Fabric Shopping (and Food Eating) in Paris: Happy Accidents

We were in Paris for five days in early April, where my husband had to work and I could be a tourist. We came back two days before the Notre Dame fire, which I reflected on here. I also visited the St. Ouen flea market, chronicled here. 

I made no plans to visit fabric stores - with so little time, I figured I'd have to focus on major tourist sites. Plus, I already have waaaay too much fabric at home. 

But that's not how it worked out. 

The first place I accidentally found fabric was in the department store Le BHV/Marais. The funky Marais district of Paris is famous for its Jewish history, dating back to the 13th century. It's also packed with boutiques, galleries, restaurants, bars, and, especially, falafel stands. The lines are long and slow, but it's worth it, a luscious pack with gobs of mix-ins (I don't even know what all this stuff was, but it was delicious.)

We wandered into BHV looking for something else entirely (food souvenirs, to tell the truth), but instead, on an upper floor, we came across a huge area devoted to crafts and sewing! There were two shelves of bolts:

Some had "Frou Frou" printed on them, which meant nothing to me at the time (but soon would). Many resembled Liberty of London prints, but weren't.

There was a table full of what I later confirmed to be fat-quarters. (Fat-quarters of an American yard, even though France uses the metric system and meters are 39".)

I needed an easy-to-pack souvenir, right? So I bought these.  

Nearby the fabric shelves, there was plentiful stationary, plus this rack of decorative paper. 

(Paris in general has lots of paper stores - this is clearly a country that appreciates fiber more than we do, except in bread.)

There were also shelves of yarn, especially from the French company Phildar, including these made from recycled tee shirt fabric....

...and more conventional yarns, non-fuzzy....

...and fuzzy.

We saw craft supplies of every description, for kids and adults. I shoulda bought one of these sweet paper mache stegosauruses, to paint or decoupage...

So much fun! I thought that was it - that one visit to a retail fabric establishment would be all I'd experience.

But no! A few days later, completely by accident, on the way to  Montmartre's Sacre Couer church, we found ourselves on Marche St. Pierre, the closest thing to a fabric district that Paris has, according to this excellent and informative article that I wish I had  studied before my trip!  

It was the afternoon before our departure, so I had limited time there. I sped through, and here's what I saw:

In a wonderfully named shop, "La Folie Des Tissus" ("The madness of fabric!?") from the precut ("coupons") table, I bought a three meter piece of this -12 Euros!

The shop specializes in garment fabric - their website is here. 

I was looking for fabrics that I wouldn't find in most US stores. Many stores had a kind of gauzy fabric with simple prints, which I liked enough to photograph, but not enough to buy. Like these bicyclettes:

And boxers:

...with bugs and bunnies on bottom. Similarly, I found the following simple but unusual prints, on a heavier cotton backing:

There were also plenty of prints with more colors, but not nearly as good quality as you'll find in a US quilting shop:

The lower-quality fabric was also inexpensive....

Several stores sold gorgeous, great quality, African wax fabrics, at very reasonable prices:

Then there was the following print - not high-quality, but highly entertaining - of macarons alternating with bears bathing in turquoise tea cups!?!

At the end of the block, I was surprised to find the Frou Frou shop! Now I understood where the fabric and kits at Le BHV/La Marais had come from! It had lots more than the department store, including these wool packets for embroidery (I assume)...

...a MUCH larger table of fat quarters than BHV...

...More of this nice gold-imprinted feather fabric of which I'd bought a piece of at BHV...

...a vast wall of buttons...

...another one of decals....

...And delightful kits for bags and backpacks.

I bought a couple more fat quarters. (OK, more than a couple.)

The first fabric on the left above is faux cutting board fabric! 

The last store in the street is Tissues Reine, Queen Fabrics. They had three tables of genuine Liberty of London fabrics - traditional prints as well as newer motifs. They were priced around 26 Euros a meter, which is around the same price you'll find them online in the US, around $30 a yard. (Plus shipping).

More Liberties:

The dupioni price looked great - 4.90 Euros! 

There were some very nice high quality cotton prints:

Extra-wide batiks: 

Many of the tables held mannequins - each about 3 feet tall - taller than a Barbie, but not nearly as tall as shop mannequins in the US, which gave them a hobbit-like air. 

This was the strangest fabric I found, severed hands + monkey vampires....

Moving from the ridiculous to the sublime, I also found this metallic fabric:

The selvage said it was a Kaufman fabric, from the Klimt collection, so I figured I could buy it in the US for less. As it turned out, it took me a LOT of Internet searching to find one piece, which I ultimately did buy - for about the same as I would have paid in France! (Lesson: Support shops, buy it when you see it.)

Even the floor in this shop was fabulous (Always examine French floors).

After burning thousands of calories fabric shopping (and walking around the spectacular Sacre Coeur basilica), based on our non-scientific study of one dining establishment, I suggest you eat dinner here: 

Yes, it's called Il Ristorante (reviews here), and the cuisine is Italian. The prices were reasonable, but it has an elegant feel. The charming owner wore jeans and an embellished army jacket, so I didn't worry about the fact that we weren't dressed up. The wine she recommended was delicious, and so was the food. Here's the perfectly grilled vegetable appetizer, with ultra thin-sliced carrots, zucchini and eggplant.

