Love Affair

I have a confession ... I have a love affair with fabric. Do I sew, you ask? No. Do I re-upholster, you ask? No. Hasn't your mother sewed for years? Yes. Didn't she teach you? I wasn't patient enough to be her student when I was younger. Now, I'm wishing I had. So, I have no skills that I could apply to fabric at all but I still love, love, love fabric.

Like all affairs this one is doomed. I can't commit. I look at a print and think ... "Oh, how I would love to see you hanging from my curtain rods" and instantly follow that up with "But, this one would look nice, too." The choices are endless. I adore so many different styles and patterns that narrowing it to just a couple is virtually impossible for me. I just have the hardest time committing.

In the beginning, my home decor color choices were limited to solids or stripes in the blue-green family because my husband was anti-anything that might be construed as too feminine. It was the "honeymoon phase" and I gladly went along with it because I liked those colors enough to use them and was really just ready to make our house feel like home. Flash forward 7 years and I'm ready to mix it up. It took me awhile but I've gotten him to agree to ... wait for it ... a floral! Gasp! Yes, he agreed and I was so super excited that before he could finish his stipulations ("Nothing too Grandma-y... ") I began scouring the Internet, as I always do, for the perfect print. Problem is that I couldn't pick just one. At this very moment, my desk is covered in 11 different swatches of fabrics that I'm considering for our family/dining room make over. I showed restraint when I picked out just 11 and, honestly, I'll be ordering a few more because I'm just not sure.

I haven't strayed too far from the blue green family but have chosen more vibrant colors and more accents to work with.

My main fabric is this gorgeous floral, for sure ...

I love the big, bold print and the color scheme. I think it will brighten the new family room up nicely and works well with a lot of our existing decor so I won't have to do a full blown make over. It will be more like a mini-face lift. This fabric gives me so many options to work with. I'm thinking of this for curtains for the slider and/or valances over the family/dining room windows.  Not sure though... that's a lot of floral. Ugh! I hate loving something and being so unsure of where to use it!

Anyway, the other fabrics I'm leaning toward are these patterns: 

 

The pea green in the mini chevron shows a little yellow in the image but the swatch matches perfectly to my floral. I didn't get a swatch of the yellow Ikat Dot but I plan to purchase one to make sure the yellows aren't too different.  I'm thinking these for pillows and maybe some place mats. I do have an ottoman that needs recovering but I don't know how I feel about either of these on it. Maybe the mini chevron? What do you think?

I'm loving the spiced carrot in the floral. Orange is such a hot color right now and I'd like to use it but I haven't figured out how to work that in yet. It might simply be with accessories or if I can find the Ikat Dot in that color that could be an option too.


I am 99.9% sure this is what I'll go with but ... I am not sure enough to buy the fabric yet! It's going to cost a pretty penny and, let's face it, I'm, at best, a beginner when it comes to sewing and I don't exactly want to practice with expensive fabric. I'd be a very unhappy camper if I ruined it. Very unhappy. I've considered hiring someone to bring my visions to light but I've said that before and still have a cabinet full of fabric that never got used plus there is extra cost involved. Purchasing this fabric will be my big splurge and I don't want to break the bank so I need to make this work.

Guess, I need to sign up for some sewing lessons. Stay tuned ...