My Five Favorite Fabrics

Beautiful pillows and drapes make such a difference in bringing softness, interest, and, most importantly, the finished look that a space may be lacking. If you’ve got any I-really-need-to-get-them-finished spaces, today we’ve got some fabric recommendations to help you get the job done! Some blogging friends (Lisa of Shine Your Light, Jennifer of Dimples & Tangles, and Pam of Simple Details) and I are each sharing our five favorite fabrics as part of this month’s My Five Favorites series. And we’re welcoming Sarah of Life on Virginia Street as our guest host this month! Sarah is always finding the most beautiful new fabrics, like this fun combination of colors and patterns in the fabrics she chose for guest room pillows – don’t you love them?!:

Thanks for joining us Sarah! Let’s get going and check out my five favorite fabrics (post includes some affiliate links):

Black and White Buffalo Check Fabrics 

I’m a serious sucker for black and white buffalo check. I mean SERIOUS. It’s a pattern that’s got enough going on to be interesting without being too busy and it’s pretty much like using a neutral linen because it goes with everything. If you saw my One Room Challenge master bedroom makeover reveal, you already know that my most recent use of a black and white buffalo check fabric was to reupholster this bedroom chair:

For my chair makeover, I used an oversized buffalo check fabric that was c/o McGee & Co. that was c/o Studio McGee. They also offer this same pattern in a bunch of other fun colorways and sell premade buffalo check pillows in all of their color options – you can see everything in their shop {here}.

I also bought a less expensive black and white buffalo check/plaid fabric locally (at Banksville Fabrics) to make a table runner that I’ve been using in my dining room since {my fall home tour} last year:

I love the black and white check pattern as a runner because I can bring in any other colors and patterns for napkins, flowers, etc. and it always just works!

Schumacher’s Chiang Mai Dragon Fabric

While most people love a good buffalo check, Chiang Mai seems to be more of a love it or hate it kind of fabric. Obviously, I love it because I’ve used it in three different colorways in different places in my home. My favorite colorway is Smoke, which is what I used in my bedroom makeover on our front lumbar bed pillow:

Chiang Mai is a pretty expensive fabric but there are lots of ways to use only a small amount of it but still add a big punch. For starters, if you’re using this fabric for a pillow, use a contrasting fabric like I did for the back of the pillow to save some money. Or you can do what I did in our living room and wrap a small piece around lumbar pillows to add a dose of neutral pattern:

I also love the more colorful Ebony colorway and have used remnant pieces of it to wrap around books (a fun and easy way to add color to a space) and to add some pops of color to my tablescapes like the “napkins” I used in {our Christmas dining room}:

I say “napkins” because I don’t actually use them as such – they’re just there to look pretty for a special dinner party until it’s time to actually start dinner. My trick is to only use them at the two placesettings at the ends where my husband and I sit and discretely put the “real” napkins that we use on our seats 🙂

You can buy pillows made in Chiang Mai Dragon fabric on Etsy (mine was made c/o Pillow Time Girls {here}) and you can buy yardage of this fabric at DecoratorsBest {here}. If you’re just looking for remnant pieces to use like I did to wrap around a lumbar pillow, a book, or as napkins, I’d recommend contacting some Etsy shops that sell pillows with this fabric – they often have remnant pieces they will sell at a reduced price!

Nate Berkus’ San Lucia Fabric

A fabric that I’ve used in my house for a few years now and still haven’t tired of is Nate Berkus’ San Lucia fabric in Mineral found at Calico (update: unfortunately this fabric is no longer available). I bought a yard of this fabric, cut it in half, and added white knotted fringe to one end of each piece to drape over the back of our living room swivel chairs to give them a softer, more interesting look:

If you missed this project, you can check out the simple DIY of creating my fringed chair throws {here}.

Robert Allen’s Lighten Up Fabric

This favorite fabric is pretty appropriately named because lightening up our home office is exactly what it does. Our home office is a small space with dark charcoal walls so I wanted to choose a fabric for drapes that would lighten the space up and and bring in a little color. I went with Robert Allen’s Lighten Up fabric in Lemongrass (available {here}) and love it:

The Lemongrass colorway is a citrine, greenish-yellow that stands out and looks so pretty against our dark walls:

Plastic-Coated Fabrics / Oilcloth

Even though I just talked about this fabric in last week’s post about our back patio, I had to add it to my list of favorites because I’m pretty much obsessed with laminated fabrics right now. There are various different types/names for them (acrylic-coated, laminated, oilcloth…) but essentially they’re all cloth that’s been treated on one side with a waterproof coating, making them perfect for tablecloths, splat mats for high chairs, or any other purpose where you want some pretty color or pattern but it has to hold up to messes. I have IKEA’s SOFIA plastic-coated fabric, which is sold by the yard, as a tablecloth for our outdoor table and love both the look and ease of it:

I did a lot of looking around online before choosing the IKEA fabric and found lots of other pretty ones along the way – here are a few of the other laminated fabrics that were among my final contenders:

Now that I’m done dishing about my five favorite fabrics, it’s time to hop over and check out my friends’ faves – I can’t wait to see their picks!:

Pam – Simple Details

Jennifer – Dimples & Tangles

Lisa – Shine Your Light

Sarah – Life on Virginia Street

I’ll see you guys later in the week for my summer home tour!