How do I qualify for the designer discount?

I've fielded quite a few questions lately about how to qualify for our 10% designer discount.  The answer is simple--everyone who uploads a design to Spoonflower qualifies!  The caveat is that this 10% discount applies only to orders of your own designs, and only to orders that are larger than a swatch.  The discount becomes 20% if you order 20 yards or more of your own single design.  If you order someone else's designs, you'll be charged our full per-yard price (and the designer will earn a 10% commission if the order is larger than a swatch).  

Current prices can be found on our fabrics page.  If you're thinking of offering some of your designs for sale  in our marketplace, you can review our seller notes page here.  If anything doesn't make sense, we welcome your questions at help@spoonflower.com. 

Tips for printing photos on fabric

Question: Can I use Spoonflower to print my photos on fabric?

Yes, digital textile printing is terrific for photos. Pictured here is a pillow -- a gift for a family member this Christmas -- that I put together with the help of photos from my Flickr photostream, Picnik's collage feature, and Kim's sewing talents. This pillow is made from Spoonflower's linen-cotton canvas, which makes for a nice sturdy pillow fabric, and a 16" pillow form (from Amazon).

First I set up a front panel on Picnik with 8 rows and 8 columns of photos, which at "high" quality produces a collage image exactly 2400 pixels x 2400 pixels in size. 2400 pixels conveniently prints at 16 inches using 150 dpi. [Note that the 8x8 layout is available only to Picnik premium members, but you can do the same thing in almost any image-editing program, including the basic program that probably shipped with your digital cameras.] After setting up a back panel the same way I saved both files to my hard drive.

To save a bit of time, I used Photoshop Elements to arrange the front and back panels into a single file, leaving room for a quarter-inch seam allowance on all sides (on Kim's advice). I uploaded that file to Spoonflower and ordered it on linen-cotton. Two 16" panels are slightly too large to fit onto a fat-quarter of linen cotton (27"x18"), but you can still economize by arranging several sets of pillow panels onto a single yard ($24.30). One of the advantages of using the linen-cotton canvas is that the fabric is preshrunk, so if you set up a 16" panel and wash it before sewing you'll get very little, if any, shrinkage.

Photos on fabric often turn out well, but it's important to keep a few things in mind when selecting photographic images for digital fabric-printing:

1) Start with a clear, high-resolution photo. A typical digital camera these days produces images that are 4000 x 3000 pixels or larger. You could print a 4000 pixel wide photo on Spoonflower at up to 26 inches across. Keep in mind that you can always reduce the size of an image that's too big (you'll see a size editor on the lower right of the Spoonflower fabric preview page ), but you can't make a small photo larger. Blowing up small images creates pixelation.

2) Find images with good contrast. Fabric can't hold the same level of detail that photographic paper can hold (which is why 150 dpi is our default resolution rather than 300, the resolution used by printers working with paper). Good contrast between the foreground and background is essential to make the subject of your photo clear when it is printed on the fabric. I've seen people do some lovely work with old black and white photos and postcards, for example. But if you have a lot detail that is lit the same way -- in mixed light and shadow, it probably won't print very well. In the detail photo on the left, the photo just to the right of the black & white portrait printed badly because the faces weren't well-lit and there wasn't enough contrast in the features to make them distinct.

3) Look for evenly-lit subjects. Especially if you're printing photos of people, look for subjects with good, even lighting, like the baby in the photo on the right. Textile printing systems are designed to handle one-to-one color matching very well, but don't do as well reproducing subtle gradients, which is the forte of photo printers. You can get around this issue by choosing photos that don't rely so much on gentle transitions between light and dark shades of color to reproduce well.

Lots of people write us to ask how they can learn to design their own fabric, which is sometimes a challenging question to answer. Textile design is, of course, something many people spend years studying. But if you make the question a bit simpler, there are lots of ways to create lovely designs on textiles. Many, many people have access to digital photos these days and some familiarity with doing simple edits and uploading them to web sites. Creating a photo pillow -- per the simple instructions above -- is one way. Creating fabric using a scanner and some simple objects -- leaves, for example -- is another. The best way to learn is to experiment. One of our goals at Spoonflower is to make digital textile printing easy enough, fast enough and affordable enough to make that sort of experimentation possible.

Have fun!

How to create images, reprised

There sure are a lot of you out there doing some amazing design work!  Even a quick glance at our Flickr pool will prove my point.  But we've had a rash of questions lately about how a fabric design novice goes about creating an image to print.  Stephen posted about this early on in the life of Spoonflower, but I thought I'd post about this again for all you new users. 

