You'll have lots of new fabric sites to browse after looking through the comments of this Whip Up post about purchasing fabrics online. Along with popular sites like purlsoho.com, superbuzzy.com and reprodepot.com and big sites for baby fabrics, sewzannesfabrics.com and sewbaby.com, there are links to several organic fabric sites and more.
Dacia Ray shares a great idea for making the most of Anthropologie's dishtowels, which might be too precious to use for their intended purpose. Try repurposing the dishtowels to use as a sewing machine cover like the one shown at Dacia Ray, or maybe as a pillow or for decorating a child's room. Many of the dishtowels have cute appliques or embroidery so they would be perfect for kids.
J.Crew stores are full of Liberty fabrics right now. The soft, lightweight Liberty cotton comes in so many different prints, so which ones did J.Crew choose to use? Here they are:
They've used the flowery prints on shirts, a skirt, a makeup bag and kids clothes (really, they are all over the store). You can find the same fabrics yourself, along with other Liberty prints, at intfab.com (which has the red and pink fabric and the navy fabric) and fabricsandbuttons.com (which has the lime and periwinkle fabric).
IKEA has some new fabrics in their stores, the bright, psychedelic Katarina fabric and the bright, striped Elisabet fabric. Also, IKEA's 2008 catlaog is now out (found via Apartment Therapy). The catalog is a whopping 372 pages long, full of ideas and inspiration.
...drooling over Virginia Johnson's cotton voile fabric with their bright watercolor designs.
Reading the August issue of Lucky magazine, I learned how to get rid of bleach spots on clothing. Use a Tria System Pantone Marker to fill in the bleached area. In the magazine, Tibi deisgner Amy Smilovic said to let it set for a day, then launder as usual. Stop by your local Pearl, Dick Blick, or other art supply store to pick out a match from Tria's 300 colors.
Sunday's New York Times features girls' dresses in adorable brightly-colored prints from Japanese brand Noko. The dresses are made from a hand-dyed cotton gauze fabric called tenugui, traditionally used as a hand towel or handkerchief in Japan. [NY Times]
With modern colorful patterns, like these at Tortoise, tenugui work not only for children's clothes, but for headbands, napkins, placemats and other accessories as well.
Apartment Therapy extols the virtues of felt, the really thick industrial-grade kind. Use it to make cute storage baskets like these from the Netto Collection, tote bags, coasters and more. Poppytalk shows off an array of felt products in her posts about Felt Studio and hey-sign.
