The weekend was like a mini reunion of sorts, as my roommate, one of the instructors, another attendee, and a vendor representative are all friends that I met at Northfield, where we volunteered our time to upholster chairs for the home. You can read about the Northfield Foundation here.
Our first class on Saturday was all about scaldinos, presented by Sarah Devaney-O'Neil of Storibook Designs. Scaldinos are the decorative throws you see on the ends of the bed in hotels, but they are becoming popular in homes now as well. The first two photos are Sarah's samples that she made in a previous hands-on seminar; they were presented along with a slideshow of some beautiful scaldinos, giving us many great ideas to take home.
All the prep work was done for us since the classes were very short; only 90 minutes. All we had to do to get started was pick the fabrics we liked from a stack of precut pieces. Below are my roommate Lorraine's and my finished scaldinos. Some attendees chose to gather the end pieces, while others of us chose to pleat. Lorraine opted for a tailored look by pressing the pleats all the way down, my pleats are left unpressed, giving a more casual look.
Donna Cash, another instructor at the school, then showed us one of her pillow methods, with the zipper sewn into the bottom seam, and the outer edges topstitched to mimic welt. Again, all pieces were precut, we had only to grab a ziplock bag and get started. The trims and center overlay were sewn on to the face of the pillow first, then the whole thing put together. Mine is the brown one on the left; it now graces my mother's living room, where uncannily, it matches a painting that hangs over her sofa. I had visited her after the seminar, and she loved it so much I left it with her.
After a break for lunch, our group was back with Sarah to learn about presenting your designs to a client and then showed how she prepares beautiful design storyboards for her clients to choose from.
Here is my attempt, I think this is why I work through designers. I do better when I have more time for ideas to percolate. But it was a good exercise to go through, and there was a lot of great information shared from instructor and fellow attendees alike.
Back to Donna for our last class as she showed us her method for a reverse sham coverlet, and the handsewing done to keep the face fabric and lining together. We also had an impromptu corner mitering lesson from Penny, who traveled from England for the seminar. They do more hand work there than we do here in the States, and she graciously showed us how her workroom would do the mitering and hand finishing of the corner. Some of us decided that we needed a bit of bling on them after finishing, so we raided the trim boxes. It was almost time at that point for our Valentine's dinner, so the trim was quickly glued on rather than sewn. A bit ironic after the all the handsewing done on the rest of it, but maybe that makes it an international coverlet.