Though I've mentioned Julia Rothman's repeat pattern tutorial on design*sponge before, it's worth posting here again because it's a very low-tech, approachable way to work up a seamlessly repeating design.  All's you need are paper, drawing or painting materials, scissors, and tape!  Oh, and a scanner.  But the important point is that you don't need Photoshop or Illustrator to create a repeating pattern.  If our own scanner didn't currently lack a power cord, I would show you all a repeating pattern that I myself designed.  This method works great, and if I can do it, I assure you that anyone can!

For those of you who would like to try composing images on your computer, you may want to take a first stab at this with ArtRage before investing in one of the more sophisticated design programs.  ArtRage offers a free, limited version of its painting program, but at $25 for the full-scale program, it's very affordable and easy to use.  This program contains painting and drawing tools as well as rulers and stencils, including the ability to create your own stencils. 

If manipulating photographs is more what you have in mind but you don't actually own Photoshop, you can download a free 30-day trial of this super-sophisticated photo manipulation and design program.  There are a zillion fun tutorials out there that will teach you what to do with your photos if you want more than just a simple photograph on fabric.  You can turn your photos into line drawings (perhaps to embroider over?) or Andy Warhol-esque popart prints for framing, or you can cut and paste elements of photos onto new canvases to create repeating patterns.  I have an antique Dresden plate quilt made of hundreds of different scraps, one of which is a dog's head repeated on a white and green polka dot background.  It cracks me up every time I spot it.  While it was obviously designed in the days before Photoshop, it would be so easy to make something similar and equally hilarious. 

So there are some ideas for you design beginners out there.  For those of you who are more adept at design, feel free to chime in with some other easy ideas here.  If there are enough of them, I can post about those, too!

Can I sell my designs on Spoonflower?

Updated 12/02/2009

Yes, you can sell your designs on Spoonflower!

In order to sell one of your designs on fabric you must have ordered at least a swatch of the fabric at some point in order to proof it. Once you've done so, you can go to the 'fabric details' page for your design and check the box on the lower right to make the design available for sale. You will earn 10% of the selling price for any fabric you sell, per our terms of service with the exception of test swatches. The 10% commission will be credited to your account in the form of Spoondollars that can be used either to purchase fabric on our site or redeemed via Paypal. It's also possible to sell your Spoonflower fabric on your own sites, as do many independent designers.

Displaying and/or selling your designs is ALWAYS under your control.The default settings for any designs you upload to Spoonflower are 'private' (not visible to others) and 'not for sale.'

We've also seen a few questions generated by concerns over some specific wording in part 2 of our terms of service. That section, titled "User Conduct," reads in part:

When you post designs to Spoonflower’s Web site, you keep your copyright. You also control the account settings that determine whether or not your design can be shared or sold on Spoonflower. In order to maintain an Internet-based service Spoonflower is required to be able to copy, crop, modify, reproduce, display and distribute your Content worldwide. Spoonflower will only perform these actions to the extent necessary to provide its service, but by submitting Content to Spoonflower you grant Spoonflower a nonexclusive, worldwide, transferable license to do so. If your Content is uploaded as a design for fabric available on this Site, you grant to Spoonflower a nonexclusive, worldwide, transferable license to create derivative works of, modify, copy, sell, display and distribute the Content and fabrics created from or based on such Content so long as such process is an essential step of the print service we provide. If you choose to make Designs available for sale on Spoonflower’s Web site, you can also choose to remove them from sale at any time. All Designs uploaded to our Site are private unless you specifically mark them as public.By making your fabric Design public on the Site, you give Spoonflower the right to display or print your Design, including photographing fabric made from that design, for use in materials used to help market both the Site and the designers who use the Site. Be aware that Google and other search engines will also index public designs and the information included in public user profiles.

Our wording here may well leave something to be desired, but please rest assured that we will never do anything with your designs without your permission. Running a web site requires us to modify, copy, display and distribute ALL the content on the site. Selling your design on fabric even just to you requires us to modify it and distribute it. Our system for creating a repeat of your design is actually a process that requires us to render a "derivative work," for example. I am certainly not a lawyer, so my explanation here reflects a layperson's understanding of the legal language, but one thing I can say with complete confidence is that we are creating Spoonflower to empower designers, not to exploit them. If you have any questions about this aspect of the site, please feel free to call or write to us for clarification.

How does Spoonflower work?

