The Late, Not-So-Great Fabric.com

Maryn

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I have a lot of fabric. A lot. I'm way past the point where I can just put similar types together in a few boxes and find what I want. I've reached the point where I really need to get organized, recording yardage, width, type of fabric, and most of all, an image. ("Geometric blue print" covers way too much territory.)

I once shopped a lot at Fabric.com, which went under some time ago, after Amazon bought out the founders and raised the prices. But the other day autocomplete revealed to me that my list of all the orders I ever made is still stored online--with a thumbnail picture of each fabric! While I can't get width, fiber content, weight, or stretch because the links to the product are dead, I can snag an image of everything I ever bought.

It's a slow slog, but my Pinterest board now has many pages of fabrics bought, with pictures, amounts, and prices. If I can figure out how to put an image in a spreadsheet (is that a thing?) I could totally organize by type and over time, repack everything in a way that makes sense and lets me find it again.

Maryn, whose eyes are spinning like pinwheels after a few hours of old order
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I didn’t order from fabric.com all that frequently — or so I thought. However, I found the “Hooray! Our site is shuttered! Now you can buy directly from Amazon instead!” announcement the day after it happened, suddenly in the middle of last October, so I guess there’s that.

Fabric.com had been pushing buying off of Amazon for years. I did try ordering one of their fabrics direct from Amazon — once.

Instead of a six-yard length of the fabric I ordered, Amazon sent me six individually cut yards of fabric in six separate pckages.

Never again.

Fabric.com had wobbly aspects, but it was the best, most organized, easiest-to-navigate fabric sales site I ever found on the internet.

Ironically, all the fabric listings are still on the site, if you dig into it, though they are all listed s “out of stock”. If you got something there recently, there’s a reasonable chance you can still find all that lovely, lovely information — manufacturer, width, fiber content in exact percentages, grams of weight per square yard, etc.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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There was a great deal of panic and consternation in the online cosplay and costuming community on October 20, the day after fabric.com shut down without much advance warning (They had said, a day or so earlier, that they would be closing by the end of the calendar year. I don't think anyone expected it would happen immediately!).

I found this Twitter thread of alternate fabric sources, to be extremely helpful:
 
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Alessandra Kelley

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I have a lot of fabric. A lot. I'm way past the point where I can just put similar types together in a few boxes and find what I want. I've reached the point where I really need to get organized, recording yardage, width, type of fabric, and most of all, an image. ("Geometric blue print" covers way too much territory.)

I once shopped a lot at Fabric.com, which went under some time ago, after Amazon bought out the founders and raised the prices. But the other day autocomplete revealed to me that my list of all the orders I ever made is still stored online--with a thumbnail picture of each fabric! While I can't get width, fiber content, weight, or stretch because the links to the product are dead, I can snag an image of everything I ever bought.

It's a slow slog, but my Pinterest board now has many pages of fabrics bought, with pictures, amounts, and prices. If I can figure out how to put an image in a spreadsheet (is that a thing?) I could totally organize by type and over time, repack everything in a way that makes sense and lets me find it again.

Maryn, whose eyes are spinning like pinwheels after a few hours of old order
I have begun to organize my sewing area's fabrics, too, starting last month, doing a bit at a time. I had thought it a huge task but just plugging at it, a little at a time, has already cleared up so much and made a few ongoing projects so much easier.

I don't have a spreadsheet, just a list, that I reorganize every once in a while as the logic changes. But that may be because a lot of the fabrics I have are solid colors, so the patterns don't need a lot of description (but now that I think about it this may be famous last words). I write up each fabric on the list (with actual measurements -- partly because folks are not always accurate when they sell them and partly because I just don't have records any more anyway), and I also pin a small label to each folded fabric with the same details as the list: type of fabric, fiber content, color, weight or other pertinent details. width, length, and if known, seller, date bought, and price paid.

What sort of fabrics do you have? I'm curious what sorts of projects you do and what sorts of fabrics you've gathered for them.
 
