Here is something you don't see every day...Design your own custom printed fabric!

[Harbourmaster]

http://www.spoonflower.com/welcome

What is this all about?

Fabric and design. Creativity and color.

The Spoonflower community uses fabric to make quilts, clothes, pillows, dolls, blankets, handbags, framed textile art and many other things. When we're lucky, our customers post photos of the beautiful items they make in the Spoonflower photo gallery on Flickr.

Interest in crafting happens to be exploding right now. For a variety of reasons more and more people are drawn to the idea of doing it themselves, of creating things that are unique and carry within them a little bit of the passion of the individuals who made them.

The handmade revolution is being waged quietly. On blogs, in sewing groups, on Etsy storefronts and in homes, a lot of people have decided to make and to share things they think are beautiful.

We really liked the idea of expressing yourself through making new things. So we decided to make a company.

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 get some sense of the enthusiasm of the craft community on our buzz page.

[MacManMaz]

Great Idea, I have a daughter that just started creating designs for silk screening. Unfortunately, she cannot afford Photoshop or Illustrator. She would like to create a "portfolio" of fabric designs.

Can she use photoshop elements to creat LAB TIF Files?

[laarree]

MacManMaz wrote:
Great Idea, I have a daughter that just started creating designs for silk screening. Unfortunately, she cannot afford Photoshop or Illustrator. She would like to create a "portfolio" of fabric designs.

Can she use photoshop elements to creat LAB TIF Files?

They do say this is not necessary http://blog.spoonflower.com/2008/05/how-...repar.html :
"If you don't have Photoshop and talking about TIF and LAB color make you anxious, don't worry.
You can upload a JPG or other common image format and it will still print nicely. There may be
colors in your image that can't be reproduced by pigments on fabric in our printer (very bright colors,
absolute blacks, and very saturated colors, for example). If that is the case you will sometimes see all
of the colors in an image shift and the colors may end up appearing different from what you expected."

Their discussion of LAB is confusing. AFAIK, any conventional RGB digital art (unless you are a
RAW-shooting photo geek who is working with the ProPhoto RGB color space) will fall within
the gamut of the LAB color space, which approximates the range of human vision. I think they
are just trying to avoid disappointing customers with unrealistic expectations. I'd venture to say
that even if someone is carefully following their instructions about LAB, he or she will still experience
what Spoonflower warns about above--"There may be colors in your image that can't be reproduced
by pigments on fabric in our printer... the colors may end up appearing different from what you expected."

Their service is still very interesting. I read about them a couple of weeks ago, and was surprised
to see that one of the artists they feature on their site is the woman who owned the daddy of my
doggies, a very talented weaver and fabric artist who has her own store in Brooklyn.

[Mike Johnson]

Thank you for posting that, Harbourmaster. I just spent $210 plus shipping on four throw pillows for our couch, because I simply couldn't find any decent fabric to make my own. I kinda wish I could return them now. And let's not talk about the hours I spent looking for fabric with the right colors!