Remember when I talked about a fabric that was a color that I didn’t like so much? Well that fabric has shown its ugly head.  I spent this week working on a new problem. I usually write about items that are done on a day to day basis, but this one has taken lots of little portions of each day over the past couple weeks. You can get caught up with the history of the situation by going here.

We were told by the company that they could remedy the situation, however after they tried to steam the wrinkles out of the fabric, we were told this:

“The fabric did not react well to being steamed.  Some of the wrinkles were removed, however, some “spotting” has occurred since the fabric was previously treated with Premium Stain Protection.  Due to the sensitive nature of this velvet, we do not recommend brushing or any further processing.

This fabric has been steamed and it is packaged with cardboard, bubble wrap and has been placed in boxes.  

 The fabric is scheduled to ship today and I’ve asked for the tracking number.  In the meantime, I guess they’ll need to inspect it when it arrives and hopefully they can use it.  Fingers crossed.”

This is what the upholsterer had to say about it:

“Please see below … regarding the fabric with wrinkle/crush marks that we sent… Per your instructions we did send to… but when … returned the COM they did not suspend the rolls and they placed both bolts in 1 box. So, both bolts are FULL of pressure/wrinkle marks and covered in white dots, almost like the nap is missing.

Please advise how you’d like to proceed.”

Arrrgh. We are officially out of luck! If you have ever watched a design reality TV show, this is a moment they would capitalize on and milk for all the drama they could get out of it! Luckily, we aren’t that dramatic.

So now that we understood that the fabric was officially not able to be used, (oh yeah, they also discontinued the fabric!) we started looking for our next option. With help from another designer, and making some calls to some Manufacturer’s reps, we ordered in some close options. Once the samples arrived, we had to find out the lead times (how long it would take) to receive the fabric – whether they had some in stock that would all be in the same dye lot or if it had to be made new to fulfill our order of 88 yds.  Our expected date to have the chairs is the first of June. So we need to obtain the new fabric, have it shipped to the upholsterer and then the upholsterer has a lead time of 4-6 weeks to do the work, then we need time to ship the chairs to their final destination.  We needed to not only find a fabric that matched our original specification as close as possible, but it needed to be there last week.  After spending a lot of time on the phone and emailing different companies, we found a fabric!

This fabric was in stock and ready to ship out. We created a Purchase Order and now we wait.  That dang purple fabric is giving me heartburn!