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Catriona Grace

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I have my share of fabric, but my stash disappears in the shade of true fabriholics. I've given a good bit of it away over the years. I shifted my quilting cotton to a friend who promptly shifted her apparel fabric to me. Sold off the part of the stash devoted to dance costumes- oh, a couple of those pieces I do regret. I turned over all my browns and tans to a young woman who loves brown and can't yet afford good fabric. (What on earth possessed me to buy anything in brown I do not know. I look like a dead leaf in brown.) Gave yards and yards of upholstery fabric to a friend after she covered a couple of chairs for me (yes, I paid her for her work, though she resisted). I hate upholstery work and she loves it. Any way, I'm pleased with what fabric remains, and heaven knows, I have enough to last me a good long while.

Buying fabric online doesn't appeal to me though I've done it occasionally. I like to feel and see what I'm getting. Alas, the nearest store that keep apparel fabric (if you don't count Hobby Lobby) is a Joann's almost two hundred miles from here. I have mostly wovens, including a lot of rayon challis. I like to sew it, got most of it on sale, and find it useful for everything from skirts to unstructured jackets. Also in the stash are sensible things like denim and shirting, along with a few exotics left from belly dance costume days. Cotton, linen, silk, and some wool fabrics are among my favorites. I have some knits as well, but even after all these years of sewing, and no matter how careful I am, I always manage to stretch something out of shape, usually the neckline.
 
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Maryn

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When we moved into this house, we labeled each box or plastic tub with a destination room, and put signs on the wall identifying rooms, like Back Corner Bedroom or Study, since the doors would be open.

And Fabric Bin Room. It's in the basement and stores about 30 of those see-thought frosted bins the size of a laundry basket. And some bigger, opaque bins that go way back to cherry-picking my mom's fabric stash after she died and my earliest purchases.

Shortly after arriving here I broke a rib lifting one of those bins. Depending on what's in them, they can get really heavy. ITY knits, cotton, and denim are especially bad, and the master plan is to move them to half-size bins and coerce Mr. Maryn into helping me build shelving so I don't have to stack them more than two high.

I sew clothes for myself and occasionally our daughters, a little cosplay for them in days gone by, and do some quilting. I could sew all day every day for the rest of my life and not make much of a dent in the stash, but since it's paid for, I have the space, and I still like what I bought, I keep it. (I donated a few bins' worth before we moved.) I have more ITY and thin jersey knits than I should, and more quilting fabric than seems wise considering how slowly I use it up. (Next up a pair of lap quilts for the family room.)

I really need to do what you've done, which is take out each piece and measure it properly, photograph it, and record it, including where it's stowed. I did some listing of what's in which bin in 2018, but that seems long ago and I didn't measure. One of the benefits of being a good customer at an online fabric retailer is they nearly always give you extra. I have notations that I ordered 3 yards and got anywhere from an extra third to an extra two yards.

Maryn, blathering
 
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Catriona Grace

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Given the price of fabric and the difficulty of obtaining good stuff, you have a treasure trove.
 

Maryn

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One of my regrets is not being able to interest either daughter in sewing. I thought I'd teach them simple things, progress in easy steps, yada-yada-yada. The best laid plans, right?

Until they left home. A few years of buying their own clothes and finding cheap doesn't last or look good for long, how hard it is to find a fit that also flatters, how shoddily assembled some things are or what low-quality fabric was used, now they wanted to sew.

Both are self-taught and one is every bit as good as I am, except that I can fit pants and she can't. The other is still doing elastic waistbands or big drapy fits that don't have to be exact but are finally long enough for her tall self. That daughter's space is limited and she has a few boxes of fabric. The other has a dry basement and a stash that rivals mine.

I expect them to divvy up my stash between them in due time, and donate the rest to some worthy charity.

Maryn, who'd like to see more people learn to sew clothes that fit them
 
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Any recommendations for other online fabric stores?

In Seattle Pacific Fabric used to be the best place (I even worked there for a brief time) but since they closed their Northgate store, I stopped using them. The main place is still down in SoDo I believe, but these days I just don't have time for that drive.

