Home and Sass: Lilly Pulitzer

I have a seat cushion that I need to recover. It’s a super easy, staple gun kind of a job. The seat cushion is small {it belongs to the vanity I’m painting…or rather, currently stuck painting…bored with it already….have learned that when the wood is not really wood, but veneer instead.... sanding to give it a worn look doesn’t really work… just needs to be painted...kinda boring}.

So the seat cushion is quite petite. I googled fabric remnants in the area, and came across an article {it might have been a blog entry?} about this place in the city that has a ton of fabric remnants at really low prices. DeBois Textiles.

One day after work last week, I packed sleepy Izzie into the trusty Civic, set my GPS to DeBois Textiles and took off. Let me tell you, if you live in this city, I would recommend mapping your route ahead of time, because this place is at the edge of the earth, and GPS will take you through some of the roughest neighborhoods to get there. We’re talking, lots of boarded up houses, with no shortage of liquor stores…if you’ve seen The Wire, then you know what I’m talking about. Roughness. {really though, when I drive through places like that, I’m usually just shocked/amazed that so many people do live that way in our country… on the fringe, with so few resources….the violence, abuse, addiction and mental illnesses as a result of some of these issues…. they run through generations of families… I’ve seen this in the work that I do…it’s a huge problem and so sad...}

Anyway, this textile place had a lot of nice fabrics {worst non-segue ever? Trivial much??}, and a huge section of thrift/vintage clothes. The stuff was old. Real old. Not the standard Sears/Target/Old Navy castoffs-- this place was authentically vintagey and thrifty. We saw: a peasant dress circa 1972, a polyester loud {screaming} floral print giant collared shirt {picture the Brady Bunch wardrobe} circa 1978, lots of sequined and satin party {prom??!!} dresses from the 80s {16 Candles, hello}, vintage Lilly Pulitzer {!!!!}, lots of fur, denim vests….Ripe for the Halloween costume/college theme party pickin’. We {Iz & I} had a fab time picking through the stuff. Sadly, none of the Lilly was in my size/or had a little stain on the front. I actually considered using a Lilly dress just for the fabric, to recover my seat cushion, but couldn’t bring myself to destroy such a piece of history. Although, I wouldn’t really be destroying it, I would be re-purposing it, right? Isn’t repurposing kind of the hip, green thing to do these days??

So, despite all of the cool stuff there, and despite my reallllly slow, deliberate mulling over of the fabrics, I couldn’t find one that I liked for this project. I asked one of the girls who worked there if they had any more fabrics in the back, and sure enough, she told me that they were going to be putting some more out tomorrow. She texted me a picture the next day of a print that could've worked, but I ended up going with something that I found on EBay... Which is great, and I'm excited again about this project. {yay!}

Below: some snaps of DeBois Textiles. Not my best work--but in my defense, I was carrying a very squirmy baby, who likes to LUNGE for the iPhone, AND we were in something of a rush after our long trek to this little hidden gem.