Here are a few of the stories behind our stallholder’s stashes…
“Unlike many Fabric-a-bracers, I am more of a fabric curator than a sewer. I love textiles and the feel/design possibilities and have always collected to use for soft furnishings – lightshades, curtains and furniture for my shop. I think I have had a stall at Fabric-a-brac on and off since perhaps around 2011! The fabric collection grew very quickly when my cousin found me about 10 bolts of dead stock 60/70s barkcloth in the back of a shop in Marton 🙂 I started my bricks and mortar shop in 2007 and closed about 2014 to focus on pop-up sales. I am getting better at letting go of vintage pieces – which were always so precious to me – and enjoying seeing them go to new homes to get a new lease of life. This Fabric-a-brac I will have a selection of vintage pieces for sale, along with some African wax cloth and upholstery fabric.”
“I’ve been collecting buttons since 1978. I was always a sewer and made all my clothes and my children’s clothes, even my own wedding dress. My love of buttons started in Switzerland, where I used to live. I helped clear out my husband’s foster mother’s house and came across an old Oxo tin. It had beautiful Austrian Tinies inside – small beautiful buttons from circa 1880-1920. From then I was hooked. My sister in England (where l grew up) sent me a cutting from the local paper, about a local button collector. That was how I found out about the button convention in America. Button collecting is huge in America – they are the third-most-collected item! A year later we went to the convention together – and I kept going every year, for twenty years. I was also a founder of the Swiss Button Club with friends I met in Switzerland – and that is still going strong.”
Ruth Meier has been having a stall at Fabric-a-brac since it first began 15 years ago. At 90, with a little help from her daughter, she is the event’s oldest stallholder and despite being a stallholder for many years, still has a beautiful collection of buttons.
“I come from a long line of sewers. My mother taught me to sew when I was about 7 or 8. She learned from her dressmaker mother, who learned from her tailor mother. My daughter has been playing in my workshop draping fabric over herself since she was one or two. I had a shop in Shannon for a few years. People would come in a choose their fabrics and we would make to measure a dress for them. I shut my shop after Covid and moved my work room to a 40ft shipping container at home. It is possible that I’m a fabric-a-holic. I have to face the reality that I have several lifetimes of fabric, so I’ve sorted out all the pieces less than the 3 meters needed for a dress plus the merino, chiffons and other fabrics I never sew with any more. They all need to find new homes so everything is priced at $5 or $10. I can’t wait to share these bargains with Fabric-a-brac shoppers. 🙂 “
Fabric-a-brac 