Small and Chic in Cville: Fun with fabric

I don't want to give too, too much away about our invitations, but one element of them is my inspiration for other wedding related projects. This isn't exact, but this is a little taste of what it looks like:

I love the colors in that design. I plan on using fabric as the backing for an escort card board and started to search for the right fabric.

Unfortunately, I didn't bring the invitation sample with me and was blinded by this Imperial Trellis imposter at U-Fab. The pattern is velvet...it feels so wonderful! It's a fabric by Iman and it was super cheap at U-Fab...maybe $24 per yard? It was selling for $40 or so per yard at Calico Corners.

But this trellis pattern is decidedly modern and my little inspiration image is a little more organic and vintage in feel. I bought two yards of the trellis fabric and tucked it away in the closet for another day. Then, I went back out to the fabric stores to find a better option.

My first stop was The Second Yard, a beautiful store that has furniture and fabric located in downtown Charlottesville. The Second Yard tends to have pretty traditional fabric options, which seemed perfect for this project. I found one fabric that might work...it had that organic and slightly vintage vibe and the blue was pretty...

But I didn't love it.

I went back to U-Fab and saw one contender, but I again thought it was a bit too modern. I loved the colors and the sheen on the fabric.

I even drove north of the city to Fabrics Unlimited to check out their selection. I only saw one possibility, but it seemed like a nursery fabric. The price was fantastic, though.

At this point, I was getting a little discouraged. I decided to stop in to Calico Corners just to see what was there. The last time I went in there, they only had traditional, boring fabrics. I was pretty surprised to see that things were a little more exciting there. The prices are still inflated, but they have some really wonderful fabrics, both modern and traditional.

After looking around for a while, I found a fabric in a few different colorways that had birds on it. I thought it was charming. The prices were not charming.

Maybe these were too traditional? After all, my little inspiration piece is a little whimsical. It didn't seem to go with those birds.

Finally, I found this Robert Allen for Dwell Studio fabric. While the colors weren't right, the feel of the fabric was.

After looking around, I realized that it can in a blue colorway...they just didn't have that in stock. They let me borrow it, though, and it's perfect. The $70 per yard price didn't seem reasonable, though. A quick check online showed that Dwell Studio sells the fabric for $56 per yard.

Just this morning as I wrote this entry, I googled the fabric to find a picture of it and found that another Charlottesville blogger, Marissa of Roost Home, had the fabric on her blog a few months ago. She hosted a giveaway for pillows made out of the fabric. I didn't remember seeing the fabric before last week at Calico Corners despite having entered that giveaway!