One day towards the end of summer, I found an email from Spoonflower in my inbox asking if I’d be interested in trying their 116″ wide cotton sateen fabric! If you aren’t familiar with them, Spoonflower is a company that offers print-on-demand fabric — so you can choose from basically endless designs, or create your own, and choose to have it printed on a variety of fabric substrates. I’ve used Spoonflower a couple times in the past for small things (such as the custom book titles I created for this quilt) but I was definitely intrigued by the opportunity to try them out on a larger scale.
I’ll write a bit more about how I put this one together, but spoiler alert: you can see the whole quilt-making process here:
Spoonflower really wanted to highlight the benefits of use the 116″ width of the cotton sateen, so I quickly settled on making a wholecloth quilt! Minimal piecing, and super easy to load on my longarm. I created a brightly colored version of my Sunsparks quilt, plus a coordinating backing print of tiny triangles. My designs were printed on the 3.5 oz cotton sateen, and I was pretty excited to see the fabric when it arrived a week later.
I planned to make a twin size quilt, which meant that the 116″ width of my backing fabric was enough not only for the quilt backing, but to cut border strips for my quilt top. Adding the border strips is the only piecing on the whole quilt! I’ve loved using wide fabrics for years, and of course they make loading fabric onto my longarm a super quick and easy process. I’d been wanting to try to Marmalade pantograph for a while, and decided that the curly, swirly design provided a nice contrast the straight lines and points in this quilt top.
This is the densest pantograph I’ve tried since adding computerization to my longarm, and it was a good learning opportunity on how to deal with the “shrinkage” that happens to a quilt with a dense quilting motif! I was able to complete it without too many issues, thanks to this particular pantograph being fairly forgiving, and not having any points that need to precisely align. I know I’ll have a bigger challenge if/when I try a dense design that also requires high precision!
A final note — I have shied away from using digitally printed fabrics over the years after having a few disappointing experiences with needle marks that were hard to remove, and white streaks where the needle breaks a thread in the fabric weave. These issues are somewhat common with digitally printed fabrics regardless of manufacturer, due to the tight fabric weave and the way the ink lies on top of the fabric instead of permeating it. (That’s my understanding anyway.)
I was concerned enough about these issues that I specifically asked Spoonflower about them before agreeing to make this quilt! I didn’t want to make something and be unsatisfied with the final appearance. Thankfully, I didn’t have that problem. The hand of the fabric is very stiff at first, but the quilt has softened up quite nicely after washing. And I’m happy to report I had NO issues with white streaks, even on the back which is a dark pink color. So while I can’t speak for all of their substrates, in my opinion the wide cotton sateen performed very well.
The stats:
- Quilt measures 60″ x 78″.
- Pattern is Sunsparks by me.
- Fabric is all 116″ wide 3.5 oz cotton sateen, customed printed by Spoonflower.
- Batting is Hobbs 80/20 cotton/poly.
- Quilted on my APQS Millie with Glide thread in a light pink color.
- Pantograph is Marmalade from Urban Elementz.
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