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By this time, if you are the least bit Internet-savvy and the kind of person interested in crafting and DIY culture, chances are you’ve heard of Spoonflower. My friend Gart Davis and I started Spoonflower in 2008 with very little money, but an ambitious idea. We wanted to develop the first website to make it possible for people to create and sell their own fabric designs through the Internet.

Since its modest beginning in a former sock mill in downtown Mebane, North Carolina, Spoonflower has been written about in the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Better Homes & Gardens, Martha Stewart Living, and BUST, as well as in well-known magazines published in Dutch, French, Italian, Spanish, German, and Japanese. The Spoonflower website has been liked and shared, pinned and followed by many thousands of bloggers, Instagrammers, Facebook fans, and Twitterers, and it is safe to say that the once-novel concept of being able to design your own fabric has permanently entered the collective consciousness.

From my standpoint this is enormously satisfying, as you might guess: the stuff of every entrepreneur’s dreams. But, like the character in the Talking Heads song who wonders how he managed to land in the middle of the life he is living, I often find myself disoriented in the midst of Spoonflower’s success. Is this, in fact, my beautiful website? It seems odd, given my background.

This book is primarily about how to design your own fabric digitally (meaning using a computer), but we also show you how to design for other surfaces, such as wallpaper and gift wrap. Each approach to developing a digital surface design is presented in the context of a handful of projects, which we hope you will want to make and/or use as a jumping-off point for further inspiration. No particular experience is necessary to begin. We’ve included lessons and projects for novices and experts alike, from the simple (a pillow portrait of your pet) to the complex (an engineered print of a skirt pattern made from one of your own photos). Whether you’re a quilter, a crafty parent, a professional artist, or an aspiring fashion designer, there are choices here for you.

We set out to create the most approachable book possible. But I should point out that I’m not a designer. I also can’t sew. Neither can my business partner Gart, with whom I cofounded Spoonflower. In fact, not only were we new to the world of fabric and sewing when we started, neither of us knew a thing about printing or, more broadly, textiles. Asked to play casting director for the ideal founder of Spoonflower, I might have sought out someone dapper, knowledgeable, and engaging: the fashion celebrity and design guru Tim Gunn comes to mind. But, alas, I am no Tim Gunn. People who have observed the state of my desk could reasonably question the wisdom of my involvement in any venture intended to promote a more beautiful or elegant anything. Let’s not even bring up my fashion sense. And my partner Gart is, if anything, worse than I am in this respect. So how is it that either of us should have ended up in the business of introducing people to the world of surface design?

Spoonflower was my wife’s idea. Unlike me, Kim is an avid sewist (her preferred term) and fabric collector. She’s a prolific quilter, enjoys making clothes for our three daughters, and in general displays utter fearlessness when it comes to making almost anything, from soap to homemade Pop-Tarts to hats. Spoonflower came about because, in the fall of 2007, Kim was thinking about making new curtains for our den. One night after work, while I sat on the sofa reading, she described to me her vision for the curtains, which would include fabric with giant yellow polka dots. The trouble, she explained from somewhere over my shoulder, was that she had not been able to find fabric with yellow polka dots as large as the ones she imagined.

“Wouldn’t it be cool,” she said, “if there was a place where you could order fabric you designed yourself?” To hear her tell it, I barely looked up from my newspaper. But—and I write this on behalf of husbands everywhere—despite all appearances, I was listening. The wheels were spinning. Partly because of digital technology, we live during a time when the option to customize your own products is, to an astonishing degree, not just common, but expected. Why on earth couldn’t a person like Kim design her own fabric?

In January of 2008, not too long after my conversation with Kim about curtains, Gart and I sat down for coffee in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, to talk about the idea of starting a website that would let people create and sell their own fabric. Gart and I had worked together during the initial four years of Lulu.com, the world’s first Internet-based self-publishing tool for books, a company founded in 2002. It’s where we learned the potential and the pitfalls of self-publishing and print-on-demand. Around the same time, YouTube—which would become the king of all self-publishing sites—was also born.

Although neither of us had much money to invest, we agreed on a course of action that included talking to crafters about the idea and learning more about the technology that would be required to produce print-on-demand fabric. In 2008 there were a few services in the U.S. that offered to print custom fabric for you, but they were, by and large, quite expensive—up to $150 per yard—and none of them had Internet-based business models.

