Much like feed stores, fabric stores are one of those pre-Internet gathering places where our social life in this country used to be knitted together (har har). There aren’t so many of them now: that gorgeous Lucky Jeans Brand bandana-print Lycell denim fabric up there (all 9 yards of it!)–part of Joann Fabrics’s going-out-of-business sale in my town. But when my mom and I were recently back in Grand Rapids visiting family, we stopped in at Field’s Fabrics, an old-school joint that’s still hanging tough (check out their website: I think it was built in the early oughts and has accrued at least 8 different fonts in the last 2 decades…). Time just seems to run a little slower in Grand Rapids, that might be why. There are old-fashioned candy and ice cream parlors everywhere; we got a DVD copied at a camera store that sold actual film; and the folks staffing the Gerald R. Ford Museum talked about the man as if he had just finished his term in office. (I’ll tell you, Betty had some FIERCE outfits. Personally, I was torn between the cream satin gown with a rhinestone pectoral embellishment in the form of a bald eagle, and a little peony-pink floral YSL skirt suit with a quilted jacket).
Field’s Fabrics was everything I remembered and loved about the fabric stores of my youth. There were the tables where you can sit and look through the latest pattern books. There were the display quilts pieced from various state-themed fabrics up front. You have to wait in line while the lady in front of you catches the clerk up on how Bob is doing with his new hip. And there is the cluster of Cutting Table Ladies over there drinking coffee and gossiping with the cutter while she cuts a mountain of fabric for them that they have no distinct plans for. I eavesdropped while I flipped through the New Look Fall 2025 pattern book (They’re putting in Trader Joe’s in Kentwood? You don’t say!). I ended up finding a button-down shirt pattern that’s gonna look great in that bandana fabric. I’ll keep you posted!
PS I just have to tell you a funny story that I heard for the first time from my Uncle Bruce while we were having dinner with him and Aunt Gail and the family. He told me how when he was a kid, he would make “inventions” from whatever spare parts and wires his dad and older brother didn’t need anymore. And then he would get my mom to plug them in for him because he was scared to. One day he finished an invention and called my mom to plug it in, and the second she did, the entire house shook–windows rattling in the frames, dishes dancing on the shelves, whole nine yards. My mom and Bruce just stared at each other, and then they heard grandma running up the stairs. I’m sure Uncle Bruce was getting a finger ready to point at my mom when Grandma poked her head in the room with a big smile and said, “Did you both feel that earthquake? Wasn’t that something!”
The Rookery 