Fabric Haul - my crazy obsession

I was downtown (Vancouver) last night meeting a friend for dinner.  I'm stuck out here in the suburbs (blah, am a city girl) so whenever I've got something on downtown I get there early and walk around looking for interesting shops to check out first.

Oh yeah, before I get into my "haul", I want to mention this great little clothing store on Main & 8th called "adhesif".  From what I can tell everything in there is from local designers, sewists, jewellry makers, etc. and most is from recycled materials.  Some really interesting stuff in there.

So, on my way back downtown I walked past this little upholstery store and asked if they had any old fabric sample books they'd be willing to sell to me.  The nicest older couple and they gave me these 2 huge books of samples for free.  Price on each sample is $90 so quality stuff.

Once home later that night it took me awhile to take the books apart, tons of huge staples. But now have all the samples ready to use.  They have this paper border which just tears away, no glue residue leftover.  I don't want to run them thru the wash as they're quite intricate threading which would all unravel so will sew first, then wash the made items.

Here are the pics of my "haul":

The last picture is where I cut one sample in half and joined it onto a coordinating sample and will make a bag out of this.

Here's the embarrassing part.  When I met up with my friend my arms were dragging on the ground as I'd carried these huge books for about 20 minutes in the pouring rain switching hands with books and umbrella.  So, the embarrassing part is how excited I was to get all this beautiful fabric for free.  What is it about us sewists and our fabric?!  We're nuts!!!  We see everything thru our fabric haul eyes and say, "I know what I could make out of that!!!"  The sad part is that we don't sew nearly as much as we haul.

I'm sad though as have no friends who sew, have no one to talk to about this crazy obsession which is why I started this blog.  I know there are loads of you out there who are the same way as I read your crazy blogs and chuckle.  When I was showing my friend all my wonderful new fabrics I was met with a glazed over "you're nuts" type of look so tried to cool it a bit and not look so excited, LOL.

Tell me about your hauls.  I'd especially love to hear from others in Vancouver and where you shop.

... just remembered I got a huge bolt of fabric for $15 ($500-700 value) last week, will have to blog that one too.

There, got that out of my system ... back to work now :).

Lisa.