I've got a little list

If you move in online craft circles, you will probably find a number of Americans mourning the demise of Joann's, which was a large fabric and haberdashery chain - apparently a very good one. Exactly the same thing is happening in the SCA, because, of course, a lot of members sew. Not all of us, of course; for some eras you can get at least a vague approximation to garb off the peg (and a vague approximation is fine in the SCA, just as long as you make some effort), and there are also people who have friends or relatives who are happy to sew for them. But, generally speaking, historical garb requires sewing, and if you're something like Tudor it requires a lot of sewing. That means you need, at the very least, fabric; and if you're not handy with embroidery or tablet weaving and you want some trim, you're going to need to get some of that which (at the very least) doesn't look synthetic. Your classic Berisford's ribbon, while wonderful in all kinds of modern contexts, is going to look weird trimming your 14th-century linen surcoat.

So I was on the main server the other night, and there was this American in the "textiles" channel talking about the various places they'd tried; some of them they could definitely recommend, some they weren't quite sure about yet, and others they thought ought to be avoided. And I, of course, said, "well, there's also Minerva." This obviously is not going to be the first port of call for someone in the USA, but it has such a good range that it ought at least to be on the list, especially now that Royal Mail has brought in the "duty paid" postage rate so that USAians can just pay postage plus tax up front and not have any additional nasty surprises sprung on them. (You can imagine just how much they're complaining about that in the armour channels; quite a few people in the SCA get their armour from Poland, because that country is particularly rich in historical armourers, and that's pretty darned expensive to post even without random tariffs... and they are, apparently, pretty random at the moment.) Then another USAian chimed in and recommended a couple more places, and added "don't go to Michael's, they have no idea about cutting fabric in continuous lengths, I once tried to buy 5 yards there and they sold me five 1-yard lengths". That sent me into an empathic shudder. I've had exactly the same experience the one and only time I ever bought on Temu; there was this nice broderie anglaise, which for some reason was sold in yards, so I got out my calculator and decided three would be sufficient. It arrived in three 91-cm lengths. This is why I have not bought anything there since.

At this point I thought... this is good, we're getting a lot of recommendations here, but the nature of Discord is that they tend to vanish off the top of the screen when new messages come in, and so people aren't going to see them unless they know they're there, in which case they can scroll back. Someone, I thought, ought to put them together into a handy document.

Now the trouble with me is that the moment I find myself thinking "someone ought to..." I instantly realise it's likely to be my job, unless there's some very good reason why I can't do it. In this case there was no such reason. So I said, basically, "hold your horses... I'm going to collate this lot into a list, so if you're going to give any more recommendations please at the very least add a web link so I don't have to go hunting for them."

They thought this was a great idea, and one person who'd already made recommendations kindly provided me with the links. Good start. So I then shimmied off to the sewing and crafts server, which is also international, and explained what I was doing. Would people be able to recommend suitable fabric/haberdashery shops in their country (with a website)? I said I needed either good generalists with a decent range of natural or nature-similar fabrics, plain or yarn-dyed, or specialists in one particular type of fabric such as linen. I also wanted to know about people who stocked suitable trims.

Between the SCA and the crafts server, I got 23 usable recommendations in several countries around the globe. I'm quite sure there are more, but 23 is a decent start. Happily one of them turned out to be a US-based site which was very much like Minerva (excellent generalist fabric/haberdashery site with thread matching service), so hopefully our USAian friends will be able to save on postage and weird duties. They're quite a mix, though, and I had to use machine translation for several of them, with varying results. The site shown in the feature photo is Rytex, in Poland, who do nothing but high-end wool fabrics in all weights from what they call "tropical" to coat weight; I can see the lighter wools being very popular with some of our members. There's a US-based silk specialist who imports from all over the Far East, and a linen specialist based in South Korea. I was very pleased to find there was also a hemp specialist on the list, because some of our members have Japanese personas, and linen was a much later introduction to Japan; it's within period for most people, but not for the Japanese, who used things like hemp and yuzu. (I have not found anyone supplying yuzu fibre.) And one of the Finnish sites, which also does a good range of natural fibres, is particularly interesting because of its trims. At the price they're selling them at, they can't possibly be tablet-woven, but great Scott, they do look like it. In addition to that, there are a few good generalists; a few places which are sort of in between (which is to say, they're not exactly either generalists or specialists, but they lean quite heavily towards natural fibres); and a couple of actual historical reproduction fabric sites. The SCA is specifically pre-1600, and the historical reproduction fabrics nominally start around the end of the 18th century, but many of them would also work for a much earlier period as they are either plain or yarn-dyed. A lot of them are cotton, which wasn't used much before 1600 in Europe; however, that is a reasonable stand-in for linen if you're not being too picky. People vary. There are some people who insist on their fabrics being as authentic as possible (and I used to be one of them until I couldn't iron linen any more), and others who aren't too fussy as long as it looks right.

While I was looking at all these sites, I did find a few others, and I ended up rejecting every single site that I found off to one side, as it were; there were a few reasons for this. Either the site was badly laid out, so it wasn't easy to find the group of fabrics you wanted to look at, or it just didn't have a great deal that was suitable. In one case it was both. They weren't particularly bad sites, apart from sometimes needing better organisation; they'd have been all right for modern use, but that obviously wasn't what I was after.

So my next job is to put them all into a document organised geographically (probably in alphabetical order of country, though I'm not quite sure where to list .nl - I do have one Dutch site), with a couple of sentences about each site to say what it's specifically good for. That means if anyone has any further recommendations, there is still time to let me know!