Gart and I were in a great location to learn how to make fabric. As a state whose economy had once relied heavily on textile production, North Carolina was full of textile-related resources. A week after we had coffee to discuss the idea, I was able to go a few miles down the road to Raleigh to visit a lab at North Carolina State University’s College of Textiles and see my first digital textile printer. At another institution close by, a not-for-profit called [TC]², I was allowed to try one out. The machinery itself didn’t seem complicated. The machines I saw were just big, expensive inkjet printers, larger versions of the sort of device you might use at home to print your photos and documents. In my next conversation with Gart, I effused over a handful of printed fabric samples and relayed the conclusion of my investigations: “We should just buy a printer and try it out. It can’t be that hard.”

Over the next eight weeks or so, Gart and I hurried to develop a rudimentary version of the service we envisioned. When we launched at the end of May 2008, a special invitation was required to use Spoonflower. Invited visitors could upload a single image, preview it, and add up to three yards of fabric to a shopping cart. Over the summer, working from a waiting list, we approved invitations at a rate of a hundred or so new members per week. In July, our confidence had swelled to such a degree that Gart and I took out a loan to buy our own printer and began to look for a space. In August, we moved into a hot-as-blazes former sock mill, which became our first office. By October, a few months later, we finally allowed the thousands of people on our waiting list to use Spoonflower for the first time. Just a few months later, the New York Times ran a piece on Spoonflower on the cover of its Home section titled, “You Design It, They Print It.”

The trouble was, we really couldn’t print much of anything at that point. The printer on which we had spent our meager savings—along with a second printer we’d purchased just before Christmas—was breaking down. We had more customers and orders every day, but were struggling to print any usable fabric. We knew we had to buy new printers, but because the economy had more or less collapsed at that point, no bank seemed willing to lend us the money. With our printers hobbling along, customers and orders were stacking up and our young startup was struggling to pull together the resources we needed to grow. We got some money from NC IDEA, a local technology grant program. A relative of our ink supplier gave us a personal loan. Kim and I scraped a little more cash out of our home equity.

While things looked pretty grim from a financial standpoint, the Spoonflower community was growing. And our customers, many of whom were following the progress of our little startup soap opera, remained enthusiastic and encouraging. And eventually we did get a loan, we did buy more printers, and we managed to keep the business alive and expanding to meet the demand for custom-printed fabric. Two years after we started, Spoonflower moved from the dusty old mill in Mebane to an office down the road in Durham, where our employees gained the benefit of air conditioning and a break room with a kitchen. Today, our office is a bright and bustling place. We have many printers that run around the clock, churning out fabric and paper designs uploaded to our site from all over the world. Our merry crew has grown to over a hundred. We print wallpaper and gift wrap, as well as fabric, and we have an entire R&D team dedicated to exploring and pushing the limits of the technology so we can extend the power of creative individuals to make beautiful things.

So, what began with an idea for new curtains for our living room has now spun out into yet another, perhaps revolutionary, direction: a book. I am reminded of something someone said to me a couple of months after we launched Spoonflower, when the site still required an invitation to join. The person who said it was Colene McCord, a 70-year-old woman from Knoxville, Tennessee, who was a lifelong friend of my mother. She raised her eyebrows with astonishment when I explained our new business idea. “That’s amazing! You know all my life I’ve wanted to design fabric. Really. When I lie in bed at night and I can’t sleep, that’s what I do. I design fabric in my mind.” Colene is not a designer or an illustrator. She doesn’t have skill with a computer. She is a creative person, a person interested in self-expression and beauty and design and pattern. Many, many people share a passion for such expression. It’s a thread that runs through many panels of their lives, perhaps showing up as cooking in one person, as gardening in the next. This book is about the joy of making something mingled with the challenge of learning new things. Thanks for picking it up. I can’t wait to see what you do with it.

Early on in Spoonflower’s history, we developed the idea of holding fabric design contests that anyone could enter. Each week, we would announce a theme, take submissions, and then post all the entries on the same day on our website. Visitors could vote for the designs they liked best. We wanted to make the contest low-key and fun, with a nominal prize of free fabric. We had two goals: first, engage designers by giving them a new challenge each week, and second, showcase designs and photos of printed fabric to inspire new visitors to our site.

At the beginning, the themes of our contests were quite simple—Halloween, Christmas, and so on—but over time they evolved to become more arcane so each contest would be unique. Because we wanted to encourage new work, we also tried to develop themes that would dissuade people from entering designs they’d already created. Surrealist Fruit. Steampunk. Tattoos. Tessellations. Robots. Cocktails. We held a contest for fabric designs created exclusively using crayons, and another for designs featuring fish that used a set palette of colors. We developed a discipline around the weekly contests that included the invention of themes and outreach like a weekly email and Facebook post; an entire section of the site became devoted to administering contests, and we developed code to run it. We’ve now had hundreds of these contests and have yet to repeat a theme!

