Monday, June 15, 2009

Spoonflower Fabrics

Back in March, following Sue Reno's lead, I decided to take the plunge and order some fabric from Spoonflower. These are the two fabric designs I ordered:

This is derived from the background of my quilt The Gathering.

This is derived from the background of a quilt design I'm still working on.

Overall I'm very pleased with the fabrics - the quality is good, and there's an impressive amount of detail. There was some banding, particularly on the top fabric, that probably only I would notice. I'm fairly certain this was a hiccup in the printing process, because there was no banding on other areas of the fabric with the same design elements and colors. For my purposes this wasn't a showstopper.

I ordered the fabrics on a whim, so did not order swatches to make sure the colors would be exactly as expected. I was OK knowing that this would result in some serendipity, but if you want your colors to match something you really should order a swatch.

Does this mean I'll stop printing fabric for my quilts on my own printer? No, but it's a nice alternative if I want yardage of a special design.

5 comments:

kathy said...

Oh yeah! These are gorgeous!!!!

Lyric said...

sweet!
How big are the pieces you ordered?
Did you have to worry about repeats to get yardage?

lovely work!
-Lyric

Sue Reno said...

Wow, these are gorgeous! I feel the same way; spoonflower will not replace printing my own, but is a useful supplement, especially for yardage.
I look forward to seeing what you do with these.

wen Redmond said...

Very nice- I love seeing my designs and photo's printed on fabric!

Diane Doran said...

Thanks, ladies, for all the nice comments!

Lyric, I ordered one yard pieces. They have a number of options for repeats, and a tool that helps you select the repeat you want. You can order smaller quantities of fabric than one yard, and see a preview of the layout.

There's a limit on the file size you can upload, so that's another factor to consider when designing your fabric. HTH!