I'm no Ryan Seacrest, but here's a short explanation of how to use Spoonflower to print your design on fabric once you're able to create an account.

| View | Upload your own

[6-02-2008: Please note that due to bandwidth issues that were causing problems with the audio in this presentation, I've posted a new version to SlideShare.]

How much does custom fabric cost?

Updated 07-29-2009

Spoonflower prints on the highest quality fabric we can source using eco-friendly, non-toxic pigment inks.

Quilting-weight. Our base fabric is white 100% cotton, 60-square, and just slightly over 4 ounces per yard. It is lightweight combed cotton broadcloth with a soft hand -- perfect for quilting and sewing. The printable width of the fabric is 42 inches (with 1-2 inches of unprinted selvage).

Swatch (8" x 8") $5.00
Fat quarter (21" x 18") $11.00
Per yard (42" x 36") $18.00

Upholstery-weight. We also offer an upholstery-weight 100% cotton sateen (warp sateen) that is just over 10oz per yard, with a lustrous surface well-suited to digital printing. It's great fabric for bags, pants, home dec projects, and the like. The fabric has a printable width of 55 inches (with 1-2 inches of unprinted selvage).

Swatch (8" x 8") $5.00
Quarter-yard (27" x 18") $17.00
Per yard (55" x 36") $32.00

Linen-Cotton blend (For a limited time only). This is a special fabric that we'll only offer while our supply lasts during June. It's an antique yellow (tea-stained) 55% linen, 45% cotton blend that is around 5 ounces per yard and would be great for skirts and blouses, especially historical reconstructions. It has a printable width of 40 inches (1-2 inches of unprinted selvage) and has 51 x 49 threads per inch.

Swatch (8" x 8") $5.00
Fat quarter (20" x 18") $12.00
Per yard (40" x 36") $24.00

Organic Cotton Sateen.  Spoonflower's organic sateen is a creamy cotton fabric perfect for making baby items, blouses, dresses, and pillows. It is certified organic by GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard).  It has a printable width of 58 inches (147 cm), weighs 4.5 oz per yard, and has an extremely soft hand and glossy, cream-colored finish.      

Swatch (8" x 8") $5.00
Quarter-yard (29" x 18") $14.00
Per yard (58" x 36") $27.00

--Shipping rates--

Notes:

• The maximum length of a single piece in an order is 5 yards (180 inches or 457 cm), but you can order multiple 5-yard pieces.

How do I create an image?

There's no single answer to this question, but I can offer a few suggestions.

Professional textile designers frequently use Photoshop to create or prepare their designs. They might start with a scan of a painting or drawing or they might compose the image in Photoshop. The pros also sometimes use special plugins for Photoshop. But Spoonflower is not just for pros, so...

There are a number of free programs available for creating and manipulating images, a few of which were sent to me recently by Meggiecat, a terrific craft blogger:

• Inkscape : Vector drawing
• Paint.NET: Photoshop type of program
• Art Rage : Realistic art painting, oils, chalk, etc. (earlier version is offered for free). Here's an image Kim put together using Art Rage without any prior experience.
• LineTracer: Converts scanned sketches to .eps.
• Wintopo: Raster to vector converter newer, more robust than LineTracer

Note (6-23-2008): Do NOT try to upload TIF files created using Microsoft Image Composer. If that is the only program you have for preparing designs, save and upload a JPG instead of a TIF.

Other ideas:

• Find a high-resolution public domain image from one of the amazing galleries available online. Be aware that you may only be able to employ an image of this sort for private, rather than commercial, use. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, for example, offers incredible galleries online, including this one: Art of the NOAA Photo Library.
• You could also print a photo or image of your own on fabric, although you should be aware that color shifting is likely to occur in a photographic image. The cleanest looking images printed on textiles have a relatively small palette of colors (under 30 or so), whereas if you examined photos and scans at the pixel-level of detail you would see thousands of colors.
• Scan something -- a kid's drawing, a leaf, a swatch of vintage fabric. In order to have it print at its best you would probably need to clean up an image like this in Photoshop, but even without that level of attention you can get some rewarding results.

Tell me what you come up with and I'll add it to the list!

Will you put my image into repeat?

For now we will take any image you upload and either tile it to fill the area of your fabric order or crop it to fit within the area of your fabric order as necessary.

We will not "step" the design repeats and we will not alter the size or dimensions of the design you upload.

If you want to print a single large image you should set up the image at the actual size you plan to print. You could set up a single image to be a linear yard, for example (which in our case would actually be 36"x44"), then order a yard.

If you wanted a smaller image on a yard of fabrc but do NOT want us to tile it to fill the area, set up your image with white space around it to fit the area of fabric you plan to order.

