Sporty Fabric Haul

In our ongoing quest to identify and procure the perfect vintage-style baseball flannel (more on that later), we visited Rose City Textiles deep in the heart of Portland's Northwest Industrial District this weekend. We'd read that they sold fabrics mostly for active wear, and thought they may sell the perfect stretchy wool flannel. They didn't. But it was an experience nonetheless.

We walked in, and were greeted with, "Are you here for the sale?"

Looking at each other, "Uhhh, okay."

We were led through the store (Sarah was momentarily distracted en route but some interesting-looking bamboo knit) to the back, which was an enormous warehouse with rolls of fabric of all colors, textures and types piled on shelves. Our friendly guide to the store then said, gesturing at the piles,

"All this back here is a buck a yard."

We stood there and watched him walked away. It was a heady, overwhelming experience, because this place sells fabric that's from all of the big active wear retailers: Nike, Adidas, Columbia and lots of the designers and boutiques. Literally, there were piles of stuff that we civilians can't normally buy.

Sifting through the piles and piles of huge bolts of fabrics, we found some gems. Josh discovered what's probably the coolest fabric in the haul---a strechy fabric for basketball uniforms from Nike that was the fabric worn by the USA Men's Basketball Team. Does it get any better than fabric AND basketball? Josh also found some interesting red and white soccer jersey fabric and felt the need to purchase quite a bit of red ribbing---and they through in the trimmings from the ribbing as well, so we now have a big pile of red ribbing sitting on the sewing room floor. Sarah found great high-end raincoat material in both brown and blue (the cool satiny stuff) and then went a little crazy and bought who-knows-how-much smoky-purple organic cotton knit that was the EXACT same as her favorite hoodie from JJill. Because you really need lots and lots of purple hoodies. Oh, yeah, and we won't even talk about the hottest of hot pink knit that made its way home with us as well.

All and all, it was pretty awesome. Thirty-eight dollars (and at least 50 yards of fabric---they threw in extras), we loaded the loot into the MINI Cooper---which was a story in and of itself---and headed home, high on the excitement of scoring the weirdest lot of random fabric ever...