By the Pair

During a weekend trip to Atlanta back in April, I found a couple fabrics that I fell in love with.

I didn’t have a particular use or project in mind when I bought these fabrics, but they were simply too beautiful to pass up. Ever since, I’ve been trying to find a place for them somewhere in our home as pillows, but nothing looked and felt quite right, so I decided to make them into napkins to join my growing collection.

Here’s what I ended up with.

And here’s the full collection that I’ve made over the last couple years.

I like to mix and match them at the table or just let guests pick up whichever one they like best. I’ll undoubtedly be adding others whenever I find fantastic fabric that is too good to miss.

The Inevitable

Last week’s fabric browsing inevitably led to some fabric purchases. I spent a solid hour perusing Hawthorne Threads and choosing my favorites, and then came the toughest part: editing. It actually took me a couple days to decide. I had to give myself some time to think on it, add a couple fabrics back to the contenders’ list, narrow the list down again, etc. (Oh, the drama!) But I finally found two that I loved and that would actually work in our home in some capacity. These are the ones I chose:

And going in for the closeup:

I was in love with the graphic turquoise pattern from the get-go, so that one was pretty much in my shopping cart from the start, but the decision-making process for the other was a bit more time-consuming. I ultimately went with the crosshatch pattern for nostalgic reasons. When I was younger and my sister was in college studying architecture, she showed me some of her drawings where she’d use crosshatching. I’d never seen that technique, and I thought it (and my sister) were so cool. (I still do.) I decided on yellow because we don’t have that much of that particular color in our home so I thought a little variety might be nice.

My plan is to make two pillows for our living room sofa out of the turquoise fabric (room tour coming soon!). The fate of the yellow is yet to be decided. I’ll be sure to share the results.

Fabric Finds

I love fabric. I probably have 40 or so bookmarked on my computer at any given time, and I regularly edit them down to keep that folder from getting obscene. So, when I spotted this amazing stack of fabric on the left on Pinterest, it sent me on an hour-long internet tangent that led to some other fantastic finds.

What I found was Hawthorne Threads, an online fabric store run by a husband-and-wife team that carries a ton of beautiful fabrics. Here is a small sampling of my favorites from the site.

I’m going to have to edit down my selections so my order total isn’t obscene too.

Fabric Finds

During a weekend trip to Atlanta, my sister and I stopped into Whipstitch, a small store which carries a variety of modern fabrics. I had my eye on a number of fabrics, but the ones I went kind of gaga over and ultimately brought home with me were these two, City Planting in green (left) and Pollen in green (right):

I have no clue what I’m going to make with them (maybe some pillows or perhaps napkins to add to my growing collection), but they were too good to pass up. Both are from Jay McCarroll’s most recent fabric collection, Habitat for FreeSpirit. I didn’t watch the first season of Project Runway, so I was completely clueless about McCarroll, the show’s season 1 winner, and his fantastic fabric. He has a lot of beautiful, vibrant patterns (see all of his FreeSpirit collections here). Here are a handful of my other favorites:

You can order these fabrics through Whipstitch’s etsy shop. I may be placing an order myself in the near future.

Images courtesy of Whipstitch.

New Blue Napkins

Does this fabric look familiar?

It should. It’s the same fabric I used for the pillow shams I finished last week. I had some extra fabric, so I decided to make a pair of napkins to match some others I’ve made. They’re all the same size and style, which makes them feel like a set, but I like that each fabric brings its own personality to the table.

New Blue Pillows

If you follow me on Twitter, you may have seen this post last week:

Well, I did get off Twitter, and I started and finished my project. It involved making two simple, modern pillow shams using Joel Dewberry‘s Herringbone fabric in Pond (from the Modern Meadow collection) that I absolutely adore. This fabric is kind of hard to find. I ordered it from an etsy seller who had only two yards left with slim likelihood of getting any in for a couple months. So, I bought another fabric that was a darker bluer blue to use for the back, and I’m really happy with the way they turned out. What do you think?