Why You Should Buy Stuff from a Quilt Store

Happy January!

Product photography is really hard for me. It's not a skill I ever thought I'd need. Add that to the list, I guess. Freddie and Leona have been encouraging, but also not very helpful. It's been a weird month. We had four inches of ice on the roads and I hear it was pretty frigid a lot of other places, too. I'm hoping you all stayed safe and warm and found pleasantly productive uses for your time!

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I wrote the original draft for this blog several months ago, and just a week or so ago I heard yet another quilt store in my area is closing. So I decided this month I’d put my focus here.

Online shopping is pretty ubiquitous now. And I get it. It has a certain convenience, and fabric is almost always cheaper on the internet. Occasionally I buy fabric on the internet too – lately for some reason it’s nearly impossible to find a true green fabric. Everything I can find seems to be either yellow-green or grey-green. I mean I know fashion and trends are a thing but really, no blue green or true green? It’s practically criminal.

But I think it’s better to buy your fabric in a quilt store if you can because you can never really judge the quality of fabric you see online. Yes, it’s true that you’re pretty safe going with the trusted manufacturers, and yes it’s true that these days, photography and image rendering have gotten good enough that judging color on your computer screen is less dicey than it used to be. But it’s still just not the same.

But moving beyond price, not everything that counts can be counted. There’s a price to be paid for getting your material goods cheaper that doesn’t show on your receipt. Quilt stores do a lot more than sell stuff. They help coordinate quilt shows, they provide space for classes and workshops, they are a locus for People Who Know Stuff. Like any brick and mortar, they also provide broader economic benefits for your physical community.

Also, I don’t know about you, but if I’m buying stuff off the internet, I don’t tend to browse. I know what I want or need and I go right for it. I’m not really someone who typically enjoys shopping, but when I am in a quilt store, I do tend to casually eye the offerings in a way I wouldn’t on the internet. I tried out Tulip applique needles because they were displayed in one of my favorite quilt shops, and now they are my favorite applique needle. I never would have tried them if I had seen them offered on Googlezon. So I guess what I’m saying is that quilt stores curate products for you in a way the internet doesn’t. You have the opportunity to get to know the establishment and, on some level, build a relationship with the people there. You’ll try their needles, maybe, and if you’re really lucky, you’ll make a friend.

Your local quilt store will really appreciate that you came in. I’ll appreciate it too, because I like having places I can physically go to buy stuff. With this latest store closing, I think the last place in town that carries a brand of hand needles that I like is gone. I guess that means I’ll have to order them on the internet. I don't like ordering things on the internet, much. I do it when I have to, and I have to increasingly often. It seems kind of silly to me to order needles on the internet. It's like using your credit card at a convenience store to buy breath mints.

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On a more cheerful note, here’s something of interest to hand quilters you HAVE to order on the internet (if you’re in North America, anyway), that I recently acquired and I am love love loving:

They call it a ‘needleslide’ and it took about a month to get to me.

This is a sort of porcelain mushroom that fits over your underneath finger that you use to deflect your needle. I’ve used a modified spoon for this in the past, but a spoon does dull your needle. If you look at mine, you can see it’s all scratched up.

Also, whereas once needles were cheaper than spoons (or at least all other things being equal it seemed easier to replace needles instead of finding another spoon that fit just right), I feel like that’s no longer the case. You can still get a spoon like this one for fifty cents or a buck at any thrift store; meanwhile, the price of needles just keeps going up – I feel like nearly five fold in the course of a decade or two?

I ran across the needleslide when I found Esther Miller’s videos on YouTube and knew I had to try it. All her videos are great, and after I watched them, my quilting improved dramatically within 30 minutes. I’m not kidding! These videos are amazing. Unfortunately she died in 2021 but her students are still teaching classes.

In Germany.

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