Fabrics for Fab Fabric Friday, and how we used them

We make a lot of shades here.  A lot, a lot, a lot of shades.  Some turn out great.  Some turn out.... just fine, okay, meh.  And some I look at and just cringe.  You know, I'm a trade workroom, and sometimes I have zero input during the design and fabric selection process, and I have to do the best with what I get.
What makes the difference between a great shade and an awful shade?...... mostly, the appropriateness of the fabric.  Fabrics for shades not only must look good, but also need to behave well and fold easily.  The best shade fabrics train themselves after raising and lowering just two or three times.

Here is a gallery of shades we've recently fabricated for Fabric Factory Outlet.  All are made with fabrics that lend themselves perfectly to their end use, and all of them just happen to qualify as Fab Fabrics.

A good quality cotton print is still the best fabric for a well-behaved shade.  This Collier and Campbell is a perfect example.
Something about this color combination just floors me.  Perhaps because it embodies the colors of my favorite autumn month, November, but for whatever reason, I can't get enough of gazing at this fabric.

After making two of these, a third window was discovered in the room.  That set off a mild panic to find two yards of this (unfortunately) discontinued pattern.  These last few inches are apparently all that is left in the world, and I'm glad it's here for me to look at every day. 

This is a beautiful crewel, with rich colors and balanced pattern.  As I raised the shade, it folded up as it it had been doing it forever.

A closer look.  Oh, I love embroidery.  Why?

I had my doubts as I started fabricating relaxed roman shades from this flocked velvet on a heavy, upholstery weight linen.  I was afraid this fabric would never fold gracefully, but I was wrong! 

The shade behaved perfectly and the fabric is stunning.

Blue ribbon wobbles its way vertically through this thickly embroidered linen.  It was hard to get a straight line anywhere on these shades, and although undeniably gorgeous the embroidered pattern is not as well balanced as I would have liked.  

The designer found a perfectly matching grosgrain to band the bottom edge, which gave a much-needed clean edge to a fabric that is beautiful but a little...... vague.

However, I never judge a window treatment until I see it in context, and here at home these shades are big winners.

Yes, I love prints.  Prints, patterns, colors, pile them on, please.  Here is one of my recent favorites, totally a joy to work with.  No idea who makes this fabric, but, well, WOW. 

Sweet.

Although a little on the heavy side, this stripe behaves well.  We made a whole bunch of these back in the spring, and now this one more for an adjacent hallway.

Love that little topper!  Nice use of the stripe. 

I love to make Kingston valances

When I need a swaggy look with a fairly straight bottom silhouette, the Kingston is my go-to valance.  The gentle curves eliminate the problem of a severe short point.

For a style I've made what feels like a thousand times, I have only a few photos.  Here's the most recent.  This used to be two swag and jabot treatments, taken apart and re-purposed.  There was JUST enough!  but, enough IS enough, so the remake was a success.  

Why re-invent it every time?...... I am on my third copy of M'Fay's Kingston pattern, since it gets so torn up every few years that I have to get a new one.  In the pattern envelope I keep a piece of twill tape marked with the fold spacing.

There are various ways of securing the pleats.  If the fabrics are lightweight enough, I can fold, pin, and stitch in the ditch by machine.  For heavier fabrics, I secure instead with a heavy buttonhold thread, stabbing through all the layers and tying a knot each time.  I never cut the thread, just slip the needle between the fabric layers and run it up to the next mark and repeat the stabbing and tying off.  It goes quickly, plus I don't have to carry the whole thing to the sewing machine and get stuck with pins.

Double London double-take, and finished length demo

The client loved her treatments......

...but hated the fabric she chose.  So she chose another fabric, and had us make the same treatments.

Long point 42"

It's hard to decide how much fabric to use in a stationary shade valance.  These double Londons provide a good show-and-tell opportunity.  Here you see the shade fully lowered.

Long point 42"

Before swooping up, flat on the table, there is 44" of fabric.  After tying up the bottom 4 rings, the shade has a long point of 42".

Long point 30"

Here it's pulled up to 30", about the longest you'd want to finish a valance.

