Thanks so much to all of you who participated in Spoonflower's 3rd annual Free Swatch Day! It's all over now but the mad printing, cutting, packing and shipping. We gave away 7,300 swatches of fabric and raised a total of $2500 for Heifer International! Thank you, thank you, thank you, everyone!
heifer
August 18th Is Free Swatch Day!
Spoonflower's Third Annual Free Swatch Day Starts Thursday, Aug. 18th, 2011
Get a single free, custom fabric swatch for 24 hours between
noon EST on Thursday, August 18, and noon EST on Friday, August 19
Start: 12:00 PM Eastern Time, August 18, 2011
End: 11:59 AM Eastern Time, August 19, 2011
HOW DOES IT WORK? This offer is limited to one swatch per customer. To activate the discount, add a swatch-sized piece of fabric to your shopping cart between noon EST on Thursday, August 18 and noon EST on Friday, August 19, then proceed to checkout. The discount will be subtracted from your cart total automatically. Note that in order to receive your swatches, you need to follow the transaction through to the order confirmation page. [And yes, shipping is free, too.] This offer works for your own designs or for any of the designs available for sale in the Spoonflower marketplace.
Spoonflower Free Swatch Day just earned a heifer for @Heifer International!
Free Swatch Day is humming along and will be live until noon tomorrow (EST, or GMT -4 :00).
As of 5pm we've given away about 1,500 swatches since noon (still to be printed — yikes!) and earned $500 for Heifer International, which is enough to buy… a heifer!
Great work so far, folks! Don't forget to pop over and vote for your favorite tractor fabrics while you are here.
Free Swatches For All! Announcing Spoonflower’s Second Free Swatch Day
Free Swatch Day Starts Thursday, Aug. 26th
Get a single free, custom fabric swatch for 24 hours between noon EST on Thursday, August 26, and noon EST on Friday, August 27
HOW DOES IT WORK? This offer is limited to one swatch per customer. To activate the discount, just add a swatch-sized piece of fabric to your shopping cart between noon EST on Thursday, August 26 and noon EST on Friday, August 27, then proceed to checkout. The discount will be subtracted from your cart total automatically. Note that in order to receive your swatches, you need to follow the transaction through to the order confirmation page. [And yes, shipping is free, too.] This offer works for your own designs or for any of the designs available for sale in the Spoonflower marketplace.
PRINT YOUR OWN DESIGN: If you're new to Spoonflower this is a great chance to test the quality of our fabric and our printing for free. Just go to the Spoonflower home page, click Get Started, upload one or more designs, click on your design and then follow the instructions above.
SHOP FOR FABRICS BY INDIE DESIGNERS: Instead of printing your own fabric, choose a free swatch from any of the thousands of unique designs in the Spoonflower marketplace.
TRY A NEW FABRIC: We currently offer six base fabrics to choose from, including quilting cotton, organic cotton sateen, organic interlock knit, upholstery-weight cotton twill, linen-cotton canvas, and cotton lawn. Read more about our fabrics.
Putting Our Crafty Community to Good Use: Heifer International
Spoonflower is still a small company. This our second Free Swatch Day. The first time we did this was a year ago when Spoonflower was an even smaller company, but we've decided once again this year to try to take the opportunity to do something worthwhile.
While we don't yet have much in the way of extra cash that we can direct toward organizations that promote ideas we value like sustainability, we are wealthy in one respect. Spoonflower is the hub of a large, well networked community of over 100,000 amazing, creative people. So we've decided to give everyone who takes advantage of Free Swatch Day on Spoonflower the option to take the $5 they would normally pay for a swatch and instead to make a donation to Heifer International, an organization that provides livestock, training and services to small farmers and communities around the world.
When you enter the shopping cart with your free swatch you'll see a donation box on the check out page where you can fill in any amount you'd like to donate to Heifer.org, click a donate button, and see the donation amount added to your cart total.
We'll report on the amount raised throughout the day on our Twitter feed and our Facebook page as well as on the Spoonflower blog once it's all over.
Questions?
What is a swatch and why aren't they always free? A swatch in this case is an 8 inch x 8 inch square of fabric custom printed with your design. Printed swatches normally cost $5 each. If you just want a sample book of unprinted fabric to see what it's like, we can send you that anytime for $1. The order form is on our fabrics page.
Can I email you an image to print? To take us up on our offer you have to use Spoonflower to create and order your swatch. That means uploading your (original) design or photo to a Spoonflower account, choosing your fabric and repeat style, and checking out using the instructions listed above.
Do I have to make a donation to Heifer? A donation is entirely optional. If you have another organization you'd like to support with a $5 donation, do that instead. You don't have to donate $5, either. Donate in any amount you like. Read more about Heifer.
How can I track my donation? The downside of raising money through Spoonflower is that we can't offer the ability to monitor and track your contribution and we can't offer you a receipt for making a tax deductible donation. We'll keep everyone informed about what we're doing on our blog, but if you want real accountability then by all means leave the donation box on your Spoonflower checkout page blank, then head on over to Heifer.org and make a donation yourself on their secure site.
If you have a question that we have not answered on this page, please feel free to contact us by emailing help@spoonflower.com.
A sheep for Cean
Congratulations to Cean Irminger! By winning her fourth (shoes, snow, apron) Fabric Of the Week contest with The Black Forest, she is now officially tied with SammyK as all-time champ. Following in the talented footsteps of SammyK, who donated her fourth win prize to Kindred Spirits Animal Sanctuary in New Mexico, Cean has requested that in lieu of receiving $100 in free fabric we make a donation on her behalf to Heifer.org, a great organization that provides livestock, training and services to small farmers and communities around the world. We are very pleased to have been able to purchase a sheep for Cean. Thank you, Cean!
Thank you to all participating designers. Final voting results were:
1. 589 votes for The
Black Forest by ceanirminger
2. 554 votes for paper_owls by mytinystar
3. 534 votes for Crafty Girl by
jordan_elise
4. 523 votes for AugustBlooms by patters
5. 475 votes for hummingbird by higgins
6. 428 votes for Weekly Specials by
linkolisa
7. 413 votes for My Green Tomatoes by
spellstone
8. 409 votes for paperdaisies by
nightgarden
9. 346 votes for Stamps by koalalady
10. 331 votes for Paper Knitting by
eloisenarrigan
Free Swatch Day Today
Just in case you missed the hullabaloo yesterday when we announced that Free Swatch Day would take place on Thursday [thus befuddling the 50% of the population who get halfway through the week and manage 
to convince themselves that it is already Thursday… me being one of them], today really is Free Swatch Day on Spoonflower. That means that up until 11:59 pm Eastern Time you'll be able to get up to two free swatches on our site just by adding them to your cart. All the details are HERE. [Note to folks outside of the US: Eastern Time is the same as New York.] We're also using this as an excuse to harness a little of the power of our amazing community of crafty peeps to raise money for a terrific organization called Heifer International. We'll keep you posted here on how much money we raise, but let me just say now that we're hoping at least to come up with enough to buy a couple of llamas.