Winmill Fabrics near Chinatown/Downtown crossing came highly recommended on Tom's list (
see previous post). In a word: Bleck. I can see if you wanted to buy men's suiting that this is the place to go. They had a lot of options all with reasonable prices. Even women's wool suiting looked okay. However, this place looked like it hadn't received any new fabric since 1982. The place was dingy. The staff didn't acknowledge me. There certainly weren't any hipster fabrics a la Amy Butler or anything I would want. Huge disappointment considering its proximity to my work.
In better news, we roadtripped it up to Lowell, MA, which is where the giant textile mills used to be. The buildings are still there and a few have been turned into national parks. We went to the New England Quilt Museum. Snooze. I have more quilts than this place had! Not as old but definitely as interesting. I was actually quite disappointed with the number of quilts. A leisurely paced tour of the exhibit lasted 15 minutes maximum. Hardly worth $5. I don't even think my mom (master quilter) enjoyed it too much.
We hit the Lowell LYS which are at this place called the
Western Avenue Studios. This place was awesome! There is a yarn store (Classic Elite) which is an outlet of sorts. Reasonable selection of yarn, just poorly organized and difficult to figure out prices: one of my BIGGEST complaints about LYS up here. After tackling the yarn store we went down and looked at the artist studios. Basically these places are for rent for artists and they sell their wares out of their studios. None of the art was earth shattering, but it was awesome that this space is available and some of the work was really interesting and definitely worth checking out around Christmas time. We will definitely go back. If we lived closer, we'd be getting a studio!
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