Fabric

My wife and I would like some tips on covering our walls with fabric or sheets. Can you help? Using fabric to cover walls is a great way to redecorate and also cover a badly damaged or cracked wall. Unless you have something else in mind, you might want to consider using printed bedsheets. These are usually fairly inexpensive, and you can buy as many as you need. Most are permanent-press. To get started you must determine how many sheets you will need. Measure the length of all walls to be covered and total this up. Divide the total by the usable width of the sheet.

Cheerful chic is what you can expect to see settling into furniture showrooms this spring. Manufacturers at the International Fall Furniture Market in High Point, N.C., found a variety of ways to inject buoyancy and a certain savoir-faire into chairs and chests, settees, sideboards and more with color, pattern, and texture. This desire to delight manifested in fabrics and forms from upholstery to case-goods. Century Furniture dressed its Dover rectangular ottoman in a Missoni-inspired fabric.

Fourteen-year-old Shelly Benton stood carefully erect yesterday morning as Tahira Amatullah draped a length of brilliantly colored, intricately woven fabric on his lanky frame. He turned slowly as she twisted and gathered it around his waist and over his shoulder. When Amatullah finished, the youth threw back his shoulders, folded his arms across his chest and looked proudly, if a bit nervously, at his McMichael School classmates. There stood not a typical eighth grader but a spiritual heir to those who first wore the "kente" cloth centuries ago - the kings of the Ashante nation of Ghana, in West Africa.

If you want curtains for the Oval Office or wallpaper for the White House's Blue Room, you might call the venerable fabric house Brunschwig & Fils. But if you want wonderful tales about decorating, sit down with Murray Douglas, Brunschwig's taste-maker for the last 50 years and coauthor, with Chippy Irvine, of the new decorating book Brunschwig & Fils Up Close (Bulfinch, $50). "I remember when my Aunt Zelina took me to see a French woman who'd done her drawing room up entirely in black-and-white chintz," Douglas recalls.

Snyderman-Works Galleries are responsible for the most impressive of the half-dozen or so fiber-art exhibitions around town this month. Organized by director Bruce Hoffman, this museum-quality presentation of international scope reconnoiters the front lines of fiber art through the work of 48 artists. Judging by the approximately 130 pieces that Hoffman has selected, the exhibition affirms that fiber art has long outgrown its traditional boundaries of weaving, needlework, basketry and papermaking.

Embroidered fireworks burst in a riot of color across the midnight background, spraying brush-stroked sparks near the hand-stitched railroad tunnel. Exploding from that first eye-catching scene is a collage of portraits depicting bundled-up children dodging snowballs and shoppers strolling by Haverford Avenue's five-and-dime store and movie theater. This mosaic of daily life, in the form of a 7-by-8-foot quilt, took 11 local women more than a year and a half to sew, paint and applique.

In a late-1960s trend toward loosening the rules about technique at the Rhode Island School of Design, professors encouraged student sculptor Kay Ritter, formerly of Levittown, to be free. She was. "It was a very strange time. I wasn't getting technique, so I fell back on something I did in childhood," she said of her "fabric mache," nearly life- sized, caricatures. However, when her teachers saw the result of Ritter's imagination they disapproved, and in an artistic difference of opinion she left the school in 1971 after three years.

There is Jack Lenor Larsen fabric in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and in a Braniff 747 as well. He has designed affordable sheets for mass consumption and leather custom interiors for Eleanor Clay (Mrs. Edsel) Ford's Palm Beach, Fla., convertibles. This is as Larsen would have his business; beautiful designs for everyone. "We have not yet resolved design for an egalitarian lifestyle," says Larsen, one of the country's pre-eminent fabric designers and a recent visitor to Philadelphia.

Passed down by descendants of the nation's first first lady, a 9-inch swatch of silk brocade from one of Martha Washington's dresses ended up with family friend Alden Freeman. In 1932, he gave it as a gift to Nan Britton, a woman involved in the first publicized presidential sex scandal. And now you can claim the fabric as your own. Wednesday, it was offered for sale for $40,000 by the Philly-based Raab Collection, which has it in a vault. It may be the only Martha Washington dress snippet ever put on the market.

