I finally got off my duff and walked over to Quilt Tree this evening. Up ’til today I had gone exclusively to Seams Like Home due to its extremely close proximity to my place of work. (Well, except for one after-hours fail attempt to hit the quilt shop in Eagle River with my sister.)
I didn’t realize before going there that Quilt Tree is a combined quilting and yarn crafts shop. And they don’t waste any space. They have bolts of cloth on top of shelves and leaning against shelves on the floor, leaving just enough space to peruse. I didn’t wander into the yarn section — though I probably should have, since I need some supplies for my Halloween costume — but it looked just as crammed as the cloth half of the store.
The color and pattern selection is perhaps a bit more muted at Quilt Tree than at Seams Like Home, on average. The two stores have some of the same fabrics available, but there’s really not too much overlap. Not outside the batiks section, anyway — I haven’t decided how much I want to get into batiks yet, so I didn’t really look at them.
Quilt Tree’s fabrics are a hair pricier than those at Seams Like Home. It’s really a negligible difference, though, generally $0.50 a yard. Their fat quarters are priced about the same, and like Seams Like Home they’re willing to cut a fat quarter off of just about any bolt for you. Exceptions to that at Quilt Tree are upholstery fabrics and their selection of imported Japanese fabrics.
The imported Japanese fabrics are wonderful. These aren’t your run-of-the-mill oriental designs; they’re the kind of fabrics Japanese crafters like to use for their patchwork. The cloth designs varied from simple prints to cute prints to a few bolts that seemed designed to be miniature fabric stashes on a single bolt (having several simple designs spanning the length of the fabric in stripes). The ones I looked at all ranged from $15-$20 per yard. They tended to fit in with the trend towards more muted colors I saw.
Overall, it’s very nice. I’ll definitely be hitting there more often as I seek to inflate my fabric stash.
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