I have maybe seven or eight totes of fabric, organized by color: B&W, Purples, Greens, Blues, Yellow/Oranges, Reds, Browns, Denims, Wools, plain whites, Miscellaneous. Whoops that's 11 ;)
 

Catriona Grace

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My daughter showed exactly zilch interest in sewing until she decided she needed a home business to make a little extra income while at home with a baby. She bought a machine, watched a hundred or so YouTube videos, practiced, and is turning out memory teddy bears and baby quilts constructed of old baby clothing. She started working on a dog prototype this week. When she sets out to do something, she doesn't do a half-hearted job of it. The friend who swapped her apparel fabric for my quilting cotton has a stash I'd put up against anyone's. When she heard what my daughter was doing, she loaded up two big totes with fabric, tools, and patterns worth a small fortune and had me deliver them to my daughter.

When my son gets his firefighter tee shirt quilt, I expect to get a few requests from other FF for the same. I'm not interested in making another one, but my daughter views such requests as a fine opportunity. My son sews better than I do, but his thing has been making leather goods for firefighters and cowboys. He's working on saddles and hunting gear, too. A gunsmith up in Minnesota or somewhere saw one of his holsters and promptly ordered 25 of them. Son told him there was a year backlog, the guy said, fine, he'd wait. Son would like to limit the custom work in favor of turning out items in bulk for stores that have requested such things for resale, but so far, he's still doing custom.

Photos Click Quinn's photos.
 
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Maryn

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Any recommendations for other online fabric stores?

In Seattle Pacific Fabric used to be the best place (I even worked there for a brief time) but since they closed their Northgate store, I stopped using them. The main place is still down in SoDo I believe, but these days I just don't have time for that drive.

I have maybe seven or eight totes of fabric, organized by color: B&W, Purples, Greens, Blues, Yellow/Oranges, Reds, Browns, Denims, Wools, plain whites, Miscellaneous. Whoops that's 11 ;)
Why, yes. When Fabric.com went out of business, The Kid shared a list of where she shops for fabric online. The "I" in the notes is her. I do most of my buying at FabricMart these days, and a little at JoAnn.

 

Alessandra Kelley

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Any recommendations for other online fabric stores?

In Seattle Pacific Fabric used to be the best place (I even worked there for a brief time) but since they closed their Northgate store, I stopped using them. The main place is still down in SoDo I believe, but these days I just don't have time for that drive.

I have maybe seven or eight totes of fabric, organized by color: B&W, Purples, Greens, Blues, Yellow/Oranges, Reds, Browns, Denims, Wools, plain whites, Miscellaneous. Whoops that's 11 ;)
I linked to an entire Twitter thread of them a few posts above. So you don't have to scroll, here it is again:

If all you are looking for is linen, this place is quite good:
 

Alessandra Kelley

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I got started sewing at university, when I was hanging around theater types and medievalists. I was interested in what would later be called cosplay, both historical and fantastic, as well as the odd garment I couldn't find otherwise. Never having been taught to sew, I honed my skills slowly, copying historical examples (medieval and Renaissance, at first, but my historic interests expanded later) and gathering old sewing manuals.

I preferred natural fibers, but I never had much of a budget. I haunted sales and scrounged up what inexpensive but good quality fabrics I could, slowly over time. (I am still pleased with some black and white checked linen I found twenty years ago for a dollar a yard at a closeout!) For a while in the 1990s I was getting pretty nice silks reasonably priced mail order from a slightly odd British man living in Macau. It's been weird, but I have found nice fabrics at good prices in odd nooks and crannies.

And I did get some more modern fabrics. I made one of my children a full-body Totoro costume one Halloween, and I still have a yard or so of the wooly grey polyester fleece I made it out of. I have some purely artificial velvets because silk and even cotton ones cost more than I could manage, once upon a time; I used some poly stretch velvet to make a muslin of a Star Trek Original Series Uhura dress before making the final version out of cotton stretch velveteen (in this case the authentic fabric would have been polyester velveteen, but I do prefer the comfort of natural fibers, so eh...).

