Buying fabric in Hong Kong turned out to be a bit of a different experience than anywhere else we’ve been so far.  We looked up where we might be able to buy some fabric and found a whole lot of shops all in one area of town.  Hong Kong has a great subway system, so we took a ride over there and this is what we found:

Hong Kong's typical fabric shop

The whole district was made up of these shops!

There were several blocks full of little shops and the little shops were full of fabric samples.  They had hundreds of different fabrics available, but none in stock!  This was a pretty big problem for us since we only had a day or so more left in town and they said it would take at least three days go order any amount of the patterns we were interested in.  They did, however, very kindly let us take as many of the sample swatches as we wanted.

For a while we thought that we would just have to collect a bunch of tiny bits of fabric and hope that they could somehow be wrestled into the quilt.  There were lots we liked and so we gathered four different cards of samples.

Just when we were about to call it a day we walked past a shop that was a little different.  They had only a few samples hanging outside and hundreds of bolts of those same couple of fabrics inside.  It looked as though it was the supplier for the people who make the souvenirs that we had seen in a lot of the markets in town.  They were nice enough to sell us a meter of our favorite design, a beautiful dark blue with dragons on it.

We bundled it all up and sent it along, so who knows, maybe the small samples will still have a chance to make it into the quilt!

Our fabric from Hong Kong