34 
House & Garden 
HOW TO BUY DRAPERY and UPHOLSTERY FABRICS 
The Value and Uses of Foreign and Domestic Printed Linens, Chintzes, Silks,'Velvets 
and Velours, Brocades and Tapestries—Simple Tests That Prove Good Merchandise 
LEON DE CHASSE 
I N matters of dress, popular education has 
made wonderful strides in the past few 
years. The woman who enters a department 
store today makes her purchases with an ex¬ 
pert knowledge and discrimination which re¬ 
sult, in part, from the educational campaigns 
of the advertisers, but are derived in large 
measure from her own necessity for self-pro¬ 
tection in getting the worth of her money. 
At the silk counter, the salesman seldom has 
to tell a customer the difference between satin, 
crepe de Chine or taffeta, or even to pronounce 
on their qualities. She can dis¬ 
tinguish for herself between silk, 
cotton and mercerized stockings, be¬ 
tween gloves of suede, chamois, 
glace kid or reindeer. At the linen 
counter she can often tell a pure 
linen from a mixture, and so on 
through the store. She has spe¬ 
cialized knowledge of these things. 
ETnfortunately, this process of edu¬ 
cation has so far not been extended 
to fabrics for the decoration of the 
home, and in this field ignorance still 
widely prevails. In this line, as in 
all others, a fabric is usually made 
for a special purpose. Use it out of 
place, or even in the wrong way, and 
you will be sure to find the results 
unsatisfactory in some respect. 
Prints 
Perhaps the favorite and most suc¬ 
cessful decorative fabrics are the 
prints. The foreign printed linens, 
which are becoming so scarce now, 
owing to the impossibility of obtain¬ 
ing and treating flax, have always 
been most satisfactory. Those dra¬ 
peries you put up one, two or even 
more years ago, or those slip covers 
you had made, although they have 
been in the sunlight, washed or 
cleaned, and roughly handled many 
times, still look well now, and have 
changed but a little, if at all, so far 
as the color is concerned. They are 
probably hand-blocked prints. 
The hand process seems to give 
better results than the machine pro¬ 
cess, both for appearance and dura¬ 
bility. This hand work is slow—a 
man makes but a few yards a clay, 
as little sometimes as four or five 
yards—and has not been very suc¬ 
cessfully undertaken in this country. 
We look to England and France for 
our best hand-blocked prints on lin¬ 
en, cotton (cretonnes and chintzes), 
silk or velvet. 
The machine process is much more 
rapid. One machine turns out sev¬ 
eral thousand yards a day,—but the 
results are limited to smaller pat¬ 
terns and fewer colors. However, 
some very effective prints are being 
made both in America and abroad 
at very reasonable prices by this 
swifter process. 
It is practically impossible to tell 
at a glance what satisfaction can be 
had from a print. Will it wear? Will it fade? 
Will it wash? The best thing to do is to test 
it a little yourself. Wash it and hang it out 
in the sun for a day—try it in salt water, too, 
if you wish. If a few square inches of the 
material stand your test, it is more than likely 
that the curtains will stand it too. 
Glazed chintzes have a cool, clean look of 
their own. It is surprising how little they 
have been used in this country. We owe it 
to a few good English decorators that these 
charming prints have been used here at all, 
and it is from England that we get nearly 
all our designs. 
Valances of glazed chintz are delightful over 
a curtain of striped moire or a heavy taffeta. 
As slip covers or chair seats they are also very 
decorative and give good service—but be sure 
to have a glazed chintz handled by a man who 
is accustomed to such work! It is quite differ¬ 
ent from any other kind of material, and only 
a skilled man can get good results. Roller 
shades of glazed chintz are quickly becoming 
popular, and it will not be long before many 
other uses come into favor, too. 
Printed silks are in especial de¬ 
mand for lamp shades, their colors 
and designs showing to great decora¬ 
tive advantage in this way. They 
are being made here in a wonderful 
variety of designs and colors. 
Unfortunately, we have not begun 
to know the decorative value of 
printed velvets. The best of these, 
usually of English provenance, are 
cotton velvets with a short but very 
close pile, and can be had in an in¬ 
finite number of color effects, those 
with dark backgrounds being prob¬ 
ably most effective. 
Velvets or Velours 
The distinction between velour 
and velvet is a difficult matter. 
Velour, of course, is French for vel¬ 
vet, and that language seems to be 
satisfied with a single word. If we 
wish to use two words, well and 
good, but let us realize they mean 
exactly the same thing and not ex¬ 
pect a salesman to show us two dif¬ 
ferent fabrics when we ask for a 
velour and a velvet. 
To be sure, there are all kinds of 
velvets, and it is necessary to specify. 
The flax velvet or “linen velour” is 
unfortunately a thing of the past. 
France, which used to provide us 
with these goods, is unable to obtain 
flax and the mills that used to weave 
that textile, mostly in the north of 
France, have not heard the songs of 
the mill-hands for a long time. A 
few attempts at making “linen ve¬ 
lour” have been made in this coun¬ 
try, but without success. 
Cotton velvets of domestic manu¬ 
facture are as good as any made 
abroad. The dye situation, although 
not at its best, is gradually improv¬ 
ing. Three years ago the importa¬ 
tion of foreign dyes, on which we 
were entirely dependent, was sud¬ 
denly stopped, and for a time our 
dyers were in trouble. Gradually 
the chemists are overcoming the dif¬ 
ficult problems which arose with this 
new situation. It will not be sur¬ 
prising if before long the market will 
be able to offer “sunfast velvets” 
such as we used to have. 
It is interesting to note here that 
the color of draperies or upholstery 
does not necessarily fade or change 
Silk armure has its designs woven with loose threads which make 
the surface liable to wear badly. It can be used for wall coverings 
and bed spreads 
■ ^rrV 
Silk damasks are suitable for furniture and wall coverings. The 
threads are closely interwoven and not thrown loosely on the 
surface as in armures 
Frise or uncut mohair velvet shows a pile curled in a loop. This 
kind of fabric gives excellent wear and can be recommended 
for upholstery work 
Cut and uncut figured mohair velvet is the best wearing textile 
outside old-fashioned horsehair for upholstery. It comes in 
numberless designs 