At any rate, what I have is a reasonable store of the sorts of fabrics you could make historical clothing from: linens and wools and silks, some leathers, a very few, carefully selected cottons, and even fewer knits. When there was a craze for historical costuming and quilting around the year 2000 I took note, and got some historic reproduction cotton prints. I have also, over time, picked up some novelty quilting cotton prints with Halloween themes just because I like them. Recently I have discovered Indian hand-block-printed cottons which replicate some types of imported cotton used in Britain in the 18th century. I've also discovered Indian Banarasi brocades (the silk-rayon versions, not the really high end ones), some of which are perfect for the Italian Renaissance, and I have gotten a few yards of them.

While I will sew with real leather, I draw the line at fur. I have been playing a bit with fake fur, though.
 
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Catriona Grace

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A good portion of my pattern stash is devoted to historical costume, ranging from "it'll do in a dark room filled with costuming innocents" to "every seam painstakingly reproduced." I keep fabric color and fabric pattern as accurate as possible, but I cheat on fabric content because 1) I can't afford enough good natural fabric for costumes, and 2) I am damned if I am going to iron ten or twelve yards of skirt every time I do a reenanctment (I do a couple dozen a year).

A friend was a volunteer seamstress for Santa Fe Opera for twenty years. Oh, the scraps she used to get to bring home were occasionally enough to make me contemplate theft.
 

Maryn

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Holy guacamole. The Kid mentioned a place I might look for silk and I told myself I'd remember it. Ha-ha? So I started looking for it and found the largest list of online and in-person fabric stores, in multiple countries, right here. Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Japan, Denmark, France, Belgium...

And I learned what silk noil is, so that's good, too.
 

Alessandra Kelley

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Holy guacamole. The Kid mentioned a place I might look for silk and I told myself I'd remember it. Ha-ha? So I started looking for it and found the largest list of online and in-person fabric stores, in multiple countries, right here. Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Japan, Denmark, France, Belgium...

And I learned what silk noil is, so that's good, too.
Ahhh, brilliant! Thanks for sharing!

(And noil is great. Looks like burlap, but soft and tough as silk. Good for “peasant” clothes if you don’t want to itch.)
 
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Catriona Grace

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Holy guacamole. The Kid mentioned a place I might look for silk and I told myself I'd remember it. Ha-ha? So I started looking for it and found the largest list of online and in-person fabric stores, in multiple countries, right here. Canada, US, Australia, New Zealand, UK, Japan, Denmark, France, Belgium...

And I learned what silk noil is, so that's good, too.
Oooooooo, Christmas present came early! Thanks for this, Maryn.

Edit after some exploration: my taste is more expensive than I thought. THIS caught my eye and I discovered it is a mere $132.50 per half yard. Imagine having the money to buy this kind of fabric, not to mention the nerve to cut into it.

Edit again: I like THIS even better for $162.50 per half yard. That's a mere $325 per yard. I'd need 2.75 yards for my project... figure in $15 flat rate shipping... hey, it would come in just a tad over $900 for a blouse. That's doable, right?

Edit #3: THIS is exactly what I want for a loose cardigan/duster thingie to wear with jeans. $397.50 per half yard, 36" wide. Let's see, I'd need at least 5 yards at that width... make it 5.5 to be on the safe side. (calculate, calculate, calculate) $4372.50 for the garment.

I gotta return to earth, get up, and go work on that tee shirt quilt.
 
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Alessandra Kelley

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Oooooooo, Christmas present came early! Thanks for this, Maryn.

Edit after some exploration: my taste is more expensive than I thought. THIS caught my eye and I discovered it is a mere $132.50 per half yard. Imagine having the money to buy this kind of fabric, not to mention the nerve to cut into it.

Edit again: I like THIS even better for $162.50 per half yard. That's a mere $325 per yard. I'd need 2.75 yards for my project... figure in $15 flat rate shipping... hey, it would come in just a tad over $900 for a blouse. That's doable, right?

Edit #3: THIS is exactly what I want for a loose cardigan/duster thingie to wear with jeans. $397.50 per half yard, 36" wide. Let's see, I'd need at least 5 yards at that width... make it 5.5 to be on the safe side. (calculate, calculate, calculate) $4372.50 for the garment.