 I ordered the gorgonzola gnocchi, which was insanely delicious....

 DH went for the tasty clam linguini,

And this was desert. Trigger alert: It may have contained chocolate. 

The final piece of fabric I brought home from France was a dishtowel with a subway map - widely available at any souvenir shop!

Along with fabric stores and paper stores, the other thing that's much easier to find in Paris than American cities is bookstores. We passed loads of them. Some were ubiquitous Gibert Jeunes, easy to find by their yellow awnings. One that we visited had several shelves of sewing, knitting, and crochet books, plus kits:

So when you go to Paris, be sure to check out the craft section of the bookstores! For a much more comprehensive article about fabric shopping in Paris - especially if you're planning a visit - I again highly recommend this article.

Creative Time Bomb: Sort your Stash

How do you organize your quilting fabric? Creating categories not only makes fabrics easier to find, but can also jumpstart future creations. Here are my categories, jammed into 8 small shelves plus 3 plastic boxes:

1. Human and human-like entities (including cyborgs, smiley faces, plus the occasional human underwear):

2. Food and beverages:

3. Animals, real, extinct and imagined:

4. Mostly inedible, inanimate objects, including florals and geometrics:

5. Blue and green solids and monochrome prints, not including skies, but including lakes, rivers and oceans...

...and green leaves (Unless the leaves are edible - the fabric on the lower right looks like collard greens to me, so sometimes it travels to category 1):

6. Yellow, orange, red and gold solids and monochrome prints:

7. Purples, lavenders:

8. Black, whites, greys & brown prints and solids, and black-and-white prints

9. Batiks, all colors, all patterns, plus all sky prints.

10. Patriotic and American history

11. Judaic prints:

12. Miscellaneous, and polka dots The huge pieces of the fabrics below - vintage housewives and pre-Obama US presidents - that don't fit in my packed "human" shelf, so they're in miscellaneous:

Quite often, when going through my stash, I will fling a fabric to a different category. Take fish, for example: Animal or food?

If it looks like it would be tasty broiled with butter and garlic, it goes into food, but if it could be in an aquarium or a deep sea, it usually goes with the animals. Same problem with cows:

Just looking at their yearning faces and thinking about where they're headed makes me want to become a vegetarian (at those moments, it goes to animals.) When craving a burger, it travels to food. And what about this print with dog astronauts - animals or humans?

This fabric has been commuting back and forth between categories for decades.

Jack-o-lantern fabric is even more elusive. Edible, human, animal, or inanimate? I should just sew it into a trick-or-treat bag and donate it to a thrift shop, so I don't have to agonize over it anymore.

The best reason to sort your stash is that you find unexpected relationships, and group  fabrics with common traits together. Even if you don't do something with the groupings and subgroupings at the moment, they can serve as messages to your future self - creative time-bombs - that will save you time and spark ideas.

Like a month ago, when I was looking through my stash for holiday gift ideas. I found the following fabrics grouped together in the "Prints: Non-Human, Non-Animal, Inedible" box.

(I know, that on the upper right looks a bit like hard-boiled eggs, but not enough.) They were piled on top of these, which you saw above:

The fabric on the far left was cut from a beautiful Swiss dress that a friend gave me after her baby outgrew it. The two on the right are fat quarters that my well-trained DH bought me for a birthday.

Plus there was this heavyweight Japanese print:

...which sent me running to the "food" shelf, where I knew I had another piece of heavy fabric purchased from the same quilt show vendor: a pastry fabric that says "petite gateau," which means "little cake" in French, even though the fabric is Japanese:

Now I had an extended family of fabrics, near-pastels with a lot of pink and a happy, air-tossed mood. I did a little improvisational cutting, sewing, and slicing, and wound up with four of these: 

Vintage rick rack made a nice punctuation. The music fabric went on the back.

I used Insul-Bright batting inside. so they can function as real potholders. For hanging loops, I found the following embroidered ribbon in my parents' tablecloth drawer. I am guessing my paternal grandmother, my beloved Bubby, bought it, maybe planning to embellish aprons? She died in 1974, which makes this ribbon over 40 years old. It's in perfect shape, perhaps because it was encased in a long narrow plastic viewing sleeve:

The plastic sleeve says "Shrinkage CONTROLLED" and "Perma-Trim". They were right, 40 years is pretty Perma!

Along with four potholders, I made a couple of table mats:

To the table runner, I added borders of a pastel Liberty of London print (also from "Prints: Inanimate"). 

I like to take a group picture of related creations, so here they are, four potholders, two table runners jammed together. If I squinch my eyes, I can imagine what it might look like if I'd made them into one quilt: 

Meh, it would have been a low-contrast quilt. (Speaking of contrast, can you find Waldo's sock in the picture?) Once photographed, I put my shoe back on, broke up the set, wrapped each in festive holographic  cellophane, and distributed them to friends for holiday presents - my daughter asked for one, too - leaving me with the good memories and a little bit more space in my stash! 

Yes, I really would love to hear about how you categorize your quilting fabrics!