As mentioned previously, we'll be attending AICon again this year. We've spent the last month or so squeezing in AICon preparations amongst our already busy schedules, but with less than one week to go, we're in crunch mode - a perfect time to stop and write a blog post!

Every time we make the decision to attend one of these sorts of events, we try to do something a little extra to build on what we've done previously. For AICon this year, we've decided to go with a bit more hand made stuff.

We've been wanting to check out a print-on-demand fabric service called Spoonflower for some time, and AICon seemed a perfect opportunity to put some designs together and see what came out. At the risk of getting a bit advertisey, we've been really impressed with the results. Like RedBubble, Spoonflower prefer to accept images with RGB colour profiles, which allowed us to adapt our existing designs really quickly.

Unlike RedBubble, Spoonflower's print process is RGB too, so there's no colour conversions going on that are our of our control, leading to some fantastic colour reproduction (which we're hoping doesn't make our clothing look less good).

Print resolution is pretty good as well, with most of our designs coming out at 300dpi. The other really exciting part for is that Spoonflower accept SVG images directly, simplifying our workflows and allowing us to upload Inkscape's native file format.

With stuff being shipped from the UK, we had about a three week wait from the time we placed our orders to the time we received them, with about half of that being taken up with shipping.

We decided to use our shiny new fabric to make some small cushions, some stuffed toys, and we also splashed out on ourselves and ordered some heavier weight fabric with the background pattern from our website printed on it to use as a tablecloth. We'll show off some more of the designs themselves and what we've been making in part two of this post.

For our flyers this year, we've decided to use the Vintage Lof Peas image that Mim put together when we discovered that there'd be room for us this year. This picture has proved to be much more popular than we expected, so it's great to be getting it out there a bit more. The new aspect ratio has made them small enough to be bookmarks (if only we had some books ready to sell), so we hope that people will hold onto them.

The AICon organisers requested another 30% on top of last year, so we had a lot of cutting to do last week (Mim did most of it whilst I was at work - she's very awesome). We were a little behind the deadline, but they very generously gave us a few extra days to get our gear in (we feel so looked after this year ^_^ ).