Saturday, May 22, 2010

Choosing vintage fabrics (part1)




It is sometimes difficult when choosing fabrics online to get a clear idea of the subtleties of weave, weight and tone. This can be especially tricky when considering which fabrics complement each other and/or colour schemes.

Most of our antique and vintage linen has either a stone/oatmeal or cream/wheat coloured base. We try our best to accurately describe tones. When choosing fabrics to be used together the background tone is probably the most important consideration and going for either the grey/stone/ porridge tones or the wheat/cream/yellow tones is a good starting point

Mixing striped linen with plain often works well and for larger projects using any combination of grain sacks, cart covers, mattress covers, sacks and sheets with the same tones can produce stunning results.

Over the next few weeks we will be presenting examples of combinations of vintage linen which could be used for interior projects. We will also be suggesting complementary Farrow and Ball paint colours as we aware that like us many of our customers use Farrow and Ball.

(Farrow and Ball is an English company producing environmentally friendly paints with a fantastic range of neutral (and other) colours. They go particularly well with our vintage fabrics.

Thursday, May 13, 2010

Period Living

Featured in Junes issue of Period living (UK). This shows one of our cushions from grain sack fabric ( not a chunky hemp cushion as it says in the caption!)

Monday, May 10, 2010

Bespoke cross stitch embroidery

Our bespoke, hand embroidered cross stitch pictures are featured in this weeks Country and Town House magazine ( bottom right in the image above)

Friday, May 7, 2010

Kalocsa Embroidery






Kalocsa , 88 miles South of Budapest is a small town famous for its paprika and its folk art.

Colourful motifs including flowers and paprika were traditionally painted on walls, furniture, eggs and embroidered to make clothes and home furnishings

This style of embroidery using bright colours was popular at the beginning of the 20th century. Before that the embroidery of this area was generally done with white thread on white cloth.

The examples above are all vintage and embroidered on home woven cloth.