could you tell me more about spoonflower? i'm interested in uploading my own designs, but i'm not entirely sure how it works or how much it pays. thank you!
Sure!
When you first upload your design, it'll look like this.
The standard DPI for printing on all the fabric sites I've seen is 150, and since I made this pattern at 200 DPI that means Spoonflower will print it bigger than I want it unless I change it here.
So I click on the "change DPI" thing, type in "200" and click "change". Sometimes I find it doesn't save, so I always go back later to check and make sure it did save the right DPI.
(You can avoid this by just changing your image to the right DPI before uploading, but sometimes I want the option to make it a bit bigger, just in case.)
If you want to make multiple sizes of the same pattern available you'll have to upload a different version for each one and change the size individually.
For example, I drew my Bathroom Dinosaurs pattern pretty large and at 150 DPI, and left that as is for the big version.
But I wanted a small version too, so for that one I changed it to 670 pixels per inch so it'd print much smaller.
You write in the title, tags, and description, and you can put any links to other pages or references in the "Additional Details" section.
(Leaving links isn't usually necessary, but sometimes it is, like how I wanted to leave a link to the original 1760's teapot for my crinoid fossil pattern.)
At this point, you can order things printed with your design, but nobody else can yet. You have the option to show the design publicly, but I like to keep it private until I've ordered my proofs and can sell it.
Now, to order proofs! DO NOT GET THE CUT SWATCHES!!! They are SO much more expensive than getting a fill-a-yard, because cutting and packaging all the little pieces is a lot of extra labour.
Wether you have a few designs, or a lot, just get a fill-a-yard.
To make a fill-a-yard you first need to make a collection. Collections can be either public or private, so I keep a private collection called "new designs to proof", and I put all my new designs in there until I've ordered them.
You can also add other people's patterns to a collection, so if you have extra space to fill up or you want little bits of a bunch of other people's patterns for a quilt or something, add whatever you want to your collection.
On the collections page when you hover your mouse over one you'll see a little patchwork symbol show up in the middle along the bottom edge, and you click on that.
That'll take you here, and you choose a layout and a fabric.
For some reason the fabric options here are a bit limited and vary depending on the layout. I like to get either the 1 yard/42 designs in cotton poplin, or the 2 yards/48 designs in cotton sateen, but there are plenty more you could try.
I'll click the latter for this example. (The squares in this one are the perfect size for pleated face masks, and I have a few made from mine and my friend's fabrics.)
Then you just click on a design and click on however many squares/rectangles you want it to fill. It usually takes a few seconds for them to show up.
You can have just one little sample of each, or you could make half the fabric be one design and fill up the rest with little samples.
(That's what I did for my brown monster waistcoat - I printed juuuust enough of a fill-a-yard to cut out a waistcoat from, and the rest was other samples.)
You can change it around if you want. Once you're happy with it, put it in the cart and buy it!
I'm not going to order this one since it's an example with designs I've already proofed, but here's what my monster patterns looked like when they arrived.
Also, I want to point out that you could VERY easily make some really fun pride flags using the fill-a-yard! You might have to have it be only part of the fabric, depending on the number of stripes, but you could make it be any texture or pattern you want. Here's a quick example I did with other people's patterns by searching "(colour) marble texture".
With only 4 stripes I'd have to fill the rest of the space in with something else and cut it off, but it would still be pretty big! (The edge of that purple stripe looks jagged in the preview, but they print perfectly straight.)
I have not done this, but someone should! Just wash it, trim the blank edges off, hem it, and you've got a flag!
(Don't do this with the 2 yards/4 designs option though, it looks like nice stripes in the thumbnail but it's made for infinity scarves and there's a gap and dotted line down the middle for cutting. Bleh.)
Anyways, once your samples arrive you can make the designs available for sale! If you have any changes you'd like to make, to the size it prints at or the pattern itself, you can make them now.
I found the small version of the Bathroom Dinosaurs print was too small when I first got my proofs, so I just reduced the DPI a bit.
And you can replace the image with a new, edited version by clicking "upload revision".
So when my brown coffin pattern printed really washed out and grey, I replaced it with a more saturated version and was good to go, no need to order another proof.
Down at the bottom of the design editing page you can now click on the options to list it publicly, and to sell it on fabric and/or wallpaper. I make all of them available on fabric, and some on wallpaper if I deem them to be appropriately large.
They'll pay you 10% of the sales price of the fabric, or slightly more if you sell over a certain amount in a month. There's a whole page of questions and answers about it.
You also get a 10% discount if you order fabrics with your own designs.
(Although, personally, if I'm ordering my own designs on fabrics for me then I'd prefer to get them from somewhere like ArtFabrics, since they use reactive dyes instead of inks, so their blacks actually print black and don't make the fabric stiffer like Spoonflower's do. And also because they're here in Canada so there's less shipping cost. Sadly they don't have an option to sell your designs though.)
Spoonflower also has weekly design contests which are announced a few weeks in advance and have pretty big store credit prizes (the first place one is 200 USD), and I've entered a few times, but I don't vote often because Spoonflower is such a huge site that there are frequently over a thousand entries and it's really time consuming to scroll through them all.
Ok, that's everything I can think of! I also put all my patterns on sone things on Redbubble, since they have options for repeating patterns on some things.
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