Fabrications

Love this store!
I could easily spent half the day here shopping for fabrics and notions and the other half sewing in their fabulous sewing studio area.
Fabrications = Awesomeness!

I’m new to sewing, so I don’t know if I’m a good judge of fabric quality, pricing, and selection. But I will say that I had a pleasant shopping experience at Fabrications. The shop is warm and well lit. The bolts of fabric are all on one wall so it’s a pretty easy way to pick and choose, unlike the labyrinth-​like Fabricland.
No, I take that back. It isn’t actually easy to pick and choose! They have a great selection of retro-​style, cute and quirky fabrics. I spent a good 10 minutes hemming and hawing over what to choose (no pun intended). I could easily drop hundreds of dollars there. My only complaint is that their selection of cotton webbing was quite small. They had really beautiful embroidered ribbon, however.
The offer classes at this shop too. Given the friendliness of the staff and the comfort of the overall space, I will certainly be back.

I LOVE this place!!! if there is a downside, they don’t have a huge fabric selection. That being said, bring your fabric in and use their professional quality machines, cutting tables, scissors (and rotary cutters) in a super clean, well-​lit, and highly organized place. And very friendly and helpful, wow! Unless you sew a great deal, it just doesn’t make sense to invest in a machine, when you can come to Fabrications and use their Bernina machines (and fancy serger) for $ 8 an hour. I just made my own curtains there, for an odd-​size window, and saved myself about $ 100!

343.5343.5I love sewing clothing, and I love traveling, and every city I go to I try to visit a new fabric store. This was the most highly reviewed on Unilocal in Ottawa (Canada has a sad lack of good fabric stores) so off I went.
Firstly, it has moved a few blocks away to Wellington Street, so don’t be surprised when you come by and it’s all closed up!
This is a hipster fabric store, plain and simple. It sells supplies you will not find anywhere else. There are no patterns by the big 3 here, only expensive indie patterns I had previously only seen online. I hadn’t heard of any of the books, and after a bit of browsing determined that none of them were to my tastes.
The fabric selection is very small and consists almost entirely of imported and/​or organic cotton in either solids or off-​beat prints. There was a selection of soft rayon jerseys that piqued my interested, which were of course labelled as «bamboo rayon» (pet peeve, as bamboo rayon does not differ significantly from rayon from other tree sources), but I found the 18/​meter price a bit much for me.
Finally I wandered over to the tool section, and here my friends is where I believe almost any home seamstress would be happy! There were tools I had been looking for in stores for quite awhile, such as a Dritz seam roll and Clover 5-​in-​1 seam gauge. They had some German and Japanese tools I had never seen before, and I was happy to stock up.
I was glad to see the tool selection and find my visit was not a complete wash. This store clearly caters to a certain clientele… of which I am not a part.

A small shop, but clean an well organized with a pretty stellar selection of fun fabric (though not huge). This place just smelled inviting – that’s sort of a weird thing to say about a fabric store, but I think it’s the wood boxes they have holding the bolts of fabric.
The staff was helpful and friendly. I was able to pickup some quilting supplies fairly reasonably priced – much better than a Michael’s that’s for sure.

Many unique fabrics that are perfectly in style. There was Japanese cotton there and many of the printed fabric was funky/​hipster — deers with thick rimmed glasses? yeah, that’s what up. My friend and I were very impressed by how clean and organized it was — definitely a great place to go to use a sewing machine (free on Friday nights! or else $ 7/​hr). I went for an alterations class and learned some excellent skills. Each person in the class had a different item to hem, so knowledge was shared. I’ve been hemming up a storm ever since!
Note that their stock isn’t big, but it’s specialized.