Making a mantle scarf in the Aesthetic Movement Moorish style

Of course like many we are adjusting to the new normal. While our showroom remains closed we have expanded our in line sales at our Ebay store gallery1884 . That has given me some much needed time on my hands to do some projects for the residence upstairs and one of those has been to do all the textile projects upstairs in our Persian Parlor. I will be detailing some of those projects over the next week or so.

The goal was to do a period style mantle scarf for  our slate mantle upstairs all the while keeping with the very "Aesthetic Movement" nature of the Persian Parlor our large formal parlor. Given the room was painted in 1885 we are not changing anything so we are working with a mostly blue color pallet. We needed to create something that looked authentic and will relate to the formal draperies so we wool the basic design of the valance and adapted it to the mantle scarf.

We used  a combination of materials including a blue damask on top of the shelf. The Moorish Style Jacquard blue and gold fabric, the 5 inch long gold tassel gimp, a smaller 1 1/2 inch tassel gimp and last but not least the burgundy velvet which is one of the accent colors for accessories in the room. All in all I think it works well and looks period. 

Re Purpose 101: SteamPunk, Industrial, Boho, Candle holders

Sometimes projects just happen. A regular client of our wanted something different for their restaurant/bar other than the normal the candle holder.

We do upholstery....so we have springs. We also had a huge quantity of vintage  peg style Candle votive's thanks to a friend of ours and an estate clean out.

As you can see, trendy and different. sorta Steampunk, Industrial, Boho, Country Chic Candle holder.

We made extras so they are available in our shop too.

Extreme Chair Makeover: Turkish Parlor Chair

Finding an 'exotic' parlor chair suitable for a Turkish parlor is next to impossible, a pair of high end chairs could set you back 10 grand or more IF you could even find them.

So how do you get "the look" without spending a ton of money? Well with a simple new slipper chair and some imagination. We already had these chairs from staging a house a few years ago and they are study and somewhat comfortable but in their  sold form they are contemporary boring seating. These actually came from Target and at least has a sort of Moroccan upholstery.

This is the chair before and its your typical big box chair that colts together and "instant chair"

Now these chairs sit higher than Victorian era chairs so we elected to cut  2 1-2 inches off the legs
You would not have to do this but we think it makes the chair look more "era authentic" We used a black base fabric that had a slight floral design and has some shine on  it. We doubled this fabric to give it more weight and durability and in this case the black skirt is 7 1/2 inches long. This immediately changes the scale of the chair. At the same time we added fabric to the top which duplicates the style of exotic chairs in the Victorian era.

The black fabric created the backdrop for the 5 inch Gold lace fringe which was applied to the skirt and the top with glue. Although we elected to do some sewing on this project this could be done no sew with hem tape and adhesive.

So there you have it, a Turkish parlor chair for less than 150.00.