Fabric Shopping

Have you been fabric shopping lately?
I had not been fabric shopping in quite some time. My stash is pretty big and Most of the time when I am quilting I just go through my stash and use what I have on hand.
I was cruising through some of the fabric shops ads online and saw that Hancock Fabrics was having some pretty good sales, plus I had some Mother’s Day gift money burning a hole in my pocket. And JoAnn’s Fabrics was having a sale on quilt batting.
Boy, was I ever in for a rude awakening. Prices are ASTRONOMICAL!!
It’s probably been a year since I did any serious fabric shopping but come on!
As many of you know, I make baby items for a charity I belong to called God's Tiny Angels. Usually I crochet sweaters, hats, booties, blankets, etc. I decided recently I wanted to work on some quilts for preemies and newborns.
What my actual goal was going to be was to make some Christmas quilts for the babies. After wading through my stash I realized I didn’t have much of anything “Christmasy”. So my main intent was to go see what I could find at the shops for Christmas fabric.
It must be a bit early for Christmas fabric in the shops. The picking were somewhat slim, to say the least. But the work part of it was that what I did find, I’d almost have to pawn one of my kids in order to afford to buy the stuff!
What I did find was $9.99 A YARD! Is that crazy or what??? Ten bucks a yard for cotton and cotton blend fabric??? Almost makes one consider raising their own sheep, geez. Needless to say, I did not buy any Christmas fabric :(
So, it’s not looking too good for Christmas quilts this year. But I am in a quilting mood, so I did get some good deals on other fabrics.
After cruising all the isles at Hancock’s I ended up zooming in on the clearance tables they had set up with fabrics from $1 to $5 a yard. It was pretty obvious why some of the stuff was on clearance, can you say U.....G....L...Y? Wow.

  I did find this cute fabric for Christmas on the clearance table. Won’t this be nice for a little girl?? I got what was left on the bolt, a little over a yard and a half at $2.00 a yard. Not bad considering it’s fleece.





Then I found this cute 100% cotton print marked down to $3 a yard from $6.99. There was a little over 4 1/2 yards left on the bolt so I bought it all, lol.

  Then I just bought an assortment of cotton fabrics to fatten up my stash. They were all $2.00 a yard marked down from $2.99 to $6.99 a yard. I only bought a yard of each of these since most of my quilts are just patchwork squares and I will mix and match them with stuff I already had.

  Of course I picked up a couple of packages of quilt batting. I went to JoAnn’s for these because they had them at 40% off. $5.39 each sure beats $8.99 each.
I really like this quilt batting. It’s a cotton batting that is denser but not as thick so it runs through the sewing machine much easier. And because it is denser it is warmer plus it washes up really nice.
Hancock’s had their quilt binding 40% off too so I picked up a few of those. Usually I just make my binding from fabric, but since it was on sale, I thought a few to have on hand might be nice. Coat’s and Clark thread was on sale at Hancock’s too so of course some of that made it’s way into my cart, lol. It amazes me how expensive thread has gotten to be too.
It sure didn’t take all that long to rack up a nice tidy little sum for 2 smaller bags of stuff. After this shopping expedition, I have made up my mind that I’m going to be taking a much closer look at the linens at our local Goodwill stores. The one in my neighborhood tends to get much nicer items in, often new and never used or seldom used. Many times I can get a queen sized sheet for $3.38. Kinda hard to pass that up after seeing what fabric is going for in the stores now.
So I think today might just have to include a little foray to Goodwill to see what I can discover.

Oh yeah, look who thought he had to hold down the ironing board for me while working on my latest quilt!