Fabrics!

I love to reupholster furniture and I've been looking for some good fabric wholesale websites.  You used to be able to get fabulous fabrics by the yard from pottery barn on sale for as little as $3 a yard, but they don't seem to go on sale all that often anymore.   Warehouse Fabrics has some great upholstery fabric for about $6.95 a yard.  But the thing I am most impressed with is their yardage estimator, which helps you know how much fabric you need for whatever you are upholstering.  Great find and I hope to have a project soon to try out their fabrics, but I already have two chairs to finish up in the garage.   

A couple upholstery tips, make sure you use a fabric that will be easy to piece together on a chair, stripes are really difficult, patterns are great if there is no real upside to the pattern otherwise pay close attention to the pieces you cut out.  Although I picked out a mostly white pattern above, I don't recommend using it for furniture because it is very difficult to keep clean and can fade and shows dust and dirt.  I think it would be great for a throw pillow though.  My favorite way to make a throw pillow is to buy two fabric napkins from pottery barn or world market and sew three sides together inside out, then reverse, stuff and hand sew the four side.  Then you have an easy and fantastic throw pillow that can bring life to any room!    

Yardage Chart         Yardage Calculator

Inspiration

As a designer I pull inspiration from a lot of different places, book covers, patterns, color combinations, fonts, posters, nature, textures, painting, art history, buildings, and on and on... I collect ideas from the internet, take pictures of things that I like, save bits of paper and color swatches, and tear out pictures from magazines. A friend of mine even picks up flyers and fun designs to help inspire me.
For this blog background I took some of my inspiration from a book cover that I found. I loved the colors and also wanted to give my blog a vintage look as well as a bit of whimsy.
Another piece to the puzzle that inspires me and contributes to how I design are photoshop brushes. There are so many available for free on the internet and they help enable my imagination to come to life on the screen. In a future post I will share with you some of my favorite links.
There is inspiration everywhere, you just have to be aware of it.  Where do you get your inspiration from?

sagmeister design