Spoonflower Fabrics – 10 Tips For Ordering

This post is for all you fabric lovers – have you heard about Spoonflower Fabrics?  They are a company that will let you design your own fabric.  Such a great idea for those times when you’re looking for that certain fabric, but can’t find it anywhere!

They will also sell designers’ fabrics – fabrics that other people have designed.  They have 100’s of unique fabric patterns that you can’t find at your local fabric store.  Today I’m going to share some tips for ordering fabrics from Spoonflower Fabrics.  They also sell wallpaper and gift wrap, but we’re going to focus on their fabrics.

I order lots of fabrics for my clients, and ordering from Spoonflower Fabrics is a little different than other places I have ordered fabric from.  They are digitally printing your fabric design on the base white fabric of your choice, so it the fabric is custom made for you.

Because the fabrics are custom made for you, they are going to be a little more expensive than other fabric sources.  But, well worth it to get the fabric you really want, and will work for your project.

Spoonflower Fabrics – 10 Tips For Ordering Fabrics

1.  On their site – spoonflowerfabrics.com – check out their How It Works tab at the top of the site.  It gives an overview of how to either design your own fabric or order fabric designs that have already been created.
2. Another helpful tab on the site is Products.  If you go to Explore Our Products and then View Base Fabrics, you will see all of the different types of base white fabrics that the designs can be printed onto.  There are 20 different types of base fabrics to choose from.
3. When you’re in the View Base Fabrics section, make sure to read the details, uses and care instructions for each type of base fabric, so that you can choose the type of fabric that is appropriate for your project.
4. When you’re in the Explore Our Products section, you will see an option to order a sample pack.  You can order a sample pack for $1.00 and Spoonflower will ship it for free.  Well worth it to actually get to feel the thickness and texture of the different white base fabrics.
5. If you have questions, they have a FAQ section on their site.  You can also email them your questions or do a live chat.  At this time they have very limited phone support.  To start a live chat, go to the Help button at the bottom right corner of the page, type in your question, and then you will be able to start a live chat.  I did have problems with a fabric order I placed, and they were helpful on the live chat.  I would have preferred to talk to them on the phone, but my problem was taken care of during the live chat very quickly.
6. When you’re ready to get to the fun part of picking your fabric designs, just go to the Shop and then fabric tab at the top of the site.  You will see trending fabrics first, but you can search for different types of fabrics – like stripes of florals.  Another great feature that I liked is that you can also search for fabrics in certain colors.  Let’s say you were looking for a black and orange striped fabric.  Just put stripe in the search then pick black as a color and then pick orange as another color.  All of the black and orange striped fabrics will come up.
7. When you have decided on your base white fabric type and the fabric design you want to order, I would recommend ordering a sample of that design on your base fabric of choice.  The colors can vary a lot depending on which type of white fabric base fabric you choose.  Here are two fabric samples that I ordered for a client. The left sample is printed on the Heavy Cotton Twill, and the right sample is printed on their Eco Canvas.  You can see that the colors on the Eco Canvas sample are much brighter than on the Heavy Cotton Twill.
8. You can only order in whole yardage amounts from Spoonflower Fabrics, and the largest amount that you can order in one continuous piece is 8 yards.  For most projects you aren’t going to need huge runs of fabric, but if you’re making draperies you will need to figure out what your cuts will be.  For instance, if you need 9 yards of fabric, you wouldn’t order 8 yards and 1 yard.  Instead you would possibly order 6 yards and 3 yards depending on what you fabric cuts need to be.
9. Unless you order 20 yards of a narrow fabric (less than 56″) or 10 yards of a wider fabric, the fabric will be shipped folded, not rolled on a tube.  I did ask them about this, and they said you can request your fabric to be spooled (rolled on a tube), but there will be an extra charge.  I don’t know what the extra charge is, but it may be worth it to avoid extra ironing needed because of folding the fabric.
10. Because Spoonflower Fabrics is printing your fabric just for you, it is considered a custom product and can’t be returned if you don’t like it.  So, again, I would recommend ordering a sample of your fabric choice before ordering any yardages.

I hope you’ve enjoyed these tips for ordering Spoonflower Fabrics!  Have any of you ordered fabrics from them?