"Ya Gotta Co-ooordinate"
Not to rip off John Witherspoon's famous saying from the movie Boomerang but, it's true. In order to take something from mediocre to excellent, ya gotta know how to coordinate. Mixing and matching your own fabrics is a fabulous way to express your creativity and personal style. If you struggle with coordinating the right fabrics, we've included a few tips to help you along the way.
Coordinating fabrics in any of your sewing projects is just as important as the actual construction. From our previous blog on Coordinating Fabrics, you'll be happy to know that J&O Fabrics is now working on adding matching coordinates to just about every fabric we carry.
Anyhow, most home decor textile manufacturers come out with new lines each season jam-packed with coordinate collections complete with decorative florals, stripes, supersoft chenille upholstery and more. In any given catalogue, a whole living room will be decked out with a complete set of fabrics to upholster the couch, ottoman, chaise lounge and even make drapes and decorative pillows. All this is excellent! However, not everyone wants a cookie cutter living room, sometimes you may want to mix and match fabrics on your own to suit your own tastes. So. . . you'll need to have some idea on just how to do it.
Firstly, feel free to express yourself and not be shackled by trends. Trends will come and go. Just because everyone matches florals with stripes doesn't mean that you have to. If you follow the reasoning behind why florals match well with stripes, you should be okay matching on your own.
While coordinating, one idea is to create balance with contrast. A straight line will contrast with a circle. Dark will contrast light. A tight structure will contrast with chaos and something large will contrast with something very small.
Here are a few examples of how these ideas manifest themselves on fabric combinations.
Linear to Circular
Busy to Textural (Plain)
Large to Small 
Going along with the idea of creating balance by contrast, another way to blend fabrics is to combine HOT with COOL colors. Hot colors include, reds, oranges, yellows etc. And COOL colors include, greens and blues. In a project full of hot warm colors, a cool colored accent may be just the key to creating a perfect balance. Take a look at these examples.
You may also want to consider combining Contrasting Colors. The Contrasting Colors include
Blue/Yellow
Green/Red
Purple/Orange
Overall, texture, color, print, and scale all play a part in how well two fabrics will match. These principles can be explained further in an upcoming blog.
If you follow the above guidelines and focus on creating balance
through contrast your coordinating adventures should prove to be both
rewarding and a lot of fun!
J&O Fabrics. . . sew many possibilities
If you're in the area, visit our store in Pennsauken, New Jersey, right
outside of Philadelphia. The size of a supermarket, we have the largest
selection of fabrics in New Jersey! Everything we carry is not on our website, so if you're in the area, check us out and browse our
fabric aisles.
J&O Fabric Center
9401 Route 130 South
Where Rt.73 and 130 meet
Pennsauken, New Jersey 08110
856-663-2121
info@jandofabrics.comPosts by J&O
Fabrics StoreLabels: coordinating fabrics, craft-ideas, decorator, discount-fabric, fabrics, quilting-fabric, upholstery-fabric
Occasionally, fabrics that are called classic are really just outdated, and fabrics qualified as "modern" may have overbearing designs. Unlike either of those possibilities, Bonetti Velvet Flock Linen is a fabric that both modern and classic in the best senses of those words.
Bonetti has a classic design in the sense of timeless elegance. It would be difficult to imagine a time when this design fabric would be considered anything less than beautiful. The timeless quality of Bonetti is also the key to understanding its modernity. This is a decorator fabric that - though it possess a classic design - can seemingly adapt to any fabric trends.
The very design of Bonetti is an intriguing combination of two very disparate elements: velvet and linen. While velvet has always been considered a sumptuous fabric of the highest order, linen has a decidedly more rustic appeal. Nevertheless, Bonetti successfully combines those qualities into one incredible fabric.
This most luxurious designer fabric is particularly suited to more formal areas of your home such as living rooms, dining rooms, studies, libraries and offices. However, it will look splendid in kitchens, family rooms and in other more casual surroundings. Furthermore, rather than detracting from your furniture Bonetti will accent and highlight it.
Bonetti Velvet Flock Linen is just one of the hundreds of decorative fabrics we carry on our online fabric store. There are many other fantastic fabrics that you can browse through in our Decorative Fabrics category. Here you will find some of the finest and most popular fabrics we carry. Regardless of what you are looking for you will find it here, from futuristic designs to the stateliest patterns.
If you would like to see the rest of our Linen Decorative Fabrics, click here.
If you would enjoy browsing our Velvet Upholstery section, click here.
Posts by J&O Fabrics StoreLabels: decorator, Designer-fabric, Linen, scroll, upholstery, velvet