A contest devoted to fabric designs was novel, and from the beginning it attracted talented aspiring and experienced designers from all over. Because the voting in Spoonflower contests was open to anyone, it exposed the work of the entrants to lots of new people, some of whom created accounts, “favorited” the designs they liked, left nice comments, bought yardage in our Marketplace (our onsite shop), or kindly shared the fabrics and artists they discovered through social media. Artists like Deborah van de Leijgraaf (bora), a young mom and former art student from the Netherlands, and Samarra Khaja (sammyk), another young mother and graphic artist who lived in New York, began to acquire fans and followers through the exposure they gained from winning Spoonflower contests. Many people used our contests as a creative challenge, such as Mathew and Matthea den Boer. At the beginning of 2011, this sleepless young couple in Toronto were in the midst of surviving their baby’s first year and decided to keep their creative juices alive by entering every Spoonflower contest—one per week—for twelve months. They came in 96th place in the first contest they entered in January. But over the long weeks of winter and spring, the two creatives began to master the art of fabric design. In the first week of August, they won their first contest, which had a coffee theme. They won another before December, when their long year of challenges came to a close.

Eventually, our little community began to attract some big-time attention. Fabric companies much larger than Spoonflower began to follow our contests and to mine the images on our site and on our Facebook and Flickr pages for promising talent. We never saw this as anything but a validation of the idea behind Spoonflower. Unlike a traditional fabric company or retailer we don’t have to worry about losing talent because our product, in the end, is not an aesthetic or a set of selected work, but a technology platform that can be used by anyone. We welcome you to try it, too!

This book assumes that you have used a computer before, that you have some interest in visually representing the world on fabric and paper, and that you like the idea of making things.

We wrote the instructions so that anyone can be successful, including the complete beginner, and we structured the chapters so that skills build upon one another. Of course, if you are already proficient in the ways of design, you can skip around and pull inspiration to do your own thing. Or if you have a specific interest, you can start there and then flip back and forth as necessary to pick up the skills you need. We’ve included lots of cross-references so you can always find your way. We’re very into doing your own thing at Spoonflower. We just want to make sure that we equip you with everything you need to feel empowered as you go.

Spoonflower isn’t the only way you can print on demand. There are methods you can try at home, and other services out there as well. Frankly, we’re thrilled to see so much interest in surface design, and we always encourage experimentation and innovation. In the end, this book is all about showing you how to make things your own, whether or not you use Spoonflower to generate your materials. To get started, here is an overview of how it all happens.

Having something custom-made for you is not a new idea. But being able to design your own fabric, wallpaper, and gift wrap and have it printed to your specifications is a pretty new idea. Spoonflower makes print-on-demand possible by using digital textile printers.

Traditional textile printing has a lot of steps. For each color in a design, an individual silk screen or etching has to be made and mounted on a rolling cylinder, which prints the ink or dye onto the fabric. Fabrics go through a “strike off” process back and forth with the designer, in which small runs are printed to check colors and print quality. Once the designer approves the fabric, custom ink colors are mixed and the factory machines are set up to print thousands of yards from the design. For an individual who only wants to make a few yards of a fabric, the setup time and costs involved in this kind of printing just don’t make sense.

Digital textile printers, like we have at Spoonflower, are large-format inkjet printers specially modified to run our fabrics and papers. Unlike conventional textile manufacturing, digital printing requires no setup. There are no screens to make or custom inks to mix. The printer gets the instructions from the computer file you upload to the site and can start printing right away—whether you need a swatch or hundreds of yards (meters) of fabric or paper. This is the essence of print-on-demand: the ability to print exactly what you want, just the way you want it.

To get custom, one-of-a-kind fabric and papers at spoonflower.com, we print from your design: that’s what this book is all about! In the following chapters, we teach you everything you need to know for all kinds of projects. It doesn’t matter if the design is as simple as a little doodle you make on a sticky note and photograph with your phone … or as complex as the vector art you will read about in Chapter 10—the basic process is always the same.

Creating a Spoonflower account and username allows you to save your designs in your Design Library. And, if you decide to make your designs public, your username is how others will find you. It only takes a minute to set up a Spoonflower account, and it’s completely free. Log on at spoonflower.com. Go to “Join” or click on “Log In.” If you can’t wait to get started, you can even begin the design process without an account if you prefer.

Once you have your design ready to go, the first step is to upload your artwork to the Spoonflower site using the “Create” link. Uploading involves choosing a file from your computer and clicking the “Upload” button, which you’ll see as soon as you click the “Create” link. There are some specifics about how large your file can be and its format, which we outline in the chapters to come.

