Fabric Shops and Color Update!

The holidays were wonderful and full of lots of time with family. I even got in a little fabric shopping:) I have been fairly good at showing restraint lately, because I really don’t need any more fabric, but I just couldn’t stop from making a few purchases. I also can’t resist super adorable boutique fabric craft shops. I happened to find two while traveling for the holidays. If you are close by, you should really check them out! 

Stitch is in the really cute area called East Village, in Des Moines. I love going to the East Village because there are several cute shops, good restaurants, and at the end of the street is the beautiful capitol building. Stitch opened it’s doors fairly recently, and this was the first time I was able to go. They sell goods for sewing and knitting, and they have a space for classes too. I went ahead and bought a bottle of Soak, which I’m excited to try out. I have a few old family quilts we’ve acquired recently, and I’m hoping the Soak will work well for cleaning them.

I visited Mama Said Sew while visiting Jesse’s family in Fort Collins. This is also in a really cute neighborhood with lots of shops and restaurants. They had so much fabric, it was hard to decide what to buy. The people there were so nice, and I even had a conversation about the modern quilt guild with another customer – which is a really big deal for an introvert like me! I’m so glad I talked with her though, because I learned about this great online tool provided by the site Play Crafts (this would have been great for the recent post I did about color inspiration) used to match Kona colors from an image. I just played around with the Palette Builder real quick, and you can see a little bit how it works below. It came up with different colors than I originally matched, but I would be interested to see the fabrics in person to see how they compare. It was extremely faster than using the color card, and the tool is very user friendly. A tip - it didn’t seem to work in the Safari browser, but when I tried it in Firefox it worked great!