Fun Website Find

Every week in the newspaper, there is a little blurb about new stuff to check out in the Home section. I have found some really interesting stuff in the little blurb. This week was no exception. They featured a site called Spoonflower.

Spoonflower is an online business that allows you to upload a design to be printed on cotton fabric. Yardage of the custom fabric is $18. It sounds though, like you can also get swatches and fat quarters as well for a lesser cost.

The design you upload needs to be no larger than 25MB and at a resolution of 150 dpi ("The print size of your image in pixel dimensions will be 150x the number of inches.") They will tile your design to fill the fabric, unless of course your design is larger than the piece you order, in which case they indicate they will crop from the lower left corner.

I think this has some really great opportunities.

You can use a drawing by your budding Picasso or a photograph that you took or just something that you created in Photoshop or other graphic software. Your design private unless you decide to make it public.

I'd like to suggest that I might use them for a quilt, but I started a quilt nearly 15 years ago and I still haven't finished it. Perhaps I was too ambitious planning to hand piece and quilt a queen size quilt for my first project, but that is a whole other story. Perhaps though, with custom fabric, I might feel that I could stick with simple squares and machine piece it.

I think it might be a fun way to make some custom pillow cases or covers. You could use the fabric in your favorite pattern to make some custom clothing - shorts, skirts, shirts. A crafty person could use the fabric to make some simple curtains for their house.

The company is located in North Carolina. They launched their Beta site in May of 2008, so they are a relatively new online entity, but boast over 10,000 crafters signed up to use the site already.

What design would you use for custom fabric? What would you do with the fabric?