Crushed Velvet Read Free

until I established a cash flow, I had to do what I could on a shoestring budget. I sorted through the old inventory and then contacted many of the dealers in New York and New Jersey, spending hours selecting whimsical cotton prints, Pendleton wools, and a glorious spectrum of silk de chine. I offered to buy any bolts they had with less than five yards if they’d make a deal on the price and a few of them did. A few of them remembered my aunt and uncle and deepened my discount when I told them I was reopening the store. It was a start.
    Still, I needed a hook, something to make people come to me. After two weeks of stopping by Tea Totalers every morning for a cup of Genevieve’s proprietary blend of tea, I got my idea. A proprietary blend of fabric.
    It was no coincidence that I owned a fabric store and my name was Polyester. The store had been in my family for generations and I’d been born inside on a bed of polyester. Growing up, I’d been teased on a regular basis and often wished I’d been born on a less controversial fabric. Was there a person alive who didn’t think of the seventies when they heard the word
polyester
? Still, it was what it was. Insteadof fighting my name, I decided to use it for a PR opportunity. I reached out to all of my contacts and finally found a mill willing to weave a custom blend of velvet using ninety percent silk and ten percent polyester.
    I had experience working with blended fabrics in my former job at To The Nines, a somewhat sleazy dress shop in downtown Los Angeles, and I knew that ten percent of a synthetic woven into a fabric could change the drape and wearability of the cloth without dramatically altering the appearance. Fabrics that were woven with a synthetic blend resisted wrinkles and held color better than their pure counterparts. My former boss liked to use mostly synthetic fabrics that came cheap (and sometimes defective). Having grown up around the best fabrics in the world when Land of a Thousand Fabrics was in its prime, I’d always wanted to work with top-quality weaves. This was my opportunity.
    My custom velvet had arrived at a distributor in Los Angeles late on Friday afternoon. The warehouse was closed for the weekend. Genevieve had mentioned that her husband was going to Los Angeles for supplies for Tea Totalers today and I’d arranged for him to pick up the fabric. It was a win-win.
    Even though the store was locked up tighter than a drum, I had a few misgivings over leaving the crew to pick up lunch. The foreman saw me watching them and gave me a thumbs-up. I smiled a thin smile and walked around the back of the store to my yellow VW Bug. Five minutes later I was parked in front of Tea Totalers.
    The tea shop was actually a small house that sat away from the street. A narrow sidewalk led to the front door. Small white iron tables and chairs with mismatched, faded cushions were scattered around the front interior. Inside, Genevieve had hung checkered curtains on the windows and tacked a few French posters featuring roosters and chickens on the walls.
    Genevieve was a self-professed Francophile, and her shopwas a testament to her love of the country. I’d secretly been working on a makeover for her store, including curtains, cushions, aprons, placemats, napkins, and tablecloths from linen toile, gingham check, and other French fabrics. I even found a bolt of place-printed cotton canvas, too heavy to use for apparel, with images of roosters on it. I planned to stretch the images over wooden frames and suggest she hang them like art. I couldn’t wait to surprise her with the concept, but I wanted to get it all together before it was done, and I wanted to find a way to use the new velvet in the design.
    Genevieve was stacking sandwiches wrapped in parchment paper, sealed with stickers that featured the Eiffel tower on them, into a wooden crate.
    â€œI hope you don’t mind that I didn’t go fancy. I’m low on a couple