When the design has finished uploading to your Design Library, you will see a preview of what it looks like when it is repeated, along with a ruler that helps you judge the scale of your pattern (see right). There are several ways you can adjust and customize your design once it is uploaded:

CHOOSE A REPEAT. The design you have uploaded will be tiled—or repeated—to fill the surface. There are five different repeat styles built into our system (we cover them in Chapter 5) and you can easily click to switch between them. For example, you can choose to have your image repeat in straight orderly rows (a basic repeat), or you can print a single centered image (a center repeat).

ADJUST THE SIZE. If your image has high enough resolution (this page), you will be able to click and adjust the size of the repeat tile.

CHANGE COLORS. This tool will help you pick areas of color out of your design and switch them to different colors. Let’s say you want blue leaves instead of green leaves in your uploaded design; use the tool to pick the color you want to change and choose a new one with a simple click (see Chapter 4).

CHANGE PRIVACY. You can toggle between making this design private, so only you can see it (the default), or public, so everyone can join in on the fun. If your skills develop to the point that you’d like to make your designs available for purchase, there is an additional checkbox so you can share a design in the Marketplace (our onsite shop).

MAKE REVISIONS. It’s easy to go back and adjust your design later, because it’s always saved in your Library.

Each time you order, you can choose to have your design printed on any surface, including more than a dozen fabrics, two types of wallpaper, or two types of gift wrap. Next you choose an amount (swatch, fat quarter, yards, rolls). At this point you will see a preview of what it will look like based on your specifications. Remember that the ruler will show you how your pattern will fill the surface on which you plan to print.

Once you have placed your order, we start printing. Then we cut it, pack it, and ship it directly to you.

Now that you understand the print-on-demand process, here is how our book will help you turn a spark of inspiration into a package of wonderful fabric or paper waiting at your front door.

PART 1 is all about getting comfortable with digital design. We’ve organized it into five chapters that are friendly mini-lessons, so that we can walk you through the process step-by-step.

You’re reading Chapter 1, HOW TO USE THIS BOOK, now, which is about how the print-on-demand process works, the basic equipment you need to get started, and the most important thing you need before you begin—inspiration for your designs.

Chapter 2, IT STARTS WITH THE SURFACE, teaches you about the fabrics and other surfaces Spoonflower prints on. We briefly review the different types and sizes, and explain how to start thinking about your surface as a canvas. The surface you print on can influence your design in many ways—an intricate pattern may look great on a smooth surface but not so hot on a textured one, for example—so it’s important to think about that as you develop your design.

In Chapter 3, DIG INTO DIGITAL, we explore how a design becomes an electronic file. We detail it all from the beginning, step-by-step. It starts with making sure you understand the basics, like pixels and types of digital images. The choices you make about resolution and format (terms defined in the chapter) will change the look and scale of your design.

Chapter 4, LEARN ABOUT COLOR, tackles the big, beautiful rainbow of color. The world wouldn’t be the same without color, and neither would digital design. But that doesn’t mean everything about how color and surface go together is obvious, so we supply you with the information you need. We help you sort through the most common questions and introduce you to a piece of wonderfulness known as the Spoonflower Color Map.

And then you’ll be ready for Chapter 5, GET TO KNOW REPEATS, where we demystify one of the most fundamental elements of surface design. A repeat is a continuous pattern that fills the surface. We know that repeats intimidate some people, so we start from the beginning and walk you through this concept step-by-step. By the end, you’ll be whipping up seamless repeats in your sleep and casually dropping phrases like “half-brick.”

PART 2 is when it really gets fun, because we show you how to take what you’ve learned and apply it to specific projects. With each chapter we introduce more skills and techniques that can be used on their own or mixed and matched. These projects are just a starting point. There are no limits to what you can design and make.

In Chapter 6, RAID THE JUNK DRAWER: DESIGN WITH FOUND OBJECTS, we work with collage and odds and ends you might find around the house or in nature. You’ll practice using a scanner and creating simple repeats when you make the projects in this section.

In Chapter 7, THROUGH THE VIEWFINDER: DESIGN WITH PHOTOS, we show you easy things that you can do with photos using whatever free photo-editing software is already on your computer. But, if you’re ready for a bit of adventure, we walk you through some really simple things to try in Adobe Photoshop.

Chapter 8, FROM PAINT TO PIXELS: DESIGN WITH DRAWINGS, PAINTINGS, AND PRINTS, shows you some tricks for cleaning up your art after you scan it. This is the point at which you will discover that you don’t have to be Michelangelo to work from your original art—even what may begin as a random scribble can be transformed into an interesting design with a few easy-to-use tools.

