by Gill Jennings

Created on: March 30, 2009

Making cushions a is a great hobby, and luxury cushions as special gifts or keepsakes even more so. It can however be tricky to find good materials at reasonable prices, so here are a few ideas of where to look.

In your neighbourhood

Home Furnishing or Curtain stores

When shopping for fabrics for making luxury cushions, your first port of call should be your nearest home furnishing or curtain store. They will have dozens of books of samples of fabric, all of which will at some point become out-of-date and need to be replaced. The fabric manufacturers provide new samples, leaving the store to somehow to dispose of the old sample books. What better way of doing so than to give them to you? The books are put together by riveting through the fabric, so there is a small amount of wastage, but it's free so who's complaining? All you need to do is to visit the store and speak nicely to the manager, who will almost certainly be delighted to off-load her sample books for free, rather than having to pay for someone to come and take them away.

You may wish to ask for only the luxury fabrics, or you could just ask for all the old samples, and think of other uses for the extra fabric. You may of course end up with rather more fabric than you bargained for my last visit to my local curtain store resulted in about a dozen fabric sample books, each measuring approximately 2 feet by 18 inches, and containing a minimum of 2 dozen fabric samples. This has kept me happily patchworking for the past 5 years, making throws for my furniture and stylish shopping bags among other things.

Factory outlet stores

Have a look in your local telephone directory to see if there is a fabric or curtain factory outlet store in your area. These sell fabric from the ends of ranges, so their stock is constantly changing, but if you're looking for remnants that is hardly a problem. It's worth making a few visits over the course of a few weeks to see the types of fabrics they sell and how quickly their stock changes, and if you see a fabric you like, snap it up straight away as it's probably not going to be there the next time you visit!

Market stalls

I know many towns have now lost their markets, but if you still have one, it's quite likely that it will have a stall that sells fabrics. Like the factory outlet stores, these market stalls will be selling remnants and ends of ranges, so visit often and snap up attractive fabrics as soon as you see them, because they won't be around for long.

Thrift stores / charity

• 1
• 2
• Next Page >>