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Blythe On A Budget: Swapping Fabric

Written on March 30, 2011 at 12:00 pm by Michelle
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Shopping for July 17th

At a lot of fabric stores, there’s a minimum amount (usually a metre [or a yard] off of the bolt or a fat quarter) that you have to get. And it’s usually quite a bit compared to how much fabric you realistically need for making a doll dress, unless you plan on making several matching articles of clothing (in which case, you can dress your dolls like sextuplets or sell the other multiples). Most people (for those not sewing things for sale), you end up with a lot of excessive fabric since you only needed a small part of it. What to do with all that extra?

Swap it!

I’ve seen some people putting together fabric bundles and offering them up for trade/swap or offering them up for sale. It’s a win-win situation, really. You can get fabric that you didn’t previously have (and not dress all of your dolls in identical clothes) and save some money instead of buying even more fat quarters and having even more fabric that you’re not using because you’ve already used it for a dress or two.

Don’t just offer up your scraps, people don’t want little scraps or shivers or fabric that can’t cover their doll. So if you cut your pieces efficiently from the original fat quarter, you can easily offer your extra fabric up for swap! Be sure to include information about the fabric like what kind of material it is, care instructions (if you have it) and even include a photo of the fabric with something for scale (a penny or a ruler works well!) so someone can see if they would like to use that fabric.

And remember – swap safely!

Did you like this week’s Blythe On A Budget? Have a suggestion for a new article? Let me know here!

8 Responses to “Blythe On A Budget: Swapping Fabric”

  1. sloane AKA @sloaneski89
    says:

    Another thing I do to save money on fabric is to buy human clothes on clearance and cut them up. Baby clothes have especially cute patterns (and are more likely to be 100% cotton), and if you go to places like Walmart or Kmart or even Target you can get just under a yard of fabric for $1-2. The best times to go are at the switching of the seasons, when retail stores are dumping all the previous season’s stuff for next to nothing (it’s about March-May for clearanced Winter/Fall stuff and July-September for Spring/Summer clothes). Having worked in retail hell for years now, I can tell you that there’s often some pretty great finds hidden among the crap.

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