The Spoonflower Handbook: A DIY Guide to Designing Fabric, Wallpaper & Gift Wrap with 30+ Projects

by Stephen Fraser, Joel Selby (Photographs)

Designing fabric, wallpaper, and gift wrap used to be the stuff of dreams. Only a few select creatives got to do it, and it required formal training and significant financial investment. But times have changed, and today anyone with a computer, Internet connection, and idea can upload a file and order their own fabric or paper, printed affordably one yard or more at a time. At the forefront of this revolutionary DIY movement is Spoonflower, a North Carolina startup that produces designs for hundreds of thousands of users worldwide—24 hours a day/seven days a week to keep up with demand.
 
With step-by-step tutorials and projects that span a wide spectrum of skills, The Spoonflower Handbook is written for both new and experienced users of this print-on-demand technology. Covering everything from equipment to software to working with photos, scans, repeats, vector files, and more, it is an essential guide to a booming new creative outlet.
 

Genres: Crafts, Sewing, Nonfiction, Reference, Design

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 20, 2015

Reviews

[Elizabeth Ramos]

While the projects may become outdated soon, the information that goes with them is invaluable, especially for a beginner. This book is a very helpful resource for anyone interested in, or beginning to work with surface design using Spoonflower’s service.

[Rachel Pollock]

I suppose that i should begin with a few disclosures, as i am hardly an impartial reviewer.

Spoonflower is a local company with offices literally just up the street from my house. I count more than one friend (and one alumna of the graduate program in which i teach) among their employees, and I have been a customer and designer of theirs for years. That said, i don't have any affiliation with this book and its authors beyond being a fan of the text.

So, what's the book like?

One could argue that it is a book-length infomercial for Spoonflower, which i suppose is technically true, in that there's a lot of information about how specifically one can use the company to produce textile designs, wallpaper, and gift wrap (the three products they print). But on a general level, there's an enormous amount of useful information about the basics of print designs--everything from how to use both analog and digital tools to create your designs, to how one might create a seamless repeat in a range of different configurations. The book does touch on some of the more "pro" programs for digital design, but also illustrates techiques and methods that are decidedly low-tech and non-intimdating for those who have no proficiency with, say, Photoshop.

The first section is a sort of overview of textiles and design--discussions of everything from types of fabrics one can print on (knits/wovens, fiber contents) to the definition of digital design terms like raster and vector based image files, hex codes, dpi, and so forth.

The structure of the second half of the book is project-based, with specific how-to craft projects, each of which addresses a different technique or medium. So, an example of a simple project for working with a digital photograph is the Doppelganger Dog Pillow (which involves printing a photo of your pet and making a pillow out of it), whereas a project addressing working with text involves creating a repeat for the Typographic Wrapping Paper.

Overall, it's an excellent book for demystifying digitally-printed textiles (and papers), which will appeal to hobby crafters, fashion designers, costumers, prop artisans, interior decorators, scrapbookers, and sewing enthusiasts. In terms of its specific appeal to theatre professionals, it's a good book to have in your arsenal, though it covers little new ground not already addressed by Kimberly Kight's Field Guide to Fabric Design.

[Kristi]

I had a tough time buckling down and reading this one, in part due to general busy-ness of life and choosing to read fiction when I did make the time to read. But I also think some blame falls on the massive amount of introductory material in the book and the commerciality of much of it (which was to be expected to some degree).

That is not to say this book doesn't have value. There are some really inspiring projects to guide you from designing your fabric/wallpaper/gift wrap to finished object! For those new to digital image editing there is a decent amount of information to get you started. It might provide a new digital artist with enough vocabulary to start googling for further Photoshop and Illustrator resources/tutorials online. If, however, you have read any other titles on fabric/surface design or taken any online classes on the subject such as those offered through SkillShare you likely will learn very little from this book. You may find a few tidbits about the various substrates you can print your designs onto through Spoonflower, but if you have experience working with fabric I found muich of that information to be pretty obvious.

This is not a book I will bother adding to my personal library as I didn't find it terribly educational for where I am at, though I may end up checking it out again at some point in the future for total project inspiration.

[Tina Panik]

Good project ideas; the recipe fabric on page 80 is inspiring.

[Sara]

Loved this book. So many great ideas and projects. I'm making the recipe tea towels, for sure! I just have to choose the recipes.