Orthodox Christian Fabric
I love fabric!
I can spend hours in a fabric store...and if you're on my website then I bet you do too. I have always loved fabric, even before I could sew, and have always had a small stash of fabric that I couldn't use nor could I give it up...why tho?? The colors! The texture! The designs! The possibilities!
When I started sewing in earnest about 10 years ago, I found lots of beautiful, fun, cute, useful fabric. But then I started to notice the lack of selection of cotton and linen fabrics with intentionally Christian themes, not to mention Orthodox Christian themes. Then I started to pay attention to the beautiful patterns in vestments and liturgical linens at church, and the patterns painted on the walls and in icons (especially the early church hierarchs). These observations were perfectly timed with discovering the NC based print-on-demand fabric company, Spoonflower. Their fabric designers are regular people like me who upload digital designs to make public for anyone to purchase on fabric, with a small percentage going back to the designer. I saw a chance to provide Christian fabric, Orthodox Christian fabric, publicly available for purchase (with no minimum yardage!) and started doing so in 2017.
In 2024 I started working with another fabric company, Little Cocalico. They are a Christian, family-owned company in Pennsylvania, and have the best quality fabrics, printing, and customer service of all of the US-based print-on-demand fabric companies. I use Little Cocalico for all of the fabric and finished goods I have in my online shop. They have a beautifully curated selection of designers for fabric yardage and home goods. Spoonflower has the corner market on niche fabric, so my designs are publicly available there, but I can drop-ship fabric from Little Cocalico for anyone interested in the substrates they have available.
Print on demand fabric means that more variety and variation of patterns can be made available, without the risk of printing an entire lot of fabric just to discover it's not the print everyone wants. It also means being able to experiment with cut-and-sew designs more readily, so my fabric library quickly grew to include stuffed toys like a guardian angel, other fabric items like bunting banners and cloth books, and a variety of Sunday school materials. Often the hardest part in sewing something is figuring out the pattern or finding the pattern online, printing and taping the pattern together, finding the right fabric, and cutting it out with the sewing steps in mind. When you buy fabric from me to make a child's priest vestment costume or a matryoshka doll, you can get right to the fun part when it arrives.
The down side to this model of producing fabric in small batches for a very niche audience is that my fabric is almost double the cost of quilting cotton in the fabric store. For cut-and-sew projects, the cost includes the benefit that there have been a lot of design, pattern, and print frustrations worked out for you. Print-on-demand is also a low-waste model where the vast majority of fabric printed is actually used, unlike fabric that is printed en masse and floats around the market (or eventually in the dump) for a long time. This is especially good for the fabrics I have that include holy images; it would be untoward to have these fabrics treated the same way. Finally, the high cost accounts for the American labor force used to produce the printed fabric.
A great thing about print-on-demand fabric suppliers is that they offer over 20 different kinds of fabrics to print the same design on, so you can choose the perfect design, and then have it printed on the perfect fabric for your project. Usually you have to look for the perfect fabric first, and hope it comes in the perfect color or pattern. The content and construction of fabric matters. Vestments and liturgical linens are made with polyester satin fibers, woven with damask designs or embellished with commercial embroidery machines. It is the right material for church use, but not for practical use or for church school materials. It is also very hard to sew with! It is slippery, frays quickly, doesn't iron well, and can be damaged with water. If you want to make something for daily use, you need a plain weave cotton. For lightweight baby blankets or bread-rising bowl covers, you need an open weave cotton gauze. For breathable clothing, a cotton knit is perfect. For tea towels and bread cooling bags, you'll want a linen or linen/cotton blend.
To all my fabric lovers out there, I hope you find something in my fabric library that catches your eye and inspiration!