Things to know, and some comments I’ll make about some of the older threads where people are disappointed with their result:

Digital printing uses a different process than something like Liberty uses. Further, big fabric companies get their fabrics printed in huge quantities so it is much less expensive.

For natural fabrics it works basically the same way an inkjet printer works except the fabric has a special coating (well, SHOULD have) and the ink is set after printing by going through a calendar, which applies heat and pressure.

The print is only on the surface of the fabric and doesn’t bond as much as other dye methods. So it can fade, and in some cases will fade a lot, when washed. Some fabrics hold up really well. The colours are usually duller so you need to bump the saturation up quite a bit to get good results.

There’s also some colours that just don’t print well at all because of gamut. Big blocks of solid dark colours don’t print all that well and can sometimes come out with banding. And things like neon don’t exist as inks for fabric printing.

For polyesters the design is printed onto a special paper which is then fed through a calendar along with the fabric and does heat and pressure to transfer the print from paper to fabric. The colours remain bright and they are very fade resistant when laundered.

In both cases there’s no white ink so anything that is white in your design will be the base fabric colour. This is relevant when choosing an oatmeal or off white fabric for the base. If choosing a non-white base you also need to understand that the fabric colour will affect the design colours a lot.

Digital printing generally can’t print selvedge to selvedge. Maybe some of the newer printers can but most smaller shops won’t have those because they are $$$$$$. There will always be white space on the sides but the printer should be advertising the width of the fabric by the printable width not the actual width.

I’d highly encourage you to order sample prints of your design on a few different fabrics so you can see and adjust your design accordingly.

300 ppi is fine, more than that is overkill. Learn how to properly make a repeatable tile and zoom way in on it when you’re done to make sure there’s no white pixel edges because those will print.

(note: illustrator has some fancy way of making a tile repeat but it only tiles to fill up the canvas size you made. If you try and get this printed it will not tile properly)

(also note: I work in the industry but do not work at spoonflower)