material possessions*

Missoula has a lot of fabric stores for a small town in Montana, and a lot of them are pretty good. One in particular, Selvedge Studio, is better than pretty good: it is REALLY GREAT. Dangerously great. Every time I walk in there I want to spend the next five hours touching stuff and if I had a million dollars I would buy two yards of everything and three yards of some things. Here is some of what I acquired in August:



There's only one fabric store in DC** and I don't love it. It's okay I guess. They have lots of beautiful expensive imported things for fancy people to make suits and dresses out of. And they have some other stuff too, and sometimes things are on sale. I usually can find something I want.

But it is too hard to navigate, in there. The fabric is mostly on skinny rolls, instead of bolts, and only half of them have any fiber content information. A lot of them also don't have any pricing information. And they are all mixed together, sort of vaguely categorized by price? or fiber? except not really, really there are all kinds of everything stacked together in heaps, all the colors mixed in there too, and since the rolls are stacked on top of each other you can't really even see most of the fabrics. Like so:



So my main feeling after being in there for five minutes is usually annoyed frustration***, especially if I was looking for something specific. And there have been a number of times when I was looking for something specific and relatively basic, like solid cotton quilt fabric or batting, and they didn't have it. And it's downtown! And it's crowded! And my life is very hard!

Anyway, they're moving into a different location (in Georgetown, which doesn't bode well for the convenience/crowdedness issue) and having a big crazy sale. So I bought some fancy new scissors and a bunch of ridiculous silk taffeta, with which who knows WHAT I will do. It's all shiny and double-woven so it's hard to take a picture of: either I got blurriness or inaccurate color.



Whatever, take my word for it, it is beeeyoutiful.


Okay, the moral of the story is, if you want me to make you something out of fabric, you should go buy some fabric soon while this big 50-percent-off-or-more sale holds out.



* HA HA HA ha ha ha ha ha.

**to my knowledge. There may be another one somewhere but their attempts to remain hidden have so far been successful.

***I know, crazy, right? The last combination of emotions you'd ever expect from me!