How much does shipping cost?

For the time being we ship exclusively through the US Postal Service or, if you are an International customer, through the USPS and your national service.

Shipping rates as of July 22, 2009 are as follows:

These shipping rates will go up incrementally as you add items to your cart that increase the total weight of the package.

How long will it take to receive my fabric order?

Updated 08-04-10

Our current turnaround time is about 20 days from the time that you place your order. We'll bring it down again to 4 as soon as we can get caught up. We anticipate bringing down the shipping times considerably by the end of August.

 

How do I prepare a file for printing on fabric?

Updated on 7-30-2009

Acceptable file formats: JPG, PNG or TIF (8-bit, uncompressed).

FILE SIZE: Your image must be smaller than 30MB.

RESOLUTION: Set up your image at 150 dpi (dots per inch). If you want to design an 8"x8" swatch, for example, you need to upload an image that  is 1200 pixels x 1200 pixels. The print size of your image in pixel dimensions will be 150x the number of inches.

We will tile your design to fill the space of the fabric you order. If you upload an image larger than the area of fabric you order, then we will crop it from the lower left corner.

FORMAT & COLOR NOTES (for advanced users): When printing a design onto fabric using Spoonflower you'll get the best results when you upload a file in TIF format that consists of colors that fall within the LAB color space. You can create a design in the LAB space or convert it. You can also upload a JPG or PNG, which we will convert to a TIF before printing.

Tip: In Photoshop you can switch to LAB format by going to the Image menu and pulling down to Mode, then checking LAB color. You'll also want to make sure that in the same menu 8 bits/channel is checked rather than 16.

Converting to LAB is not enough, however. After changing to the LAB color profile under the Mode option in Photoshop, in CS3 you can can then go to the 'View' menu and see any of the colors in your design that are 'out-of-gamut,' which means colors that do not fall within the LAB color space that our printer is capable of reproducing. Using the Color Replace option, it is possible to shift out-of-gamut colors to in-gamut colors.

UPDATED 1/22/09: If you use Photoshop or Illustrator, we have two files -- created by our fabulous intern Danielle -- that may be useful to you. They offer a Photoshop color library and palette of colors that fall within the gamut of our printer. Note that these are a representative palette of colors and are not the only colors available. In the updated files, we've removed some of the reds that have tended to shift to orange in the printed fabric.

• Download SpoonflowerColors ACO file (photoshop)

• Download SpoonflowerColors ASE file (Adobe)

• Download ColorChart   You can upload the color chart to your own Spoonflower account and order it as a swatch for color testing.

CONFUSED?

If you don't have Photoshop and talking about TIF and LAB color make you anxious, don't worry. You can upload a JPG or other common image format and it will still print nicely. There may be colors in your image that can't be reproduced by pigments on fabric in our printer (very bright colors, absolute blacks, and very saturated colors, for example). If that is the case you will sometimes see all of the colors in an image shift and the colors may end up appearing different from what you expected.

Uploading an image that you know uses only LAB colors offers some protection against all of the colors shifting. In LAB color, if the printer encounters a color it can't reproduce it will shift only that color rather than all the colors.

If you're curious (and technically inclined) you can read more about TIFs here, and more about LAB color here.

What kind of fabric can I print on?

Updated 7-29-2009

Spoonflower is working to expand the range of fabric it offers.

We currently offer:

Quilting-weight. Our base fabric is white 100% cotton, 60-square, and just slightly over 4 ounces per yard. It is lightweight combed cotton broadcloth with an extremely soft hand -- perfect for quilting and sewing. The printable width of the fabric is 42 inches (with 1-2 inches of unprinted selvage).

Upholstery-weight. We also offer an upholstery-weight 100% cotton sateen (warp sateen) that is just over 10oz per yard, with a lustrous surface well-suited to digital printing. It's great fabric for bags, pants, home dec projects, and the like. The fabric has a printable width of 55 inches (with 1-2 inches of unprinted selvage).

Linen-Cotton blend (Limited-time only). This is a special fabric that we'll only offer while our supply lasts during June. It's an antique yelloow (tea-stained) 55% linen, 45% cotton blend that is around 5 ounces per yard and would be great for skirts and blouses, especially historical reconstructions. It has a printable width of 40 inches (1-2 inches of unprinted selvage).

