My goal for this blog is to aid people like me in shopping for fabric online. I have 3 small children and shopping at brick-and-mortar fabric shops is pretty much an insurmountable task! Not to mention, for many of you, fabric shops are too far away or maybe don't carry the fabrics you are looking for. When I started shopping online I felt overwhelmed by the choices and I started this blog as a way to try to organize at least some of the information and resources out there.

One challenge of online fabric shopping is scale and how the fabric will look when used in a project. There are many wonderful photographs on the web of "fabric in action" and periodically I round some of those up for a post. I know many of you have wonderful photographs of projects you've made with our favorite fabrics, so I've started a Flickr group as a way of sharing this information.

The Flickr group is called: The Fabric Shopper - Fabric In Action! I would love it if you would post some photos here :) The rules are simple - just photos of completed projects (no shots of just fabric or stacks, no matter how fabulous ;), please tag with designer and/or collection name to make it easier to find what we're looking for and please agree that posting to this group allows me to put your photo on The Fabric Shopper blog if I so choose. If I do put your photo on this blog I would most certainly credit you and link back to your photostream!

I have some new features in the works and one of those is a fabric gallery. I'll have a permanent page where some of our favorite collections will live along with links to shops that carry them (it will be easier for me to keep things current and for you to find them!) In these galleries (which will feature "artwork" shots of the fabric from the manufacturers' sites, in most cases) I plan to add some photos of the "fabric in action" and will always be perusing the group for some of these photos!

Okay, I'll give you a sneak peek of the new gallery (below), sorry I can't give you the link yet, I'm just not ready for that much scrutiny (a lot of work yet to do!), so I'm just giving you a screenshot. The thumbnails are clickable and open in a "lightbox" for a close-up look.

The bad news in all of this is that The Fabric Shopper will have to move URLs. I'll give you ample warning to change your bookmarks and hopefully for feed readers the move will be as easy as Feedburner claims it will be :) This probably won't happen for at least 3 more weeks, but I'll give you some time to adjust. The Fabric Shopper's new home will allow for some nifty new features that I think you all will enjoy.

So, what do you think? Any suggestions or ideas to aid you in your online fabric shopping? Let me know in comments and thanks for reading and being a fan of this blog!