Monday, October 22, 2007

Fabric Swatches

My dear, sweet, older brother is always on the look out for me. He is fortunate enough to have connections in the furniture business and when I say furniture business, I mean fabric swatch samples! This past weekend he dropped off a load of swatches for me, it took 5-6 handfuls to get them all in! Below is just a portion of the "pile."Fabric swatches are so fun because they are perfect samplings of unique fabrics to do small craft projects with. Oh, and did I mention I get them for free (shhh!)? A few years ago, I got rather ambitious and made handbags from this type of upholstery fabric because they are already cut into perfect squares, eliminating that extra time you have to take when measuring your fabric out. I took my shop on the road and visited a couple of craft shows. It was fun and added an extra buck to my pocket, but I concluded after that adventure that the horse-power was too much to keep up with while in school.
The only pain in fabric swatches are the annoying little staples you have to dig out, oh and the fact that some swatches have unfinished edges causes a rather large mess...but if you can get past that, you are golden! Every pattern comes in an aray of colors so it is always exciting to flip through a pattern for the first time to see what color will pop out at you next!I'm trying to be more efficient with this go-round of fabric swatches. Hopefully, I can get organized to make a quilt or something along those lines (just in time for the holidays). Any suggestions on what I could do? I'm sure I will come up with something, but for now my stack of upholstery fabric sits waiting to be morphed into something beautiful!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Whitney... can your cool older brother get me free fabric swatches??? - Nicole

Anonymous said...

I did a search for fabric swatches today and found this post on your blog. Those fabric samples are awesome! Does your brother have any advice on where to get samples like that or would he ever ship any if the shipping was paid for? Thanks! my email is Ambylee2006@hotmail.com