Sourcing secondhand fabric: online
This is the first part of a planned series of blog posts, where I share my knowledge of shopping for secondhand fabric. This is by no means intended to be an exhaustive list, but more a starting point for anyone new to shopping second hand!
Over the next few months I intend to cover:
shopping for secondhand fabric online
shopping for secondhand fabric in person
secondhand or thrifted fabrics - how to identify natural vs man-made
uses for secondhand fabric in your sewing practice
Plus any other ideas that may occur to me! If there’s something you specifically want me to cover, feel free to drop me a comment. I will say, I’m based in the UK so if you’re reading this in another country, the principles may apply but the websites may not be relevant to you.
We’ll start with some general tips for thrifting secondhand fabric. If there’s one thing I’ve learned over the years about buying secondhand fabric, it’s that you must be constantly vigilant. In an ideal world, I would buy fabric as and when I had a project in mind. Unfortunately, if you want to sew with secondhand fabric, you need to buy when you see it, since it might not be available when you need it. This does come with a certain degree of financial and space privilege, to be able to buy fabric without a specific plan and store it for the foreseeable future. However, I will say, generally buying fabric secondhand does mean you will be paying less than you would have done new, straight from the roll.
You may also have to be flexible and inventive with the fabric you thrift. You will have less, or even no, control over the size of the fabric you find, it will often be pre-cut so you might need 3 metres for your pattern and only be able to source 2. You may have to be creative with pattern placement or change your plan altogether, avoiding pattern matching for example. Whilst this can be viewed as a constraint, in some ways I find it helps my creativity, having to think outside of the box and not just blindly follow the pattern instructions. Some of my favourite sewing projects have been a result of having not quite enough fabric and resorting to colour blocking, for example, or piecing remnants together.
So, here are some of my personal top tips for sourcing fabric online:
follow your favourite brands or people on their social media channels or subscribe to their email list. Most fabric shops will have a newsletter or an Instagram profile and often this is where you will get previews of upcoming drops of fabric. Since secondhand fabric is often in limited quantities, it helps to be one of the first to hear when new fabric is live
Roberta Cummings does the occasional deadstock sale of beautiful fabric
ArkDefo sell deadstock waxed cotton and have an email newsletter
New Craft House sell designer deadstock fabric and have an email newsletter
some people sell fabric directly on Instagram, through destash accounts. Some people do it through their primary account, others have a separate specific destash account. Search ‘destash’ on Instagram to find a plethora of these accounts and give them a follow for when they’re next hosting a sale
the Destash for Kids with Cancer account is run by Lesley, of Sew Sleep Deprived, and opens sporadically for sewists to destash in aid of a cancer charity
secondhand clothing apps, like Depop and Vinted, can be useful tools for sourcing secondhand fabric. They’re primarily used to buy and sell secondhand clothing, but by searching for ‘fabric’ and filtering by ‘art’ as the category on Depop, you can find people selling secondhand fabric. On Vinted just searching for ‘fabric’ with no additional filter will bring up material. Both sites also allow users to sell secondhand textiles, such as bedding and blankets. These can be invaluable sources of material and often works out significantly cheaper than buying fabric in its pure form
bonus tip for Vinted and Depop: don’t discount buying secondhand clothing to use the fabric. I’ve had great success buying cheap secondhand shearling coats to reuse the fabric to line slippers
I’ve had a lot of success with eBay over the years, though its star is on the wane with the growth of apps like Depop and Vinted. I find eBay quite a cluttered and visually overwhelming app these days, the user interface doesn’t appear to have been updated for at least 5 years. That being said, you can pick up vintage wool blankets and secondhand cotton tablecloths for a song, if you can track them down. It can be hard to find genuinely secondhand items these days on eBay, there is so much brand new rubbish listed on there, so you do need to be prepared to put the time into digging
Facebook Marketplace and Gumtree are two apps that cross the boundary between online sourcing, with an in-person collection element. You can find people who are prepared to ship fabric on these sites but I find on Gumtree in particular, there are a lot of scammers so be careful before you part with money. I would personally only buy with cash in person from either of these places, to avoid the risk of being scammed. When I ran Craft & Thrift as a shop, I bought a job lot of vintage Laura Ashley fabric from Facebook Marketplace and 2 boxes of mixed cuts of fabric from a person clearing out her mother’s stash
top tip for using these sites - like or favourite any advert that catches your eye, even if you’re not interested in buying. This helps train the algorithm to show you more of these types of advert. Over time, this is all you’ll see when you check out these sites, which will make regular checking much more efficient for you
Lastly, don’t forget good old Etsy. Etsy is where Craft & Thrift originally began selling secondhand fabric and there are still many good shops on that site
search for ‘secondhand fabric’ and filter by shop location to find secondhand fabric in your area
favourite shops and items in which you are interested, to train the algorithm to show you more of those things
If you have any additional places you have success sourcing secondhand fabric online, please share in the comments! I’ll be editing this post to keep it up to date over time, so will happily add extra resources as they come my way. In the meantime, here’s a pinnable graphic of my 3 top tips, summarised into easy to remember bullet points:
