Continuing my series on print-on-demand fabric services, today I’m reviewing the original trailblazer on the digital fabric printing scene, Spoonflower. I have been a Spoonflower designer for many years now, and you can find all the prints featured in this article - and many more - in my Spoonflower shop.
Continuing my series on digital fabric printing services, today I’m reviewing CottonBee. CottonBee is based in Poland and, as the name suggests, prints on all-natural cotton materials.
The digital fabric printing industry has grown considerably over recent years, and there are now a number of players on the market. I’ve been promising a series of reviews of some of the options out there (particularly UK/EU-based services), and I’m finally ready to start sharing the results! First up is Fashion Formula. This is a UK-based service offering a wide range of fabric and paper options for printing.
Here’s my entry to this week’s limited colour palette Spoonflower design challenge. As a lifelong collector of ephemera and philately, the travel-themed novelty prints of the 1950s featuring stamps and luggage labels have always appealed to me. My aim was to create a design that would call back to those original 1950s prints.
I’ve written in the past of my love for Victorian glasshouses, but the palm house at Kew Gardens is surely the queen of them all - it’s one of my favourite places in London. My Kew membership allows me to take advantage of later opening times in the summer to stroll through the gardens on my walk home from work, but the glasshouses and galleries close before I get there most days. For just a few months during the high summer though, they stay open an hour later on Fridays. Getting there after the day’s crowds have departed (and away from the madness of the weekends), I often have the quiet majesty of the palm house entirely to myself.
It seemed fitting to debut my latest make, in a tropical-themed novelty print, on the final late opening of the season. And a delight to find the great glasshouse empty, silent except for our footsteps and the droplets of water splashing to the floor from lofty palms. The golden hour light, diffused through the condensation-fogged, curved glass, just added to the magic.
Following on from yesterday's blog post topic of reusing, recycling, making-do-and-mending, I'm delighted to unveil my latest refashion project. This rayon crepe dress was one of the very first 1940s items in my vintage wardrobe, and the first vintage novelty print I owned. Although the waist was a little high on me, and the fit was a bit odd, I worked with it and I wore and loved it. When I noticed that the fabric was becoming very delicate and fraying through at the shoulders, I reinforced the seam, then added an iron-on interfacing and darned it in. It wasn't enough though, and the beloved dress, too delicate to wear regularly, hung unappreciated on a padded hanger in the wardrobe. Until eventually I decided that a print this adorable needed to be worn; it was time to give the dress a new lease of life.
