How I Was Able to Get Lots and Lots of Fabric!

This is a bit serendipitous, that's for sure. Today I bought lots and lots of fabric at a steep discount! Here's a picture of my car with fabric piled up. There are more bolts underneath the bolts you see here... so exciting!

You see, I have my studio, but only a few yards of different types of fabric that I purchased to experiment with. At first I was thinking of creating a women's line, but I recently decided to start by making baby clothes first because I need to dress my baby before she turns into a toddler! I can't believe they call babies toddlers after they reach 1 year. My baby is growing up so fast! My goal is to try to make her a few outfits before she reaches 12 months of age. Not that she would actually change much in size from 11 months to 12 months, but there's something about dressing a "baby" versus a "toddler" that makes it seems so cute! Toddlers are cute too, of course, just not as little!

Today was my lucky day! I saw an email in my inbox with a newsletter from the Textile Arts Center. I randomly pick different newsletters to read on any given day or week because honestly there are just too many that come into my inbox to read! For some reason, I decided to read that one that day, and all the way at the bottom of the newsletter was a message that said that they were selling excess cotton fabric they had. Hmmm... intrigued, I emailed them.

They were getting rid of excess stock and today I met them at their storage facility that they were emptying out. Woohoo! And I scored lots of fabric! It turned out that they had tons of fabric because a company that was designing baby clothing went out of business. So, this fabric was intended for baby fabric. Perfect! The fabric is probably not organic, which would be my first choice, but at least I can start here and feel free to experiment since the fabric isn't so expensive!

Last month, my friend, who is moving out of the country, gave me a huge bolt of muslin, pattern paper and some other supplies. That was so nice of her! I'm starting to get all the materials I need to start designing. Once I get a baby dress form, I think I'm ready to start playing with fabric! Those mini dress forms are so cute! I just can't take it. Technically I probably don't need a baby dress form unless I'm doing something very drapey, but I love working on dress forms rather than flat patterns, so perhaps a cute itty bitty dress form will inspire me to get my butt into the studio and stop using lack of money for a nanny or schedule limitations due to my pumping schedule as excuses to not even start. Clearly the universe wants me to start if I'm being blessed with a studio, supplies, and fabric! And obviously it's something I want to do too!

This fabric is making me so excited. Hahaha... so many itty bitty baby things can come out of this. You can see the fabric is mainly boy colors because the company was making baby boy clothing. My original intent was to make only baby girl clothing since I have a baby girl, but why not make a few cute boy things for my sister? Can you tell what the color palette will be from that picture? :) Quite obvious, huh?

Hopefully I'll be able to make something for my cute little Sophie soon! :)

Here's a picture of Sophie in a little sweater I knitted even before I was planning on having a baby. It just happened to turn out that I ended up having a baby girl who can wear it! She is such a doll!