Fabric Thrill

The fabric that I’m working with now totally thrills me. It’s a boucle, but it’s woven with strips of seemingly random stuff rather than just regular wool fibers. I took a swatch apart in the photo above to show what’s woven into it. Here’s what it consists of:

1. Sparkly ombre thread with poufy stuff sticking out of it
2. Thread with little balls of pouf strung along it. Ombre.
3. Relatively normal threads that you might find in any fabric
4. Red ribbon
5. Strip of tulle

It is wonderful and it’s even worth the hassle of fusing an interfacing to the whole thing to keep it from self-destructing. It’s from Michael’s Fabrics. It does not seem to be on the site any more, but maybe it will re-appear. It was slightly expensive, but not really all that pricey.

For some reason, lately I’ve been thinking about buying fabric and what makes me buy. I don’t buy much fabric online, and I can’t really understand the pull of most online fabric sites. There may be several reasons for this. One is that I am lucky enough to have fabric stores located near me so I can actually touch the fabric before buying. But lots of people live near where I live and still buy fabric online.

I tried looking at some of the popular fabric sites, and was not even remotely tempted. One problem is that they seem to concentrate their offerings mostly on prints. Prints, for the most part, leave me cold. If I took a print and tried to deconstruct it like the boucle above, it would simply not be all that interesting. Prints are pretty much all surfaces. I prefer fabric with some depth, but depth is a hard property to convey in a photo. Herein may lie my problem with buying fabric online. Oh, and I purchased the above fabric online, but only after receiving a swatch from Sherri.

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