Remember when I talked about how scared I was to go to fabric stores in New York? Well, after two weeks of putting it off (a freak October snowstorm and preparing lunch for my in-laws precluded trips on the last two Saturdays), we got up early and went this Saturday.
I did a bunch of research to find the most affordable upholstery fabric stores in New York. On Friday night, I decided to do a little last-minute Yelping just to make sure I had all my options in order.
Let's backtrack to discussing this with my mother, who is a proficient quilter and frequent buyer of fabric.
Mom: You should go to City Quilter. I wish I could go there. It looks amazing.
Me: Mom, I'm not making a quilt. They won't have anything that I need or want.
Now let's go back to this Friday night Yelping escapade. Want to guess what place had the highest ratings when I typed in "upholstery fabric" and "new york, ny" on Yelp?
Yep. The City Quilter.
My mother is often freakishly, supernaturally right about these things. And she would freak out in this store. It's the most beautiful crafting haven I have ever seen in this city. And I have been to my fair share of paper stores (a secret love of mine).
They had, of course exactly what we wanted. And in our price range.
The only down side is that these are not "upholstery" fabrics per se. They're your average cottons, the weight of which is absolutely fine with me and my sewing expert: Mom. Your average bolt of cotton, however, is about 44" wide. Which is really annoying when you want to cut a bunch of 24" squares, like I do. We talked it out with the nice girl cutting our fabric and got 3 yards of each of these amazing fabrics:
Aren't they stunning?!
Do I think they coordinate exactly perfectly with each other? Of course not. I am really, really, really weird about matching. But we both love every single one of them and I don't think we could part with any of them. They each match the couch and bring out different aspects of that lovely rich chocolaty brown. They each coordinate with our throw pillow of inspiration. And they all look cool with the rug.
They'll learn to be friends.
Let's take another look.
If you look closely, you will notice that the top one is drawings of houses, the middle one is a light print of buildings, and the bottom one is names of cities. We are nothing if not thematic.
I suppose we would have been better off--or my matching-mind would be more at ease--had we stayed within the same shelf when picking out our fabrics. The fabrics near, say, the city names, were all tonally similar and would have gone together beautifully. This says a lot for how well City Quilter is arranged, because not only are color families placed together, they're also tonally arranged so each divided shelf would make a beautiful tone-on-tone quilt. But Husband and I are not ones to limit ourselves, and we really loved these three fabrics. Husband had a great time in the store--he may have been the only man in it--and really enjoyed their inventory of city-themed fabrics. I love that ours are abstract and therefore more subtle.
The more I look at them (they're sitting in the chair so I can stare at them while I'm on the couch), the more I love them. I can't wait to have them covering our pillows!
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