Fabric!!

Yesterday we returned home from a trip to IL to visit family. As part of our journey back we stopped by Hancock's of Paducah. OH. MY. I felt completely overwhelmed when I walked in. I have never seen so much fabric in one place before! This picture was taken at the end of my visit, so I don't look quite so shell-shocked. Behind me is just a portion of the store, less than half!! (You can click each image for a much bigger view.)

 Lovely inspiring quilts hang through this warehouse-type store:

Along the walls are hundreds of quilt patterns. And look at all those beautiful marbles!! The sheer amount of batiks (not pictured) was breathtaking. (SOMEDAY I'm making a queen-sized Storm at Sea quilt with batiks for myself. This will be after Dashiell graduates from college, I'm sure.)

Here's a funny quilt that hangs near the entrance. I thought about getting a picture of my husband next to it, but the reality is he didn't wait in the store for me. He dropped me off and took the kids to Toys R Us instead. :)

So this store isn't a fancy quilt shop, but it's not exactly a warehouse either. It has business hours and other shoppers were there. However, most of the "shoppers" were employees. They went around the store with printouts of web orders to fill carts with fabric, and headed to the cutting tables to get orders ready. When a bolt reaches remnant stage, they take it and toss it on this pile. It was HUGE! (Oh, and notice the husband sitting on the bench reading the newspaper? If you look carefully you'll actually see three gentlemen sitting back there waiting on their wives.)

The batik remnants were $6.98/yard, but the rest were $5.98 a yard. I could have spent an hour digging through all the tables. I did peruse it for quite a while and found some gems. Love getting fabric for $6/yard instead of $11-12/yard! Here's what I brought home, I thought I did a good job containing myself! It was all remnants except for the Christmas Dots, the pink w/dark pink dots, and the basketball print. I love dots, ginghams and stripes!

Won't this fabric look awesome in basketball appliques?!? It was pricey, but I could resist.

There were two things that helped me not go nuts in Hancock's of Paducah. First, their minimum cut is 1/2 yard. If I could have gotten 1/8 or 1/4 yard cuts, I might have gone a little crazy. But my budget just doesn't allow for $5.49 and up for half-yard purchases. The other thing that helped me tremendously was that I had gone fabric shopping in my MIL's sewing room the day before. :) Look what she shared with me! Fun textures, stripes, and more dots!

Look for these in upcoming projects. Now I should be good and prewash everything before adding it to my stash...