How to Use the Spoonflower Fill-A-Yard option

Several years ago I started designing fabrics and using the print-on-demand textile printing company Spoonflower to print my fabrics on quilting weight fabric. 

You'll see some of my fabric designs used in quilts in my book, Prairie Patchwork for Martingale Publishing. Church Picnic and Ma's Sewing Basket are quilts made using my Porch Perfect fabric collection - fabrics in teal blues, creams, reds, browns and black:

 

Ma's Sewing Basket

Church Picnic

It wasn't until last fall that I opened my Spoonflower shop, so that others could purchase my fabric designs. Since then, I've had customers wanting to know how to order fabrics from the site, and especially how to order quantities smaller than one yard.

When you order fabric from Spoonflower, the default yardage quantities are an 8" x 8" text swatch, a fat quarter, and then increments of yards - 1 yard, 2 yards, 3 yards, etc.

But what if you would like, or need, yardage under a yard, or even smaller than a fat quarter.

In that case, you can use the Fill-A-Yard option on the website, and I'll explain how to do just that.

The first thing you'll need to do is get to my Wagons West Designs Spoonflower shop page on the Spoonflower website, by clicking https://www.spoonflower.com/profiles/wagons_west_designs

 

Pictured you'll see the landing page for my Spoonflower shop. On the left side of the page, you'll see Shop Home in blue, and underneath an option titled "All Collections". Click on that.

 You will then be on my Wagons West Designs Collections page, where you'll see several groupings of fabrics. For this example, we'll use the Prairie Patchwork Quilt Along Collection, which are all of the fabrics used for the Prairie Patchwork Quilt Along Sampler quilt. Click on that collection.

Prairie Patchwork Quilt Along Sampler Quilt

You'll be directed to the Prairie Patchwork Quilt Along collection page, where you'll see all of the prints used in the Prairie Patchwork Quilt Along sampler quilt. To order pieces of fabric less than one yard, you'll want to use the Fill-A-Yard option, which you see in the banner just below the title of the collection. Click "Start Designing".
 

After you click "Start Designing", you'll be taken to a page where you'll need to select a number of options.

Option 1 is pre-selected for the Prairie Patchwork Quilt Along Collection, so drop down to Option 2, and select the template "1 yard (up to 42 designs)".

Option 3 is set at the default Petal Cotton, which is what you want to use for quilting, so now drop down to Option 4, and select "Start Designing".

You'll now be taken to a blank grid, shaded gray, and divided into 6" squares. If you fill each square with a different fabric, you'll have 42 different fabrics printed on one yard of fabric. Pictured, you'll see that I've filled part of the grid with 2 x 3 squares of the same print, which gives you a 12" x 18" rectangle of fabric, which is very close to what a fat eighth of fabric would be (9" x 21"). The prints you see selected are those fabrics in which you only need a fat eighth of a yard for the Prairie Patchwork Quilt Along sampler quilt. The rest of the grid is filled with one square each of the different prints where the fabric requirement is either an 8" square or a 5" square - the 6" square is close!

Pictured below is another example, still using the Fill-A-Yard option, where I've selected fabrics for which a half yard is called for in the Prairie Patchwork QAL sampler quilt fabric requirements. In that case, I've filled in the grid with 3 down, and 7 across for each fabric, resulting in an 18" x 42" rectangle of fabric, or in other words, a 1/2 yard.

 

 

The following YouTube video gives you a step-by-step tutorial on how to use the Fill-A-Yard option on Spoonflower. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me!

 

 

 

Until next time,

Martha