I had the opportunity to attend the Quilting and Fiber Marketplace which was held in Sanford, NC on the 6th and 7th of January. This was a really delightful gathering of approximately 40 vendors, about 75% quilting and the others assorted yarns and fibers. Four or five guilds were also represented. A number of the vendors do not have bricks and mortar shops so this was a rare chance to see their wares in person. We were also pleasantly surprised at how much wool was available for appliqué and rug hooking.
This is one of the three main aisles, there was also space on the stage at the far end of the room (sadly that was not wheelchair accessible but fortunately for me I was not using my chair that day, still it’s a pain to carry the rollator up 5 steps :/) and there were some smaller booths and raffle quilts set up in the lobby.
The booth of the Quilter’s Loft was my favourite. I would love to take home all of the batik — see the half yard pieces lined up in the bottom left of the photo. There were also many modern quilts that really inspired me. I’m fired up and itching to quilt now 🙂
This was my total haul from the day. Actually the wool on the left is to be shared with my mother, I need to cut out some grey circles for needle felting on a rug, the rest will be for her rug hooking. I have a lot of batik and some solid black fabric for the Craftsy Block of the Month quilt that I have decided to work on. (Although like all BOMs I do reserve the right to not make blocks if I particularly dislike them! We have not seen all of the upcoming blocks yet.) I also have some Bali Pops that you can’t see very well under there, I’m working on a strip quilt from the Craftsy Quilting Quickly II course using those and some of the black solid. So I should have two color coordinated lap quilts when I am done. The embroidery floss was a great bargain. I didn’t really need it for the Take a Stitch Tuesday challenge but that is a good excuse 😉 There’s also a small scrap of undyed woven wool that I plan to try dyeing with Colorhue dyes. Those dyes work well on silk (I’ll post about them soon) and say they work well on wool so I wanted to test them out. The Lumiere paint I just got because it is pretty. I’m not sure what I will do with it yet but I still haven’t started with the fabric-based visual journalling I had hoped to do last year, plus with all of the silk I am dyeing I am sure those lovely paints will come in handy. Finally in the center is a needle threader (that after seeing in Quickly Quilting my mother and I decided we needed!) and the new Pilot pens that disappear when heated with an iron. Since I do sometimes work on fabrics that really shouldn’t be wet much I’d tried a few air-vanishing pens but they don’t stay on very long. I’ll give the heat pens a go and see if that is better.
Overall I really enjoyed the market! If you’re in North Carolina they are having another one in Statesville at the Civic Center the 27-28th of January. The vendor list is not identical but there is a significant overlap. With batik fabrics as low as $6 a yard and other fabrics I saw as low as $4 a yard it is a great place to stock up for quilts. The fiber offerings were not very interesting to me, but I already have a huge fiber stash and attend fiber fairs throughout the year so get a better offering there. But if you don’t have a local yarn shop or don’t have access to dyed rovings, etc., this is not a bad place. There are probably 10 vendors with yarn and two or three of those had roving or other spinning/felting fibers. I don’t know if it would be worth the $5 entry if that is all you are going for. I got a coupon from my local quilt store for $1 off so that helped. Please do let me know if you do go, I can’t make it that weekend but I’d like to know if it was as good as the Sanford one 🙂