Bare walls

I'm pretty sure we are never going to find proper dining room furniture. We have a table and chairs, and we did have a corner cabinet for china, but the new door to the kitchen made the corner too small for the cabinet. For some reason, it is really hard to find corner cabinets. And then we need some kind of console table for the wall on the other side of the door. The problem there is that someone in my family is way too picky. The good news is, if we had an Asian-themed decor scheme, we would have found a dozen pieces to suit our needs at the Home Consignment Center in Mountain View today!

SF fabric tour

A couple weeks ago Linda and I went to the city looking for fabrics for a couple projects. We were both mostly looking for home decor fabrics, but I also wanted to get a better feel for what the shopping is like in SF, so I got recommendations from a few friends who sew.

First we went to Discount Fabrics in the Mission. Definitely a place to go back to! They have at least a little of everything, but I've never seen as many different kinds of trim and wacky stuff you can stick on your clothes or curtains. For this reason it's one of the go-to stores for my belly-dancing friends.

Linda found everything she needed there. I found some good candidates for the guest-room curtains I plan to make, but didn't actually buy anything.

Next we went to Fabrix, which was underwhelming. It's a pretty small place, but it's crammed with fabric that mostly seemed cheap and blah. It might be a good place to check out regularly to see what comes through if you lived in the neighborhood, but I wouldn't seek it out.

Across the street is a place called Satin Moon that sounds great, but it's closed right now because of a water main leak! I'll check back next time I need something special. My impression is that it's mostly home dec type fabrics with some high-end silks.

Discount Fabrics was on our list but we didn't make it there. Definitely hoping to check it out some time. I'm also intrigued by this place in the Haight.

Britex, of course, is the Mood of San Francisco, but is pretty overpriced. Rounding out my list is a place you should definitely check out: Peapod. It's a tiny store in the Inner Sunset with a great selection of quilting fabrics. They are beautifully chosen and displayed and coordinated; I bought all the fabric for this quilt I made for my niece, Gwen, at Peapod.



Thanks to Lorah, Laura and Rebeca for their recommendations on where to go!

Finally, I found a pretty cool blog post about SF fabric stores.