Do you look around your room and it feels just ho-hum? Maybe you’ve made a lot of really safe choices in your furnishings: Beige sofa, solid color chairs, white wood blinds. It should be done, but it still doesn’t feel ‘decorated’ or finished?
Maybe you should branch out and bring in a little pattern! Anyone that has worked with me will know that I LOVE fabric. Silk, wool, cottons, linens, even some great poly mixes. Fabrics can add personality, style and texture to your space. But how do you mix them without overdoing it? Here are few basics to get you started:
Build your fabric story with three basic patterns, then fill in with solids and textures that coordinate:
- Repeat – repetition pattern, stripe or graphic, depending on your style
- Random – A large scale pattern, sometime random or bold.
- Mini-Print – small, repetitious. Sometimes one color with texture
So how to begin? I find it easiest to pick out the busiest fabric first. Go shopping. Fall in love with something beautiful. Already have a fabric in the room that you’re building from? Even better! Take a piece of that (chair cushion, throw pillow, fabric swatch) with you to the store. Determine which colors you want to extract out of it. For example: Let’s use the first storyboard above. You HAVE that wallpaper on the walls or are in love with it. You decide that from that wall paper, you want to see more pink than white or green. You will be shopping for pinks and greens to lesser extent with white as the base color (versus beige, cream or ecru). With me so far??
The fabric selections don’t all have to have the same colors, but each should relate to the other in some way. Solid white background, repetition of pattern or the same shade of green as the accent. Sometimes it’s fun to throw in something wild, but this takes a little more practice so for our example, I kept it simple.
