TMQG takes a field trip, Spoonflower

One gorgeous, beautiful day, Triangle Modern Quilt Guild took a field trip to Spoonflower's offices in Durham, NC.  The 7 minute drive from my house was a drive I normally take with the exception of a one turn and then I was right at the office complex on Meridian Parkway and soon as Spoonflower.

We filled the room and took up all available chairs.  We started with a tour of the space.  The first room we walked into was the nursery.  A large industrial humidifier hung from the ceiling and kept the air moist like a winter day in Miami, and very reminiscent of the environmental stress labs of my previous workplace.


Something about big machines makes my pulse race.  Seeing this table full of problems and troubled hardware made my inner engineer cry out for some tools to get to fixing.  The nursery is where the machines that are not working properly are kept.



Steven talked about how Spoonflower was envisioned and  how the large format printers are hacked to print directly to untreated fabric.


The room with the working printers was very loud.



These are the heat setting rollers.  The newly printed fabric is placed on the rollers for one last spin before it gets cut and packaged for shipping.


Here's the cutting, packaging, and shipping room.  Love the umbrellas.  They use IKEA Expedit shelves for their outgoing shipment sorting.  Expedits can hold a whole lot of stuff and I enjoyed seeing that some shipments were as small as one swatch and others were multiple yards.


We returned to the lobby and were shown how to use the Spoonflower site and create a quilt label.

Once I get a free moment, I'll be making up some quilt labels and designing a few designs.  Maybe it is something to put on my WIP to do list. 

Happy quilting.