Textile Fabrics in Nashville, TN

Yesterday I had a little road trip with my mom. Textile Fabrics just happened to be 9 minutes away from our day-trip destination, so I got to pop in before lunch. Wow! It’s a huge fabric store full of beautiful fabric from all over the world, lots of cool buttons and belt buckles, shelves and shelves of various trim, and lots of sewing notions. They had Burda patterns! I’d never seen a real Burda pattern before. They had some Rowan yarn and a pretty good book selection. There were lots of people shopping there on a Monday morning and lots of friendly staff ready to cut fabric and answer questions.

ARE YOU WONDERING WHAT I BOUGHT?

Patience!

First I have to confess to you I’m engaging in crazy behavior by joining the Chanel Sew-Along, a group of sewists who are all working to create their own Chanel style jacket by November 15th-ish. I decided to join because I need an unnecessary and unachievable deadline on my shoulders at the same time I’m starting a new job (with travel required). Perfectly sensible, I think. It takes a professional, experienced couture tailor about 100-150 hours to create one of these masterpieces, so I guestimate it’ll take me about 700 hours. This is fun, isn’t it?

OK, your patience has now paid off. Here’s what I got at Textile Fabrics:

• Cotton-blend tweedy fabric for my Chanel jacket.
• Silk lining fabric in olive.
• Silk thread, olive for seaming and white for basting.
• Pins for silk.
• Trim.
• Long, thin basting needles.

I still have a lot to do before I’ll be ready to cut any fabric:

• Get a real dress form.
• Decide on the pattern. (I have almost decided on using Vogue 8259 with modifications for the neck and button band.)
• Read up on Chanel jacket making and on Chanel herself: books, articles, and blogs. For someone who hasn’t sewn much, I have a ton of resources on hand, including several Threads magazines and Couture Sewing Techniques by Shaeffer.
• Buy a walking foot. I will call my local Viking dealer tomorrow and inquire about it.
• Find some awesome buttons.
• Figure out how to do an customised FBA for myself. Ugh, I need a lot of adjustments here and I’ve never been able to do it with great success.
• Buy a good muslin for mocking up my jacket.

For a muslin fabric, I asked the ladies at Textile Fabric for a suggestion on an inexpensive fabric type similar to my cotton-blend. They looked at me like I was an alien, so I guess I’m on my own for this one. I’ll search my stash first to see if I can find something of a similar weight, but I may end up going back to Tennessee for another quick fabric trip.