I just received notification from Spoonflower that they are moving on to the next phase of custom fabric printing which is now open to everyone!
If you’re not familiar with Spoonflower, they’re a group of folks working in an old sock mill in Mebane, North Carolina who print fabric using a digital process so there’s little to no set-up cost and you can print as little as a single yard of fabric. We printed fabric digitally here in Rhode Island for a trade show two years ago. We used IOLabs {they do the printing for Tiny Showcase} and the fabric looked great. We were already in the process of having fabric screen printed but it wasn’t yet ready for our trade show so we printed a few yards on IO’s digital printers to make samples for our show. We could hardly tell the difference between the final screen printed fabric and the digitally printed yardage.
[Spoonflower is] not far from the Haw River, which runs through the North Carolina Piedmont and was once lined with cotton textile mills. It’s also true that Mebane is not too far from the cities of Raleigh, Durham, Chapel Hill and Cary, where technology companies like Red Hat, SAS, and IBM have headquarters. If you’re in the area and want to drop by we’re happy to give you the tour. We launched the Spoonflower web site as a closed ‘beta’ at the very end of May 2008, shipping the first few hundred orders from our kitchen table. Word spread quickly. We moved into a real office in August. As of October, there are over 10,000 crafters signed up to use our site and we’ve sent fabric all over the world.
You can print your own fabric in small quantities for whatever use you have - textiles, fashion even bookbinding. Just upload a file and get ready to design. Check them out!
Visit Spoonflower
Thanks for sharing! It would be so cool to design my own fabric (if only I had more spare time)!
Comment by Nancy Kubo — November 4, 2008 @ 2:45 am
Hey Nancy, this is a great service for printing custom fabrics. You can also test run a design or tweak colors before going to print. Nice to hear from you! Jason
Comment by Jason Thompson — November 5, 2008 @ 12:08 pm
Thanks for the fyi! It’s on my “long” list of things I want to do! Hope everything is going great with you too! Nancy
Comment by Nancy Kubo — November 6, 2008 @ 12:49 am