I gotta return to earth, get up, and go work on that tee shirt quilt.
Ugggh, I HATE places that charge by the half-yard!

So dishonest!

I am still pissed off at the place that was the first half-yard place I ordered from, which I did not notice until half of what I needed showed up.

... It also shifted their prices from Yikes, but I can just manage it and this is nice stuff to Wayy too expensive for what this is and also dishonest, so <raspberry>.

I don't know when online stores shifted to half-yard-pricing but I hate it.
 

Maryn

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Wait, there's places selling and charging by the half yard? Treachery!

Catroina, I admire your taste. I'd like a robe out of some of that silk. Four and a half yards comes to... so much that I could never wear it for fear of something happening to it.

Mr. Maryn, who used to work with spreadsheets at his job, says adding images is a thing and if I'll make a mock-up of some fabrics I'd want on my spreadsheet and put the images on my own computer instead of Pinterest, we can mess with it together and make it work using LibreOffice. (I don't use MS Office.) He says ten or fifteen examples is enough to figure out how/if we can do it well enough for it to be worth doing on my vast stash.

Maryn
 

Alessandra Kelley

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Wait, there's places selling and charging by the half yard? Treachery!
I know! It's annoying. You have to be really careful looking at store's descriptions now. It makes comparison shopping next to impossible. It might be some dishonest SEO garbage -- if you look like your prices are lower you get prioritized by algorithms. And of course it's a race to the bottom. (I have even seen places charging by the quarter-yard. Not quilting places where this would be related to a "fat quarter" -- a long-recognized term of art for people who need only small amounts of varieties of fabrics for quilting -- but actual garment-fabric-sellers.)

Grrr.

Somewhere in the interval between the last time I bought appreciable amounts of fabric online and two or three years ago, when I came back, a lot of online retailers shifted to the dishonest misleading half-yard-measures.
 
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Catriona Grace

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Many, if not most, online fabric merchants only sell in half yard increments. If you want 5 and 1/8 yards, you have the choice of being an eighth of a yard short or having 3/8ths of a yard of fabric you can't use. That's an even more clever business strategy than shorting people three inches on an order, don't you think?

To be fair, there are also super honest vendors out there. I once ordered a substantial amount of pearl cotton embroidery thread only to discover the lot I received had a green cast that was not the same as the original lot and would NOT work in the kits I was making up for students. Promptly contacted the seller who was appalled. She called me back within half an hour, said the factory had been notified, and new thread was being dyed specifically to match the lot I already had. No charge for the new stuff, no shipping charge, and please keep the incorrect two dozen balls of pearl cotton as well. You can damn well bet I now buy all my thread from that vendor. Valdani

I hang out on the forums at Pattern Review, a very useful bunch of folks if one has questions about anything to do with sewing. One professional designer actually offered a free step by step corset-making course within the forum after someone asked for advice on a difficult project. It's also a good place to seek reviews on everything from patterns to sewing machines to selling practices of online fabric stores. I highly recommend it. Pattern Review
 
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Maryn

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I'm on Pattern Review and didn't even know they have forums. Duh. I should check that out.

Besides the half-yard SEO crap, I also hate that some online fabric retailers sell only in two-yard increments. A pair of pillowcases in a non-directional print takes 2 1/4 yards, so I have to buy four? Yikes. Or rather, I Think Not.

Maryn, who has a bin of pillowcase fabrics already
 
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Catriona Grace

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I'm on Pattern Review and didn't even know they have forums. Duh. I should check that out.

You should. There are some great folks there, a few of whom I've actually met.
 

Maryn

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In further good news, I had positive experiences with three independent fabric shops in recent weeks. One phoned (!) minutes after my order, and the other two emailed within 24 hours. I especially appreciated the one where I'd ordered six yards but the last cut was not straight, so there was 5 7/8 at the selvage and 6 only at the fold. Not only did she check to see if 5 7/8 was enough, but gave me 10% off. It wasn't a whole lot of money, but the gesture did not no unnoticed. I will definitely shop there again.

Maryn, who's already received all three packages of fabric