janedennis

I am currently making a quilt for my DS and so far the top has cost me 2.00 for a yard of white at Walmart and a spool of thread that cost 3.50. The rest is denim cut from my and my DH's jeans. Last year I bought several kits that I have not even started yet those are for when I cant afford to buy fabric. We are not cheap just being real in a tuff world that we all are living in today. To the people who can afford to buy LQS fabrics, lucky you, but to the people who do what they can with wehat they can find, I salute you.

daisylil

Im sure you would be glad not to buy fabric in the UK , nearly all cottons are around 10 pounds a metre , so about 16 dollars or so , I do take advantge of sales tho :)

Bevanger

no, your not cheap at all. i too am on a fixed income (disability) and i can't afford to buy fabric. if not for my angels, i wouldn't be sewing at all,. But i think fabric has gone ridiculously high. :thumbdown: :thumbdown: :thumbdown: :thumbdown:

Pam B

I don't shop often at Joann's so I don't know how their prices are lately. I am pretty frugal so I only buy fabric when I need it for a particular project. I am not one to just see fabric and buy it...if I did that, it would probably never get used. And, when I am buying for a project I usually only buys the amt I need. I am very careful, you know....measure twice, cut once. I will still continue to buy at the LQS because I like the people there and I do not want them to go out of business.

quilt queen 2

I'm one of the lucky ones with a stash but I feel sorry for our new quilters. My guild trys to do small projects with FQ and use patterns with little waste.A piece 36x45 of warm & natural is $12.95! We have stores called Fabricland that sells a membership that gives a discount on many items and they also have members only sales so we keep anyone posted on this There are 2 quilt shops in the area and they give guild members a discount also both LQS donate some fabric if we are doing something charitable so we like to supportthem too.Everything has increased in price here so does our fabric but we still love our quilting!

Luv Quilts and Cats

I have been seeing higher prices too. Lately I have been buying fabric from sources that seel good quality fabric at a discount. But the only thing with that is that I can't get the latest fabrics, and sometimes the selection is not what I want. I guess I will have to buy judiciously from LQS...no more sprees, unless I win the lottery! :-D

Leann

Yes, I totally agree - I liked my fabric stash enough to buy it in the first place and it is all I have to work with right now.

mardi

Prices are higher, and fabric is a luxury not a necessity. Though everything is costing more, small shop owners are feeling the pinch as well as their customers. Many are trying to keep their stores open and are combatting larger retailers, not just Joanne's, but on line stores that have none of the overhead costs a small local shop has. Places like Keepsake Quilting can afford to have lower prices sometimes, but don't often. It is a sad reality that we are facing. Small shops won't be around for much longer as we tighten our belts and only shop our stashes. It's not our fault and not the shops fault, it is what it is. A sadness fills me as I see all this happening because I have grandchildren that won't have the experiences I have had with visiting a local shop and meeting up with friends there. My childrens generation lives in "make it convenient for me"...on line shopping....how sad and empty. They will tell stories of when they were little and there was actually a building where "grandma" use to take them and they could touch the fabrics and feel the colors and maybe there was a play area just for them while Mommy shopped. When we shop on line, we close another local quilt shop door....and the signs will read, "Sorry, we are closed forever, thanks for your patronage...happy quilting. Goodbye.

wvdek

Prices go up for convenience, everyone wants to make a buck and pay a 'good' price and most things are being imported and not in the good sense. Sorry folks, but we are bringing it on ourselves by shopping the big discount places, buying online, wanting more variety of everything, buying more than we can afford or need, and wanting everything NOW instead of waiting. Off my soapbox :oops: :cry:

QKO

Please let me try to correct your incorrect impression of online stores if you will...

First, over 90% of the quilting fabric sold in the USA is sold by several large chains and several large online stores; notably JoAnne, Beverlys, Wal-mart, Ben Franklin, fabric.com (a subsidiary of Amazon.com), Keepsake Quilting, Hancocks, and a couple others.
This leaves the thousands of Mom&Pop and Mom&Mom LQS's and small online stores, i.e. "the independents" competing for the other 10% of the market. Many of the remaining online stores are run by people as an extension of their B&M stores.

Second, an online store has different, but not necessarily lower operating costs than a brick and mortar (B&M) store. While B&M stores are paying more for store-front rent in many cases, it's not that much cheaper than warehouse space rent. As far as wages go, there are additional and expensive skillsets needed to operate a web store, like web developers at anywhere from 60 to $150 an hour and a lot of specialty packaging and shipping equipment as well as lots of computer software, huge security checking fees, software licenses, hosting fees and other expenses not found in a B&M store. We also pay exactly the same business license and incorporation fees to the state and county as does JoAnne or Wal-mart.

Additionally, online stores pay higher merchant processing fees than B&M stores for credit card processing, typically 1% or more higher, and since literally all of our business is done by credit card, the total fees paid add up to a lot more expense.

If you operate a web store in a residential area, like we do, shipping costs are higher. We typically pay 15 to 30 cents more a yard for fabric delivery, delivered by the same UPS truck, as the quilt shops a few miles away, because our area isn't zoned commercial. One of the reasons we don't offer UPS or Fedex shipping is because of the huge residential area pickup fees charged by those carriers, that would have to be passed on to our customers.

If you are going to make a successful online business, it takes years of hard work before the search engines find you, and that's what drives most of your business. There's very little impulse buying in an online store, and there's no guilt in walking out of an online store like there is with walking out of a B&M, so for every sale in our store we see hundreds, even thousands of people "walk" through our store. People are also ruthless comparison shoppers online, much more so than in your B&M stores.

We've been building our online store for over 3 years now and have yet to take a dime out of it. We've also put much of our savings into it. Someday, if we don't burn out first, we might be able to supplement our fixed pension income, or make it successful enough to be able to sell the business. That's our hope.

Anyone who thinks they're going to get rich overnight by selling fabric on the internet is in for a rude awakening.

But at least Cindy gets her fabric cheap. :mrgreen: :mrgreen: