More than the sum of its parts

One of the hardest things for me to do is stand in an empty room and visualize the changes that the designer can so easily see in her own mind.

Katherine Stern has a great imagination.   She also is in love with pattern and color. When she presented me with half a dozen fabrics that seemed to bear no relation to each other, I could but have faith in her vision of the master bedroom she was designing.
I'm hesitant to show these now because the room is unfinished, but here we go anyhow.

When the room is complete we will have installed window treatments as well.  But so far our share on this side of the room is the bedskirt, duvet cover, and flanged shams;

on the other side, this round tableskirt, and a topper which I pieced from a too-small remnant that Katherine loved and scraps of the sham fabric to make it big enough.

The most fun part of the project was creating the topper from scraps from the shams.  The look and the process are right up my alley.  How about those mitered corners?  I hated to give this topper to its owner!

Not shown in the picture at top are the feather/down wedge bolsters out of the headboard fabric.  Albany Foam custom-made the feather/down inserts from the template we made. 
I called them the "purple monsters" because stuffing those inserts into the covers was like wrestling an insanely strong, clunky, irrational being.

The value of a good mock-up, part 1: the tableskirt

Recently many of our projects have required mock-ups in order to be sure that the final product is exactly- exactly!- what the client wants.  Here is the first in a series of mocked-up projects: the tableskirt.

Photo courtesy of Kim Freeman Style and Design

Designer Kim Freeman made a LOT of trips back and forth to the city with templates and mockups for this drop-dead gorgeous fitted Donghia wool tablecloth.

The russet wool contrast inserts provided depth and shading.  Both the gold and russet draped and hung beautifully.  Cotton and jute trim from Samuel & Sons gave an edgy rusticity to an unquestionably luxurious product.

Photo courtesy of Kim Freeman Style and Design

The end product fitted as precisely as we could have wished- that is, perfectly! 

The process started with a plastic template which eventually went through many incarnations and was marked over and over with notes. 

I made a full-size tableskirt with 5 different pleat options.  There were to be two mock pleats where each chair would sit- that is, the contrast inserts were actually separate pieces to allow the fabric to comfortably accommodate the sitter.

I wrote all over the cloth in Sharpie pen, labeling each pleat option and explaining the advantages and disadvantage of each variation.

Kim chose Pleat A.  The face fabric folds back and the contrast insert is flat.

Lining was serged to the wool for the tabletop, and the oval shape carefully marked for the faux pleats.

Each rectangular section was lined and the trim sewn on by hand.  I thought I had taken pictures of those 24 separate sections, but I guess not.
My improvised method for sewing on the trim involved "basting" the trim in place with adhesive tape, hand-sewing the bottom edge of the trim, then pulling off the tape and hand-sewing the top edge.  Machine sewing created too much rippling, and leaving the adhesive tape in also caused puckering.

The process of sewing all the sections on to the increasingly cumbersome tablecloth was tedious, awkward, and more than a little scary!  Which might explain why I did not take any pictures as I went.  But finally I had a completed tablecloth although I didn't have an oval table in the workroom to display it on.....

What goes around comes around.....

.....or, making a round tableskirt with shirred jumbo welt.

I took a lot of pictures thinking I'd sort of practice writing a tutorial.  But that turned out to be really tedious!.... blogs are just not the place for that.  It would take forever just to get the pictures where I want them.  (If ever)


So here are a few pictures of the process.



I always cut welting strips using a rotary cutter and mat.  That's because I taught myself pillow-making right around when I was doing strip-piece quilting.  I transferred techniques I learned in the quiltmaking process to my custom pillow business, which was my breaking-in to becoming a custom window treatment workroom.  I think I made probably 5 or 6 thousand pillows in those 10 years..... not to mention a couple thousand boxed and welted cushions.... and that was my part-time job!..... I had to get good at it, and fast.
The fabric is shirred up on the jumbo cording 12" at a time.  It's fun to do.  For this tableskirt I need 9 yards of finished cording, so I cut about 24 yards of 5"-wide bias fabric strip and  I wound up using every inch of it.
And that is just about all I'm going to say today about shirred jumbo welting!