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.