.)

Do we have a winner?

Thanks to all of you for weighing in on the logo. The results are in (original choices appear here). The logo on the left, below, is the winner, although many of you also liked the version using the alternate font that Caroline gave us after the voting had started. They appear here side by side, but I think for now we're going to move forward with the people's choice. I like them both, really.

(if the color of the flowers looks slightly different it's because I mucked up the file somehow... they're really the same)

Another thought

Caroline, our talented designer, has posted a revision of one of the logo options that offers a slightly less confusing ligature (where the 'f' meets the 'l'). If you think you might prefer this version to the one you voted on in the survey, maybe you could leave us a brief comment?

Still working on the logo

We are still in the process of defining the look and feel of Spoonflower, so the logo you see is temporary. At some point it might be nice to post two or three options and to let the group of testers vote on their favorite. Right now the leading candidate is something along these lines: