With so many types of furniture fabric available in the market today, many consumers are spoilt for choice when it comes to shopping new pieces of furniture for homes or offices. In addition to the type of furniture design you chose, it is also important to ensure the characteristic of the cover perfectly aligns with your needs and surrounding such as durability, maintenance and how regular you intend to use the piece of furniture. Fortunately, the following post compiles a glossary of fabric covers you available that you can pick from.
Different Types of Furniture Fabrics
Furniture fabric can be classified into the natural fabrics such as cotton, leather, wool, silk, just to mention a few and synthetic(man-made) fabric that includes; acetate, polyester, olefin, nylon and acrylic. Le’s us take a comprehensive look at them.
Natural fabrics
Leather: leather is perhaps the most common type of natural fabric cover available. Leather covers are usually ideal for homes with kids and pets as they are highly resistant to scratches, spills, and stain. The nature of the material allows it to be dump wiped and vacuum cleaned, with either saddle soaps or leather conditioner, without it wearing off. However, proper maintenance is of utmost importance when it comes to leather covers to ensure they have an extended life as they are typically expensive than other fabrics.
Vinyl: they are easy to care for and less expensive than leather upholstery. Their durability solely lies with the type of brand you go with as their quality widely varies. They are suitable for everyday use meaning they can be used to in both living rooms and dining rooms.
Linen: linen covers are suitable for homes with adults thereby making it ideal for formal living spaces. This is due to their ability to wrinkle and soil easily and therefore can’t withstand wearing. When cleaned, soiled linen can also shrink and as such, it’s vital to contact a professional cleaner to handle it.
Silk: just like linen, silk is also delicate meaning they are highly suitable for adults and formal living rooms. They also must be professionally cleaned to avoid soilage.
cotton: cotton fabrics offer good resistance to fading, pilling, and wear as long as you confirm they are 100% cotton. However, cotton is highly prone to soiling and wrinkling as well as flammable. Thus, manufacturers usually compensate this weakness by blending them with other fibers to counteract against that weakness.
Wool: wool comes with greater durability than their cotton counterparts as they offer good resistance to fading, pilling, wrinkling in addition on to soiling. Similarly, wool is also blended with other synthetic fibers that make them easy to clean.
Synthetic fabric covers
Acetate: these type of covers are developed as synthetic silk or rather the imitated version of silk. They are fairly resistant to soil and have a high rate of fading, wrinkling as well as wearing making it unsuitable choice for everyday furniture use.
Nylon: they have hardly used alone as they are mostly blended with other materials to make them strong enough to eliminate any sort of crushing that is associated with napped fabrics like velvet. Nylon cover rarely soil but is highly susceptible to fading and pilling.
Acyclic: the synthetic version of wool is highly resistant to wrinkling, fading, soiling in addition to wearing. However, low-quality acrylic may excessively pill if it receives high rates of abrasion.
Polyester: when blended with other fibers such as wool, polyester offers the perfect cover against wrinkling .
Rayon: rayon is the man-made version of linen, silk, and cotton and one of the most durable materials available.
Olefin: this is suitable for furniture that is likely to receive heavy wear as it doesn’t exhibit any profound weakness.
The above-mentioned are the various types of furniture fabric available in the market. However, before buying any type of furniture fabric whether for re-upholstery purposes or adding new furniture in your home, it is important to take into account their characteristics and how you to intend to regularly use the furniture.