Organic Cotton Sateen.  Spoonflower's organic sateen is a creamy cotton fabric perfect for making baby items, blouses, dresses, and pillows. It is certified organic by GOTS (Global Organic Textile Standard).  It has a printable width of 58 inches (147 cm), weighs 4.5 oz per yard, and has an extremely soft hand and glossy, cream-colored finish.     

It is our intention to offer additional fabric choices in the near future, including organic cotton. If you'd like to weigh in on what kinds of fabric you would most like to see, please drop Kim a line.

When will Spoonflower be open?

We're getting this question a lot, as you can imagine. Here's the latest:

Updated on 11-10-2008: We're open!

We're working our way through the beta wait-list. Over 1,000 people have already received invitations to try out the beta site, and a few hundred are left on the list as of this writing. Unless we get completely slammed by an unexpected PR event ("Please don't throw me in the brier patch!") everyone currently on the list should have received an invitation within the next week or so. Until we're fully up and running, however, we will continue to send invitations only to people who've added their email addresses to the wait list. Sign up for list here.

In the second week of May we will start to email invitations to create Spoonflower accounts to a small number of beta-testers. Because such a large number of people are interested in participating in the beta (thanks everyone!) we'll expand the number of invitations we send slowly over a period of two months or so. At the end of two or three months we hope to be able to take the wrapper off the web site and open registrations to everyone, but we'll have to see how things go. Thanks for being patient, and thank you again for all the encouragement. We're looking forward to hearing your suggestions and ideas.

How do I repeat an image to make a pattern?

Here's a relatively simple technique for using Photoshop to create a repeat without requiring a textile design plugin. The steps are taken from an online column by Frederick Chipkin, the author of Adobe Photoshop for Textile Design by Frederick L Chipkin.

1. Open Photoshop, open the image you want to be the basis of your repeat, then modify the canvas to reflect the size of the fabric you want to print (18"x22" for example).

2. Using the rectangular Marquee tool select the area for your repeat.

3. In the Edit menu, drag down to choose "Define pattern." In the dialog box, name your pattern and click 'OK.'

4. Deselect the Marquee (Select menu ->Deselect).

5. Go to the Edit menu and drag down to 'Fill.' In the Fill dialog box, next to 'Use" choose "Pattern." You can now choose your selected image as a custom pattern.  Click OK.

6. The area of your canvas around the original image should now be filled with your pattern.

Note that in the example below, my original image does not 'match up' on  the right/left and top/bottom, so there is a tiling effect. But it still looks nifty.

  -->

How do I prepare a fabric design for printing?

Meggiecat wrote the other day to ask the most obvious question about printing fabric on Spoonflower, which is "what do we need to do to prepare designs?"

I've delayed my response in the hope of being able to offer a bit more technical detail, but in the absence of a perfect response I'd like to go ahead and post a few suggestions. Please forgive me if I end up needing to revise any of this [likely].

File Resolution:
240 dpi is a minimum resolution for the design you wish to repeat in a pattern. If you want to be able to scale it up after you upload it, the image will need to be at least twice that. Updated info on preparing images is here.

Image Size:
You can take an image of any size (240 dpi or greater) and repeat it to create a pattern. Alternately, you could create the pattern repeat on your own computer and then upload a large file equal in size to the amount of fabric you wish to order. For example, the fabric we will be using is 44" wide (112 cm), so if you wanted to order a yard you could create an image that is 42" (the printable area) x 36" (or close to that). The file size limit is 25 MB, so if your design is large you will almost certainly have to use the JPG rather than the RIF format.

Fabric Size:
You can order a swatch (8"x8"), a fat quarter (18"x21") or any multiple of a linear yard (up to 3 yards).  We will always recommend that you order a swatch of your design before ordering a larger quantity. That will give you a chance to examine the colors firsthand to make sure they printed as intended.

Creating Repeats:
When you upload a design to your Spoonflower gallery, you will be able to create a pattern by tiling the image, using a half-step or half-brick repeat (which staggers the tiles), or by mirroring your image. In the case of tiling, in order for the pattern not to appear to be composed of a lot of individual rectangles, the design you upload will need to be composed so that the left side of the design 'joins' to the right side, and the top of the design 'joins' to the bottom. If you have a textile design program or Photoshop expertise, you can probably do this pretty easily. For the rest of us, however, we plan to post tutorials to help you through the process of creating patterns on your own.

File Types / Color Profile:
You will want to set up your files in LAB color profile or RGB profile with 8 Bits/Channel (rather than 16), and to save (and upload) them as .TIF, .JPG, or .PNG files with flattened layers. LAB is the ideal profile for printing. We cannot print from CMYK files. Do not compress the images.