I was never a flower girl. This will go down on my List o' Lifetime Regrets right alongside never tap dancing on Broadway and giving away my original Midge® and Skipper® dolls to the little girl up the street rather than saving them in mint condition to sell on eBay for hundreds of dollars! Putting my bitterness behind me, we've come up with a beautiful flower girl basket as part of our Rustic Wedding series with Fabric.com. Our design combines five very different fabrics for an awesome blend of color, weight and texture: a rich cotton blend on the outside in a cool ikat style polka dot, a vintage style ticking on the inside, a great tulle ruffle around the top, a ruched taffeta for the handle, and a pretty rolled accent rose on both the front and back in silk dupioni silk with burlap leaves.

In Ancient Egypt, pillows were a sign of wealth and prestige and were often used to carry ornamental items, such as precious jewels. The amount of money a family had determined the number of jewel-covered pillows on display. Similarly, the Romans used pillows to present precious items to the bride and groom during a wedding ceremony. A page would be selected to bring in pillows laden with gifts during the ceremony. Royal families would present the couple with crowns brought in on a pillow. Today, the pillow continues as the traditional way to transport wedding rings down the aisle, usually in the shaky hands of the bride's or groom's youngest male relative. Our Rustic Wedding version is made from intricately woven ribbons.

The most popular fabric for the Rustic Wedding is burlap. Believe it or not, this coarse fabric, more traditionally known for bagging coffee beans than bedecking wedding finery, is the hottest ticket out there when it comes to adding trendy texture. Part of the reason behind this is how many options there are in burlaps today. Both in density (the coarseness of the weave) as well as color. Yep. Burlap is not just brown anymore. We've come up with a beautiful design for a simple wedding table runner made of two layers of burlap highlighted with a splash of luxurious silk. Burlap, like many of the specialty fabrics we're featuring in this series, comes in wide widths. The burlaps we chose to work with from Fabric.com ranged from 47" to 60" wide with the most common width being 58". This means you can get a number of strips from each yardage cut.

We're thrilled to have been selected to be part of this spring's Amy Butler Alchemy Fashion Look Book and Trunk Show. Rowan Fabrics put together this fantastic idea to promote Amy's Alchemy Studio Collection. They tapped ten prominent designers and asked each to come up with a special project using one of the new Alchemy substrates. Some of our amazing Look Book partners-in-design include Betz White, Amy Barickman, Cal Patch and Linda Lee. Sew4Home was awarded a home décor project, and we chose to work with voile and Amy's brand new cotton linen. Our resulting Sofa Throw features a wonderful zig zag patchwork technique and lusciously long bullion fringe. It's reminiscent of the popular furniture covers of the 1930s and '40s, which tended to be longer and thinner than what you find today. One or more of these heavy throws adorned the back of a couch or chair in nearly every home of the era as a prominent decorating accent. The combination of colors and textures in the Alchemy fabrics we selected have a beautifully vintage feel, but with a modern infusion of pattern and design.