Spoonflower colors

The colors on print-on-demand fabric can be vibrant, but also wrong. I mean, it’s not their fault… as usual, I charged forward without doing a proper check.

And it’s not like I didn’t know better: I worked in a print shop once upon a time, I know there’s weird conversion between RGB (made by adding colored lights together) and CYMK (made by adding colored pigments together). I have a color chart that tells me what things on the screen will look like on fabric.

Sometimes it’s “too much trouble” to drag it out, though, and I did that with the tiger dragon in the first round. I mean, tigers are intensely colored, right?

I called the first draft the Flame Tiger Dragon but on looking at the comparison I think we can safely say that’s an abbreviation for Flamin Hot Cheetos Tiger Dragon. (And yes, I’ll still sew more up.) For the second one, the finished dragon in that picture, I referred to the chart.

Somehow I made the same mistake with the “bronze” in the baby dragons on the most recent round. Now, I knew they weren’t quite right, but I needed one more quarter yard and I didn’t want to take the time to rework that whole design, so I threw them in just so I’d have something to test the alignment on. And some colors were fine, though there’s not much difference between the blue and the purple, and the bronzes are pretty fox-y (and of COURSE that was the one I made two of). In hindsight they look pretty orange on the screen too, but I think I was shooting for something more like Shannon’s Rust, and thinking it would come out darker in print. Always check the chart.

Spoonflower has a full-yard chart, and I have a quarter-yard chart, both of which I have. Theirs is organized by “pick the color you want, and it will return the RGB code,” mine is organized by “see what the RGB code you have is going to look like in print” - and also it’s only a quarter yard, so it’s cheaper (currently half price, in fact).

They recommend you buy a chart on every type of fabric you’re going to use, because each one reacts differently (and also because they want to sell a lot of yards of fabric), but in my experience all the polyesters are about the same. Except the nearly-transparent chiffon, anyway. Mine is on velvet, and it is pretty reliable for minky as well.

Fat quarters are currently on sale (they call it BOGO but single quarters will still be half-price), so it’s a good time to shamelessly promote my chart, or the cut-and-sews, or the nebula fabric, or burrito fabric, or Silica Gel Do Not Eat… all in my Spoonflower shop. The sale is good through July 14, 2022, so jump on it.