Purple is out. Also brown.

For old times sake, I dropped by my local Hancock Fabrics, which is going out of business.  Can't even begin to estimate how many hundreds if not thousands of dollars I have spent there over the decades, although I haven't patronized it much in recent years as my sewing habits have changed.  I wanted to see if there were any fabulous markdowns that called out to me.

None did, except some $2 a yard fabric that will be great to wrap rolls of quilts before they go under the bed for storage, and a couple of spools of thread.

I was interested to see what was left after several weeks of markdowns.

If you want purple, this is your chance.  Many, many, many bolts of tiny purple prints -- for some reason, many, many duplicates.  I think these shelves are full of only three or four different patterns.  Do the overseers of liquidation send all the purple prints to my store, and all the blue ones to Indianapolis?

Also plenty of brown.

Same theme in the thread department, where the secondary colors were the sole survivors in this rack.  I guess the people who didn't buy the purple prints didn't need any purple thread.

I'm always sorry to see a fabric store go out of business.  Does this reflect declining interest in sewing or just bad management?  I've been to so many going-out-of-business sales over the years it's discouraging.

But there are glimmers of hope, even among the carnage.  The African man ahead of me in line was buying hundreds of yards of fabric.  The clerk asked him if his wife, who had been gliding around in an elaborate floor-length dress and headwrap outfit, did a lot of sewing.

"No," he said, "I do the sewing!"

And you could tell he knew his way around a mess of fabric, expertly winding this length back on the bolt after measuring.  That made me smile.