A herd of goats and a flock of geese: Free Swatch Day Wrap-Up

We posted this link in our newsletter last week, but for any of you who missed it:

Thanks again to all who participated. If you missed your chance to donate to Heifer International during our Free Swatch promotion, you can still do so anytime on their web site: Heifer.org. You might also find it interesting to read a recent article that mentions Heifer from the NYT Sunday Magazine: Saving the World's Women.

YouTube jackpot

I have a love/hate relationship with the internet which I suspect many of you out there might share.  On the one hand, I really hate how much time can be sucked away before I've even realized I've been reading blogs for an hour during my girls' naptime when I had planned to actually sew something.  But on the other hand, sometimes I run across something so brilliant and amazing that I know I never would've found out if I hadn't been dorking around online.

Courtesy of an archived podcast on dress forms by Lori at Sew Forth Now!, I present to you this fantastic video on how to make your own dress form.  Out of duct tape.  Really.

I love the internet.

Indie craft documentary

This may be a case where everyone else in the crafting world is way ahead of me, but do you all know about Handmade Nation, a documentary about the indie craft movement, due to come out next year?  You can view the trailer below.  I, for one, am super psyched!

Spoonflowering, Episode 8

This isn't the first shipment of fabric we've sent out from our new space, but it's our first video in the new space.  Photographs and video editing done by the delightful and multitalented Danielle.  I'm beginning to wish I had an intern at our house, too...

Spoonflowering, Episode 7

Kim introduces this week's fabric preview with a little help from the smallest member of the Spoonflower team, who just started crawling! We saw more amazing designs this week, but that won't surprise anyone by now.

Spoonflowering, Episode 6

This week's preview is quite limited, but next week we'll try to capture more designs.

Spoonflowering, Episode 5 - Fabric at the Beach

Here's a slightly belated preview of a few of the fabrics we shipped out this past week. Because of holidays and the fact that LOTs of you are busy making great designs, we'll probably run a bit behind shipping orders over the next seven days, but should have a full head of steam by next week. Thanks for your patience, beta testers.

We also have a long list of people who've signed up for the beta but who haven't yet received invitations. We'll send out the next round of invites as soon as we're sure we'll be able to keep up with your orders. Things are moving right along thanks largely to the enthusiasm of the craft-blog community. We can't thank you enough for your support.

Spoonflowering, Episode 4

Because it is late and I'm out of steam, I'm just going to post this week's preview of your fabrics as is... with no introduction and auto-edited in a program for Windows called Muvee. Our preview is hosted as always by Kim (although I didn't use the audio), and this week featuring two surprise guests. Thanks for a busy week, folks. Your creativity is inspiring.

Spoonflowering, Week 3

More of your fabulous fabric should be in the mail tomorrow. Here's our weekly video glimpse of what's going out the door.

And be sure to checkout the latest from the Spoonflower Flickr pool, where a couple of people have already started to add photos of projects being made from Spoonflower fabric shipped over the past two weeks.

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Sharing your designs with the world--or not

We've gotten a few concerned emails this week from some of you asking whether your designs are protected from being seen and used by the rest of the world.  The answer is yes, any designs you upload to Spoonflower are currently viewable only by us employees who would never dream of doing anything sinister with them (however much we might like to make a cute summer skirt out of a certain adorable house print...).  They are your designs and we have zero claim on them whatsoever.

That said, in our excitement at showing the world some of these wonderful designs, it's finally occurred to us that showing your fabrics in our weekly recorded fabric displays might be something that some of you might want NOT to happen.  You may have noticed that the resolution in our little movies is pretty low, and the sole intent is to make up for the (temporary!) lack of Spoonflower galleries just now.  But if you want us to exclude your prints from our video round-up, please drop me an email at kim@spoonflower.com and I'll be more than happy to leave yours out. 

Spoonflowering, Episode #2

Here's a glimpse of a few of the fabulous fabrics shipping out this week (in the mail tomorrow).

You folks are really talented.

Shipping your fabric!

We thought you might enjoy a short (crudely edited) video that shows a bit of the fabulous fabric we shipped out Friday .

NOTE: If you are planning to order custom fabric this week, do it today if you can. We're printing this week's orders tomorrow (Monday) for shipping on Thursday or Friday. If you put in an order after Monday morning it won't print until next week.