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Spoonflower Bootcamp: How to Design a Quilt Block in PicMonkey

We all have family photos we’d love to incorporate into quilts. In today's Bootcamp tutorial, help team member Lyly will guide you through creating a photo quilt block with PicMonkey, and she'll show you how to size your photo block to fit perfectly on a Spoonflower swatch!

Spoonflower BootcampSpoonflower’s test swatches are 8×8 inches in size, and at only $5 each, they're perfect for incorporating a customized block into a beautiful quilt! In this post, I'll walk you through the steps to create a custom quilt block with open source design software PicMonkey, which you can access directly from your Spoonflower account. Let's get started!

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Commissions on swatches at last! Important change to Spoonflower policy

 

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As designers who use Spoonflower know, we’ve always had a bit of a flaw in our commission policy. When you make a design available for sale on Spoonflower and someone else buys it, we pay you a 10% commission. All well and good. The exception to this has always been swatches, which until now have not paid any commission. The reasoning behind this went as follows:

Swatches act as test pieces for larger purchases. We want to make these 8″ x 8″ squares of fabric as cheap as possible — and now and then, as on Free Swatch Day each year, even to make them free. Designers share our interest in making swatches as accessible as possible as an investment in selling more fabric later.

Flash forward two years to now, after we’ve been able to study data from shopping behavior (and designer sentiment) over a fairly long stretch of time. It turns out that in many cases swatches have a value on their own, either as squares for quilts, patches, or — as in our recent ornament contest — as 8-inch-square cut & sew patterns. When the end product is a swatch, it’s not fair not to pay a commission.

We still want to be able to give away swatches sometimes, but after a good deal of thought and analysis, we’ve decided that even when we give away swatches, we can still afford to give designers their $.50 Spoondollar commissions. We will absorb it as a promotional cost. The only difference now between swatches and other fabric sizes is that, when you buy your own swatch, the $5 price will not receive the Everyday Designer Discount of 10%. So swatches will still cost $5, but if you are a designer who sells fabric in the Spoonflower marketplace you’ll now be able to earn Spoondollars on all the swatches you sell to other people.

Good news indeed! Learn more about how commissions work at Spoonflower here.

Spoonflower Free Swatch Day just earned a heifer for @Heifer International!

Free-Swatch-Day-logo-final
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.

GET THE DETAILS ON FREE SWATCH DAY

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

Order a free swatch 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

Heifer International helps promote sustainable agriculture around the world 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.