In Chapter 9, READ ALL ABOUT IT: DESIGN WITH WORDS, TEXT, AND LAYERS, we teach you how to manipulate letters, words, and text to create cool projects, and then in Chapter 10, THE WORLD OF VECTORS: ALL-DIGITAL DESIGNS, we dive right into design that starts from a blank digital canvas. But by this point, you’ll be ready for the challenge. And finally, in Chapter 11, NO REPEATS NECESSARY: DESIGN CUT AND SEW AND WHOLE CLOTH, we explore how to design a whole canvas without creating repeats.

Design Equipment You Need to Get Started

You can spend a lot of money on design equipment and software, but you don’t need to do that when you are just getting started. In fact, we thought very carefully and came up with this short list of basics.

+ COMPUTER with Internet connection

+ GRAPHICS SOFTWARE: This means anything you can use to edit photos or make original digital art. Adobe Photoshop, PicMonkey, Adobe Illustrator, and Gimp are all examples of graphics (or image editing) software. It’s really about picking your favorite and what works for you, including the free option that comes standard on your computer. The more expensive software can have lots more options and tools, but the price is higher and you will have a lot to learn. Bottom line: You can make great designs with any graphics program. You can learn and upgrade as you figure out what you need. (See the list of resources on this page, and also check out https://support.spoonflower.com/hc/en-us/articles/204444640-What-design-tools-do-you-recommend for an even more up-to-date list.)

Each program has a set of tools that help you accomplish tasks such as cropping a photo or resizing an image. Although the symbols and names to denote these tasks can vary slightly from program to program, they all achieve the same result. (Imagine that they all speak the same language but with different accents and dialects.) Once you learn how to recognize each tool, which we teach you how to do in this book, you should be able to sit down with any kind of graphics software and intuitively figure out what to do. If you’ve never used a graphics program before, check for online tutorials to help you learn the basics. Your local community college may offer classes too.

+ SCANNER: This is a device that looks like a flatbed copier but is used to transform what you scan—anything from a document or photo to your child’s drawing to a leaf—into a digital file. Technically, this is optional equipment. But scanning is a useful way to transform hand-drawn artwork into digital art. Look for a scanner with a scanning bed size that makes sense for you: a 9 × 12-inch (23 × 30.5 cm) bed is usually large enough, unless you tend to work on larger-format projects, in which case you might want a scanner with an 11 × 17-inch (28 × 43 cm) bed. Look for one designed for scanning photos and text, as there are document scanners that are really only good for print pages. Also, make sure it has options for setting the scan resolution. All-in-one printers also have scanning capabilities, so you can experiment with scanning if you already have this piece of equipment at home or in your workspace.

+ DIGITAL CAMERA: This is also optional—but good if you want to work from your own photos. Digital cameras have come so far that there really is no minimum anymore. A smartphone camera provides plenty of pixels, and the quality is really very good.

+ DIGITAL DRAWING TABLET SUCH AS A WACOM TABLET: This is a fun tool to add to your repertoire once you get going. A digital drawing tablet allows you to make and edit artwork digitally using a tool similar to writing with pen and paper. There are many styles of tablets; some use a pencil-like stylus to draw directly on the tablet screen, while you can use your fingertip on others.

Basic Sewing Tools

You don’t need everything on this list for every sewing project in this book, but you will need most of them. Have the following on hand when you see “Basic Sewing Tools” in the Materials and Tools list for a project. When required, we add specialty items not on this basic list.

+ Sewing machine

+ Hand-sewing needles

+ Thread

+ Pins

+ Iron and ironing board

+ Scissors (fabric and basic craft)

+ Pinking shears

+ Paper

+ Pencil

+ Ruler and tape measure

Our sewing directions are geared toward DIYers with very basic sewing skills (you’ve threaded a machine before and understand how to sew lines and curves). If you’ve never sewn before, but you’re a quick study, you might pick up everything you need to know about how to sew from the instructions we give. But to really understand sewing, we recommend consulting a sewing reference book or online site.

Myths and Facts About Using Spoonflower

We’ve heard some myths about what you need to know to design for fabric and other surfaces digitally. Maybe you’ve heard them, too. Just in case, let’s clear the air.

MYTH: YOU HAVE TO OWN LOTS OF EXPENSIVE EQUIPMENT.

FACT: Chances are you already have what you need to get started. Got a smartphone and a computer? You’re set. Add an inexpensive scanner and you have even more options.

MYTH: