Buying drapes on the Internet

By the time you've lived in a place for 3 years, it's time to add curtains. This is just my personal timetable; you may need longer.

You can't rush curtains. Well, you can, but then people ask awkward questions like, "What were you using for taste the day you picked that fabric?"

I've always run screaming from drapery stores because the choice is so overwhelming. The selection of tassels and piping and brocade and finials shouts itself in waves of visual chaos. I can no longer hear my still, small style voice, which is hoarse even on a good day. So I go home and put towels over the windows.

Then about a month ago I had this idea that maybe there's somewhere on the Internet where I can buy fabric without the dangers of over-stimulation, without having to smell that stultifying drapery odour, and where the fabric is not the predictable stuff I see in stores and can't work up any passion about. "And it shouldn't cost more than towels", I added to my wish list.

Which led me to discover one of the U.K.'s great gifts to style in the form of Richard Taberner, a Shropshire lad who works as an interior designer for both private and commercial contracts all over Britain. He winds up with masses of overstock, and sells it on the Internet for tiny fractions of the material's original cost.

For example, for $250 (plus the cost of shipping), I got 40 meters of the most gorgeous Italian chenille tapestry fabric for the living room windows. With the cost of shipping (roughly $100, which is what it costs me in gas to drive around to different drapery stores year after year), that's still only $8.75 a meter, for fabric that retails in England for $200 a meter. Oh baby. I ordered another 40 meters of Irish linen for the bedroom ($200), some gorgeous Italian taffeta for the dining room ($60), and all kinds of other breathtaking bargains.

I love shopping from the sanctity of my home office, and relish the occasional bidding war over one of Richie's unbelievable brocades or sateens. This is stuff you will never find in North American stores; the quality is beyond description. To investigate for yourself, visit Fabric Bay, or visit eBay and enter "curtain fabric" in the search engine (the handle for Richie's shop is shambabyexclusivedesignerfabrics).

There is one other English seller worth having a look at, and that is Saal Textiles' eBay shop (member name is saaltextiles), where you can get 10 meters of pure silk embroidered Italian taffeta for about $150. Honestly, it makes curtains FUN. And as a towel, girl, I don't say that lightly.

The only caveat to ordering via the Internet is that, depending on your computer monitor (and the seller's photographic equipment), the colours may be slightly off. I've found that my monitor tends to see photographs as bluer than they really are, so the fabrics I've received are all warmer than I expected, tending toward terracotta when I thought they were more reddish. But my mother always warned me that I'd have a peri-menopausal Orange Phase in my decorating future, so I'm going with it.