Some great ideas here using upholstery fabric from my Decorating with Textiles group on flickr.
I love bedspreads made of upholstery fabrics as they are so tactile as well as being lovely and weighty…a must have for me to get some sleep.
To see the rest of the photostreams of all these artisans just click on each photo.
These fabric samples arrived a week or so ago from Kara of Delicious Handmade Handbags. She was having a clean out and thought of me…wasn’t that nice of her? She knows I love my upholstery samples and remnants…there were also a lot of smaller offcuts as well. Lucky me! Also lucky that I have almost finished tidying my garage …the work area in the bedroom is also under control now thank goodness …and am sure my husband is pleased as well. He patiently waits for me to move all my stuff around the room before he goes to bed, although I do try to finish up in time to clean up well before he toddles off to bed with his hot water bottle. It is really chilly here at present and due to expenses we try not to have the heater on for more than a few hours a day…so thank goodness for all those quilts and throws. It has slowed me down bit though….I was really getting into the hand sewing but my fingers are too cold to hold the needle properly!
Its terrific fun at present seeing all the pilgrims arrive in Sydney and the groups of them I saw today were very happy and polite …..we live about 15 minutes by bus from the CBD so its not surprising that some are staying here. although the price of hotels etc is astronomical and they said on the news that the average pilgrim is going to spend around $75 a day while they are here….lucky to cover their meals with that around here!
A lot of them are being billetted out amongst local Catholic families so perhaps that is why we have so many here. We also have a large university so maybe they are hosting some as well. When I walked home tonight around six a group of them in their early twenties were going into one of the local internet cafes. Am not quite sure what to do really….when we were preparing for the Olympics Sydneysiders were encouraged to be friendly and speak to tourists and even invite them home for meals etc but they haven’t said anything about this. I said have a wonderful time to several of them and wondered if I should give some of them money for a coffee as a lot of them are on such tight budgets…I shall see what happens when I run into some more …… I will let the spirit move me. Sorry could not resist….after all Pope Benedict knows his history, calling Australia the “great southern land of the Holy Spirit.” Judging by Sydney CBD today maybe he is right even if it took the youth of rest of the world to bring it about. The Spirit may be interpreted differently by everyone and today I saw it as a wonderful spirit of joy in the air…making everyone around the pilgrims a little bit happier.
The heart of my all time favourite throw started life as a brocade floor length skirt found in a local charity shop. Looked to me like something from the sixties or seventies and when my friend saw me with it she wanted half so I ended up with the back piece which was basically two pieces with the zip and a long opening in the middle. I had been collecting fabric for about a year since purchasing the first Kaffe Fassett hard cover book on quilting and have long been a fan of Kaffe since the early nineties when I discovered his wonderful designs and radical ideas for knitting via Glorious Knitting and Glorious Colour.
His astonishingly beautifully photographed book on quilting just mesmerized me and I spent many months drinking in his truly glorious colours and original takes on this traditional craft. After purchasing the skirt I realised that all I needed were a few selected greens and then I would have enough to get going on this throw. I had been collecting brocade from sample books for some years and had really wanted to replicate the colourway of the throw in the book, however when I found the skirt something clicked and I knew it would work with everything I had been collecting, just in case, for a few years.
I had a large piece of Liberty of London upholstery weight fabric that I used as a border for a door curtain so the hunt was on for the remaining pieces of that. Also from the charity shop was a formal shirt in gold silk brocade so I added that to the pile as well. Recently I had found some fabric samples from a new range in Spotlight [Australia's Joanne's] which were very deeply textured and patterned and also had some deep red jacquard which I had bought as a remnant. All I needed for the rest of the throw were the 30cm squares which I had been collecting for some years of gorgeous brocade samples in golds and reds and greens and some red floral fabric which I had bought several weeks before.
Once I started cutting out and arranging the top it was very quick to come together….I was held up for a few days when i realised that I needed another floral of some sort……. knew I had just the thing…somewhere and had to search the garage for them. The overall design was very easy and as a lot of the samples already had overlocking around them that saved me a lot of time, upholstery fabric frays a lot and requires some kind of stitching either before sewing the seam or after you see. Once I added a border, which Kaffe was not always adding in those days, it seemed to really finish off the top perfectly.
A week or so earlier Spotlight had just introduced a divine chenille….darkest red with gold swirls throughout…I just had to have it for the backing even though it was about $30 all told. That’s a lot for me as I usually use thrifted fabric or sale fabric for backings. this was going to be a leess expensive option anyway as I did not need wadding or batting inside the two layers as the chenille was so thick and heavy. I had been drooling over several throws at Laura Ashley and I was so excited by this chenille as it as even more lush than the ones in that store.
I slip stitched the border to the backing fabric and then top stitched around the inner border. It has been three years now of fairly constant display and during that time it has faded slightly so that it looks truly vintage…I even washed it once in case the dreaded mould had infected it and it came up better than new. After a few months I made a few companion cushions with some of the remaining skirt brocade and a tiny little piece of embroidered silk that as it was $185 a metre was all I could afford! The minimum cut was 30cm and I made every centimetre count! It is well placed I think in the heart of the brocade…..I think the woman who wore that skirt would wear something made out of that silk today…a little bit goes a long way and both the silk and the brocade are truly the stars of this throw!