Long point 30"

There is 13" in each pleat- it would be too much for a full-length operable shade, but just fine for a valance.

Long point 25"

And here it's pulled up to about 25", which is what the designer requested.  Here the proportions look the best; though different widths will have different optimal long points.

Long point 25"

There are 7 rings per shade, and 4 are tied up permanently.  A cord lock makes it adjustable.

Long point 20"

Shades look ridiculous when pulled up too far, as you can see here- this is pulled up as high as it will go, and the long point is 20".
The short point is all squished together and hiked up way too far.
I know homeowners say they will want to see as much of their "view" as possible, but there's no point in misleading them into thinking that they can pull up a relaxed silhouette to an absurdly short drop. 

A week in the life

Sometimes it's hard to decide what to write up on the blog.  It's easy with whole-room projects, with lots of pretty "after" pictures and interesting "how we made it" shots; but some weeks are more hum-drum, filled with work on a smaller scale and a lot of variety.
So here's a sample week in the workroom.

The week started well, with a gorgeous Vervain hand-printed silk, for one of two duvet covers with microcording in the seams.   But the week derailed quickly, when the serger decided to take a bite out of the second duvet cover......... we had to order more fabric...... an expensive but oh-so-easy mistake. 

With the bedding package in limbo, I moved on to creative problem-solving.  A homeowner decided she wanted her hobbled shade lined with blackout.  Since it was going to be used as a valance only, and never raised or lowered, I cut strips of blackout fabric (which does not fray!) and used a tag gun to attach them at the rib pockets.

It worked.  Easy, cheap, and effective.

You can hardly tell.  The last strip just hangs loosely down to the bottom trim. 

During this week I had the opportunity to visit some of my work, which I had not yet seen since it was installed.

I love this shaped rose-colored contrast banding. 

And it was the first time I had seen the cornice that Liz from Paris Interiors had had made out of a carved wooden panel she got from a trip to Bali.  Very cool!  And, hey, we made those draperies!

Now it was time to get busy with real work.  My favorite project that week was two Roman shades out of an exquisite crewel.

It's a treat to get gorgeous fabrics like this.

I had nine shade/valances to make, along the lines of this three-sectioned opera shade.  It actually was not at all easy to get sections of unequal width to droop to the lengths the designer specified.  A lot of time was spent fiddling with it.

Then there were four self-lined Roman shades out of this wool-blend sheer.

If you've been following the shade safety discussions and know all about cord shrouds, you'll recognize this one from TechStyles.  I hadn't used this in awhile, since ladder tape became available, but in one week I used it on two different projects- this one, and a very wide box-patterened bronze sheer shade, which I forgot to photograph. 

Also that week were two solid cotton shades, 88" wide, with a jute tape trim- again, no photos.

However I did remember to grab the camera when the week ended with Pillow Day.   I forgot to take pictures of the gigantic (31x31") flanged shams that I made from a quilted velvet bedspread.........

The orange and brown pillows are gorgeous with the unusual three-toned loop brush fringe.

And the fun I had picking out zipper colors!  Every week should end with Pillow Day.

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.

Box-pleated header, and more.....

  Finally.  The last shade in the Paris Interiors collection.

Right off the bat you could see that the vertical ribbon can be run sideways as a border.  So we split the fabric in half and pieced one row onto the bottom. 

Since you can see the wrong side of the tails, we contrast lined with a blue silk.  I don't much like pillowcased sides, so I experimented with sewing in a teeny little blue silk flange, on the sides as well as the bottom.  

The beautiful solid glass beads were kind of heavy for the fabric, and the tape was sort of dull, so I sewed the trim tape halfway into the bottom seam with the little flange behind it.

The box-pleat header idea was irresistible.  Since the dotted ribbon is printed crookedly, the blue band came out all wonky, which I just loved. 

I imagine it's not to everyone's taste, but it suits me perfectly.

The header is stapled to the 3/4" board face, then the blue welt is stapled over that. 

The tricky part is stapling the shade, upside down, with tacking strip up against the welt.  

Then the shade is flipped down revealing a beautiful finished top.