Online Fabric Shopping

This week I was home part of the week, rattling around the house, because I am a clumsy person. Yes, spectacularly clumsy. Tuesday at work, I fell down a flight of stone steps. I work at Webster University in St. Louis, and Tuesday I tumbled down the front steps of Webster Hall:

I managed to injure my pride much more than my body...although I did sprain the heck out of my left ankle. I tried to tough it out at work but after about the 14th instant message from co-workers saying "GO HOME," I took the hint and took myself home. The drive home was miserable, since I drive a manual (Jeep Wrangler). When I got home, I commenced calling my Mommy over and over until she FINALLY picked up, and agreed to come take me to the urgent care.

At the urgent care I was pronounced unbroken, but merely badly bent. I was issued an ankle brace, a prescription for some lovely painkillers, and directed to stay off of it as much as possible and keep ice on it. My mom was nice enough to trade vehicles with me (since both my car and my husband's are manuals. It took her 3 tries to find reverse, didn't realize it had a 6th gear, and couldn't find the controls for either the windows or the lights so the exchange has been quite giggle-worthy...in the meantime, my dad who has NEVER been allowed to drive my Mom's new car is quite peeved that I scored the Escape Hybrid). So here I am, hobbled, not even sewing!

Since I am confined to my chair, the only thing I can really do is play on my laptop...so of course I am shopping for fabric!

But this brings to mind various questions I see repeated from time to time on Pattern Review, and even questions that people have asked me through this blog:

"How do you buy fabric online when you can't TOUCH it?"

"How do you know if you can use it for the garment you want it for?

and probably most often:

"How do you MATCH fabric online?"

The first two have the same answer...return it if it isn't right! Ordering fabric online is never something you want to do when you are in a hurry. I try to avoid situations where I have a deadline or if only the most perfect of perfect fabrics will do. If it is imperative that the fabric be exactly right, the best thing to do is to order a swatch. But, this is going to set back your timeline significantly.

Also, as you become more experienced with fabric, you will be able to more easily determine if particular fabrics are going to be appropriate for your project. Also look at the descriptions...most sites will tell you "appropriate for jackets and coats" or "use for shirts or dresses." This will give you a hint as to how the fabric will drape, feel, etc. Which is not to say that I am not sometimes surprised when I recieve my order! But more often than not, I can easily re-deploy the fabric for a different garment.

There are two stand-out sites that I can think of that help with this tremendously...one is Fashionista Fabrics and the other is Gorgeous Fabrics...the owners of both I happen to know are expert sewists, as they are both members at PR!

At Fashionista Fabrics there will be photos of the fabric lying flat so that you can see the details of the print or weave...but there will also be a photo showing the drape:


This will give you some information about how the fabric will hang, and how it will behave. At Gorgeous Fabrics, you always get a recommendation for patterns that would work well with the fabric in the description. Then go look at those pattern recommendations, and see if that is like what you were thinking:


One of the reasons that Fashionista and Gorgeous Fabrics is so great in depicting and describing their fabrics is because the owners of both ARE sewists. As a result, they are fantastic at helping their fellow sewists understand the products they are offering.

However, that leaves the issue of how to match fabrics; or given the varations in computer monitors, digital cameras, and if the color you are seeing is representative of the fabric. At Gorgeous Fabrics, you can find in the description a reference to the closest Pantone color, but to use this, you will need a Pantone Color Guide, which is not cheap:


So how do you go about matching fabrics online when either the retailer does not include pantone information, or if you don't have a pantone color chart? One of the things I use very often is the Design Wall at Fabric.com. I suspect that the design wall is something of great use to quilters who need to coordinate lots of fabrics, but I use it to see if fabrics go together for outfits. Granted, there are a couple of assumptions that I am making here, one of them being that all the photos of the fabric were taken with the same camera, edited in the same way, and not altered in any way:


However, I have been placing my fabric orders this way ever since I started using Fabric.com and it has consistently worked well for me. This way I can be reasonably assured that I will not end up with any "orphan fabrics," which is how fabric stashes grow!

You can also utilize websites like Polyvore to do this when using sites that do not have services like the Fabric.com design wall. Or you can just email the company and ask..hey, does this fabric match this one? Although I suspect that Fashion Fabrics Club humors me in this area, as the office manager is the mother or one of my high school classmates, and the step-mother of another! They do also offer thread matching...and in your order form, you can tell them how many spools of matching thread you need. I do this ALL THE TIME.

Occasionally I do still end up with a fabric orphan...sometimes these fabric orphans are passed on to my neice so she can use it in her learning to sew. Or, if it was exceptionally inexpensive, I may keep it for use in muslins (knits especially...I have grown a large stash of knits because it can sometimes be difficult to find comparable knits for use in muslining patterns).

In the end, I do usually wind up with fairly well-coordinated fabrics...and have been able to talk myself out of any number of large-scale prints (I am a sucker for a print) due to my inability to find ANYTHING that coordinates with them.

Happy Fabric Shopping!