Free Swatch Day Postponed Until Aug. 20

Those of you who receive our weekly email know this already, but we have postponed Free Swatch Day until next Thursday, August 20. We're very sorry! Here's what we wrote:

Last week we told you that Thursday, August 13, would be our first Free Swatch Day. With profound apologies, we've decided to postpone Free Swatch Day until Thursday, August 20. As you may remember, we plan to announce two new fabrics and really want to make Free Swatch Day your chance to try them out. The hitch is that when we make the announcement we expect to need a LOT of the new fabric on hand, but we have only a little in the shop at the moment. Sorry for the delay!

As I wrote last week, we'll be using Free Swatch Day as an excuse to raise money for a nifty organization called Heifer International that provides livestock, training and services to small farmers and communities around the world. When you use your free swatch promotion, you'll have the option to add a donation to your Spoonflower shopping cart. We'll report on the money raised on our Twitter feed during the day.

Last days to order linen-cotton + updated shipping rates

We posted this in the weekly email on Thursday, but for those of you who prefer RSS...

Sunday, July 26, 2009, is the last day you will be able to order your designs printed on the current linen-cotton blend. We will be introducing new, permanent fabric options soon, but we'll be retiring the limited edition linen-cotton at the end of this week. If you've ordered some already and would like to get more just like it, this is your last chance.

Also, I have finally updated the shipping rates in our FAQ, a long overdue exercise. These rates have been live on our site for some time, but the FAQ has remained out of date. Sorry about that. You will note that our rates are by and large very reasonable. Keeping shipping as affordable as possible is important to us.

Have a lovely weekend!

Organic Cotton Comes to Spoonflower

You've asked and asked and asked again. So we are very, very pleased to finally be able to offer organic cotton as an option for Spoonflower printing. Its virtues are not purely ecological, either -- this apparel-weight cotton sateen is truly lovely stuff. See details below. Now live on the site as an option along with quilting-weight broadcloth and upholstery-weight cotton sateen.


Spoonflower's organic sateen is a creamy cotton fabric perfect for making clothes and pillows. Certified organic by GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard).

• 4.5 oz p/yd
• 58-inch printable width (147 cm) natural finish
• glossy, cream-colored finish
• extremely soft hand
• $27 pr/yd

Spoonflower gift certificates

We've had a couple of requests for Spoonflower gift credits, so I've put Paypal's gift certificate feature to use here. If people like this idea, we will make a more concerted effort to make sure everyone knows about it. Please email us if you have questions.

Gift the gift of creative possibility!

Democratizing fabric design

Kim Kight, the fabulous fabric blogger (flogger?) over at True Up ("All Fabric, All the Time"), gave Spoonflower a lovely and thoughtful shout-out today.  She talks about the democratizing power of digital production technology, which represents many of same advances for textile design that it does for  industries like book publishing, photography, music, and video. Apart from giving many, many more creative people access to the tools to realize their visions, a sometimes overlooked aspect of digital production is its lower environmental impact. This is especially true in the case of textile production, which in its conventional form is highly wasteful and highly polluting. But the most pleasing bit of the post was being compared to Etsy, a site that may actually be the best Internet business ever.

Another thing custom fabric could be good for...

  SpoonFlower_Logo-4x copy 
  Originally uploaded by salutor

...printing your own artfully designed fabric labels to go inside the gorgeous items you have made with your artfully designed custom fabric! You could size them however big or small you wanted, include washing instructions, a website address, anything!  I'll bet quite a few would fit onto a yard, and a rotary cutter would make short work of cutting them apart.  How to finish edges, though--hmmm....

Interested in Spoonflower?

Thanks for visiting Spoonflower, a soon-to-be-launched resource for folks who love to sew and make beautiful things.

By signing up through the link below you will allow us to notify you when the beta version of our Web site is launched. Beta testers get to see a site in its earliest stages when there are likely to be bugs and missing features, so it's not for everyone. But in return for testing the site and sharing your suggestions with us you will not only earn our eternal gratitude, you'll also join a select crowd that gets to hear about a cool new service before anyone else.

Click here to sign-up for the beta.

[We hate spam as much as you, so please rest assured we will respect and protect your information.]

Thank you, everyone!

We received well over 400 responses to our modest Spoonflower Interest Survey and it is clear that -- however the details may vary -- LOTS of you are interested in designing your own fabric!

Special thanks to the fantastic folks at Sew, Mama, Sew who posted a link to our survey, as well as to Burda Style and the fabulous craft-bloggers who also posted links: MeggieCat, Secret Cave of the Sugar Mama, MyLittleSewingSpot, and SadieAndLance.

I know you are anxious to get started, but please bear with us for a few weeks. We hope to get things around here up and running by May.

While we wait for the big show to begin, I'd like to invite folks to submit images of things they've made -- fun bags, clothes, pillows, and the like -- for us to post here (with a link back to your blog, Etsy shop, or what-have-you). You can send photos or photo-links to kim at spoonflower dot com.

Welcome to Spoonflower.  Our ears are always open. There is much more to come.