Before you go any further… sign up for the Fabric Spot giveaway if you haven’t already. It’s the LAST DAY to enter! The giveaway ends at 10pm tonight (May 24th). Don’t miss out on your chance to win. (It’s worth signing up, check out the yardage I won last weekend (Hooray!), it’s posted on the Thread Riding Hood Facebook page.)

Aside from stitching up a tutorial (for this coming Monday!), I’ve been reading a really great book that I bought last week. It’s not a book you would generally sit down and read cover to cover… but I am a person that generally reads manuals for everything, cover to cover – so I suppose this works!

When I first read about Dana’s book “Fabrics A to Z” on her blog, MADE, I figured I would eventually have to buy it. She’s an amazing blogger and sewer and her photographs are really well put together. She’s a big inspiration for me when I sit down to write a post for y’all! (I’m allowed to say “y’all” by the way, my parents are currently living in the Southern US!)  Anyhow – her book is really great and I would recommend that you buy it. I found mine on Amazon, and for a fraction of the cost on the back, which is always nice.

So… confession… I wasn’t really sure that I really needed this book, I just wanted it because it seemed cool to own Dana’s book. And everyone knows, you have to be cool to be a blogger (ha!) so I decided to buy it. Motivation aside, it turns out I really did need this book, and still do, and will for (maybe) always? It’s an amazing compilation of information about every fabric known to man and includes really great and super helpful information for each one.

And… this leads to why it is unlikely that you might sit down and read this cover to cover… it’s a reference book. But, like I said, I like to devour information (mostly to my detriment, because I really can’t remember everything I read) so I started on page 4 and went on from there. In the first few pages I learned:

1. What Bedford Cord is. And its properties, how to work with it and it’s care. Oh, and its most useful needle size, stitch length and sewing machine foot and whether to use the “with” or “without nap” layout when cutting patterns. (And there’s more info than that on every one of 150 fabrics types!)
2. Canvas and Duck cloth are the same thing. (and I always thought they were different… silly me!)
3. Chambray is made by weaving a coloured “warp” thread through a white “weft”. (She also explains warp and weft on page 10). And, the most common colour of Chambray is blue – just in case you were wondering!