Spoonflower allows you… yes YOU… to design your own custom-printed fabric. How enticing is that! As a designer myself, I’m almost afraid to try my hand at textile design for fear I’ll never do anything else. Not only can you design your own fabric, you can buy interesting fabric designed by other people. It’s easy to get caught up looking at the thousands of options. Some of it is truly fabulous, a lot is very good and of course, there are some duds. On the whole, however, I found plenty of fabric that I had to fight the urge to add to my towering stash. We gave Spoonflower a try with a set of simple pillows made from our friend, Tammy Hensley’s Family Forever collection. We’ll take you through the order process, the options, and what we learned.

Spoonflower allows you… yes YOU… to design your own custom-printed fabric. How enticing is that! As a designer myself, I’m almost afraid to try my hand at textile design for fear I’ll never do anything else. Not only can you design your own fabric, you can buy interesting fabric designed by other people. It’s easy to get caught up looking at the thousands of options. Some of it is truly fabulous, a lot is very good and of course, there are some duds. On the whole, however, I found plenty of fabric that I had to fight the urge to add to my towering stash. We gave Spoonflower a try with a set of simple pillows made from our friend, Tammy Hensley’s Family Forever collection. We’ll take you through the order process, the options, and what we learned.

For our first foray into Spoonflower, we’ve chosen to buy a pre-designed fabric. In a future article, we’ll take you through the the actual design of a custom fabric.

Getting Started

Go to Spoonflower and take a look around. Right away you’ll see a selection of fabric made by others who have taken the Spoonflower plunge. You’ll also see a few bullet points about the site. There is no minimum order (yay!) and eco-friendly textile printing (double yay!). Pricing is approximately double what you would pay in the store for comparable quality fabric.

Create an account

I created an account right away. It’s fast and it’s free. You can even use your Facebook login.

I recommend ordering the Spoonflower fabric sample pack for $1 (free shipping). You’ll quickly receive in postal mail a small booklet with 4″x 4″ swatches of the available fabrics. Scroll to the bottom of the linked page to order the swatch booklet. If you are ever considering creating your own fabric, also order the Spoonflower Color Guide (also only $1). I ordered both and received them in just a few days.

Browse the site

Click on the Shop tab to browse the fabrics available for sale. The What’s Hot selection is the default.

You can search by category, color or use the search field to enter a key word. Since we’re going to order fabric by our friend Tammy Hensley, we searched for her user name “tammikins,” and landed here:

Order Fabric

As one of the three fabrics I ordered for the family pillows, I chose FamilyForever-Pink.

I used the booklet of swatches I received to help me make my fabric choice. I chose Quilting Weight ($18/yd) fabric and in a 21″ x 18″ fat quarter. So my total for this fabric is $11.

When it comes to showing you what you get, Spoonflower really has their act together. You can see above that with the Fat Quarter button checked, the image shows me exactly what I will receive with both a horizontal and vertical ruler positioned for additional accuracy. Click once on the image to see the motif repeat. Clever! If I want to see what a yard looks like, all I have to do is click on the 1 yard button. Voilà:

Add your fabric choices to you cart, and check out with PayPal or a major credit card. I had my fabric in about a week. They say “under 10 days” with the caveat to check your custom shipping estimate.

The Pillows

These are very simple pillows. If you’d like to make a similar pillow, you can find many pillow tutorials on Sew4home. These are made using our Super Simple Throw Pillows tutorial.