Back in the '80s, the sole purpose of outdoor fabrics was to be utilitarian. As for looks, their green and cream stripes seemed more like a government-issue uniform than a designer statement. But when the outdoor-fabric brand Sunbrella started creating better designs, its manufacturer noticed something: Employees, the kind with kids and dogs, started using the fabrics in their living rooms. That was 15 years ago. Once the company made prioritizing design a goal, in the same way it had with technology, sales exploded.

This weekend, the Quintessence Theatre Group of Mount Airy presents a recitation of Shakespeare's "Venus and Adonis," a poetic dialogue in which Venus beckons the young huntsman to consummate their affair. Adonis demurs, raising the tension in what is considered Shakespeare's most erotic poem. Actors will play the couple and narrator, making this more of a full-bodied theatrical piece. In keeping with Elizabethan tradition, there are no sets, the better to emphasize the language and actors.

When the Fabric Workshop and Museum moved to Arch Street to make way for the expansion of the Convention Center, it gained some cavernous, loftlike spaces on the upper floors of its building that lend themselves to monumental installation projects. In the current art climate, there seem to be many artists who like to work this way. But how many can effectively fill a shoebox-proportioned room that's 130 feet long? Pae White can and does, with a mesmerizing construction of red yarn called Summer XX. White is one of three Los Angeles artists being featured at the Workshop through late spring.

PASSED DOWN by descendants of the nation's first first lady, a 5-by-9-inch swatch of silk brocade from one of Martha Washington's dresses ended up with family friend Alden Freeman. In 1932, he gave it as a gift to Nan Britton, a woman involved in the first publicized presidential sex scandal. And now you can claim the fabric as your own. Yesterday, it was offered for sale for $40,000 by the Philly-based Raab Collection, which has it in a vault. It may be the only Martha Washington dress snippet ever put on the market.

Cheerful chic is what you can expect to see settling into furniture showrooms this spring. Manufacturers at the International Fall Furniture Market in High Point, N.C., found a variety of ways to inject buoyancy and a certain savoir-faire into chairs and chests, settees, sideboards and more with color, pattern, and texture. This desire to delight manifested in fabrics and forms from upholstery to case-goods. Century Furniture dressed its Dover rectangular ottoman in a Missoni-inspired fabric.

In some ways, the furniture-design exhibit at Philadelphia University's Paul J. Gutman Library couldn't be more commonplace. But that's exactly the point, says Gotz Unger, founding director of the university's industrial-design program. The exhibit features a simple-yet-functional, white, two-seater sofa, no frills. Nearby are a few chairs that look like seats that could be found in any office, along with a modern, plain, unadorned table - all very ordinary. Yet, they speak to the transformation in office design created by a young architect and her businessman husband, Florence and Hans Knoll, Unger said.

WITH THE Eagles playing again Thursday at Seattle, reporters aren't going to get to talk to Marty Mornhinweg this week, until after the game. The usual weekly press conferences with the coordinators aren't being held. So by the time we get a chance to ask Marty about his dustup on the sideline with defensive-line coach Jim Washburn during Sunday's crushing loss to the Patriots, it will be very old news. But the fact that two of Andy Reid's coaches had to be separated during the first half of a game, and were said to be still jawing as they came onto the field for the second half, will become part of the lore of a lost 2011 season.

More misadventures in home makeover, this time with curtains. You may recall that two years ago I painted my family room myself, on a Type A tear, but I took the Scottoline route. By which I mean, I took shortcuts. Lots of them. I painted around pictures rather than removing them, and the paint only reached 5 feet, 6 inches up the wall, which is my height plus my arm length, minus a ladder, which I don't own. This would be the mathematical formula for do-it-yourself wainscoting.

Lolabelle must have been one special dog. When she died on April 17, the performance artist Laurie Anderson, her mistress, was inspired to create an unusually elaborate, and emotionally intense, memorial to her longtime terrier companion. It's on view at the Fabric Workshop and Museum in Anderson's exhibition, "Forty-Nine Days in the Bardo. " People who bond intimately with dogs will understand it intuitively, and probably will find it moving. Those unable to accept pets as human surrogates might consider it to be a bit over the top. Either way, "Bardo" is an impressive piece of creation, in large part because it's not just about losing a dog. In its broadest sense, it's a meditation on the timeless themes of love and loss, of how people accommodate themselves to the inevitability of death.