So. Much. Fabric

A huge part of any clothing business is fabric. So many different options, and like anything else you buy online, it's hard to know exactly what you'll get. Colors might be different than you expect, but the feel and the drape of a fabric are equally important, and it's almost impossible to comprehend how they'll behave if you can't feel it in your fingers.

I'd prefer to buy in person, or better yet, design my own special order fabrics to suit my needs, but that's just not possible right now. Fabric stores near me are more for quilting or crafting, and the few apparel fabrics they sell are stupid expensive. I could travel to a fabric warehouse, but those are many hours away and the inventory in those places is usually dead-stocked. That’s great for small batch collections, but not for my samples, as I'd need to make sure I could get more of everything I'm making.

I found a wholesale fabric store online and discovered that it had the majority of what I needed. Their availability of colors is the main reason I chose to create a collection in only 3 colors. It's not ideal, but I'm working with what I have available to me. And honestly, it's better to keep my collections small and manageable, especially while I'm just starting out.

White, charcoal, and navy. They are simple, safe colors, all of which will look good on redheads, and all of which are pretty readily available in the majority of the fabrics I need for my designs. I wanted to have green as well, which is always one of the best colors for redheads, but I wanted a specific shade of green which was not an option for most of the fabrics that I needed, so green will have to wait for a future collection.

I ordered 100 yards! Mostly linen and cotton, but quite a lot of different types and no more than 15 yards each. I'd love to say that this will make a ton of pieces, but I know it will go quite quickly. 100 yards sounds like a lot, but it isn't. It's enough make maybe 5-6 samples of each of my 8 designs, and while that seems like more than enough samples, it will make only 1 or 2 of each size for each piece, and not even in all the colors. It's a lot, and yet, not at all.

I’ve been waiting, quite impatiently, for it to arrive. You know how it goes with tracking numbers. They tell you it ships and it’s going to be early, so you get excited. Then it gets delayed and you get disappointment. In the end it still got here when I thought it would. It's been terribly difficult not to cut into it right away! Instead, I've been cataloging it and keeping samples of each fabric so that I know exactly what I have and what I'm using it for. As much fun as it is to dive right in and start creating, I think it's important that I have everything written down because the last thing I want is to have a finished garment with no idea which fabric I used to make it. But it’s here! And I’m going to be very busy the next few weeks using it all up!