I spent much of last year procrastinating about adding my designs to Spoonflower, a fabric print on demand site, but last October I finally made myself get on with it.
Reasons to procrastinate
At times I am a very visual person, and as the scaling on the screen differs from the finished printed fabric, I was struggling to visualise the result. But eventually, I thought I had worked it out correctly.
Spoonflower also requires you to purchase test swatches before selling your designs, and I had over a hundred of them.
A money-saving tip I learned from Oksansia via YouTube was to buy the cheaters quilt which lets you add forty-two designs per yard.
So convinced I had done everything correctly I ordered three yards of fabric printed with my designs.
Not to Scale
It was quite exciting when the fabric arrived, until I saw my rather obvious mistake.
When Oksansia mentioned the size six in her video she meant 6-inches, I mistook this to mean 600 pixels but that prints at only a 4-inch scale which for many of my patterns was far too small.
I have now set up a file in illustrator with an 8, 6 and 4-inch artboard that when zoomed at 63% is to real-life scale, that way I can see how it will look when printed.
Some patterns just needed scale adjustments, others needed both scale and colour, for that I purchased a printed version of Spoonflowers colour map as screen colours can vary quite a bit from the printed result.
While it would be wonderful to get everything right first-time it is too easy to let the fear of making a mistake stop you from doing something you want to do. And in the end, the mistakes I made taught me what not to do in the future.