Fabric Shop in Bergerac, France

We're home again from our trip to Portugal and I did manage to stow a few [!!] fabric purchases in the motorhome to bring back.

I shall be blogging about the pieces and where they were bought very soon but for this quick blog I thought I'd share the photos of the biggest fabric store I visited and this one happened to be in Bergerac on the way down.

I bought 4 pieces but as you can see it was difficult to know what to pick out of this fantastic choice. These photos were taken from the middle of the shop and if I'd turned around 180 degrees the photo would have shown as much space again but this part taken up by curtain fabrics, faux leather, towelling, lace and plastic sheeting for tables etc.

There was so much it was almost overwhelming and although this was on about day 4 of our 5 week trip I could have happily spent the other 30 days there. However, I would then have missed out on the other fabric finds along the way.

In Nazare, Portugal we came across a very small fabric shop but it was dedicated to just men's fabric. Beautiful shirting cottons and suiting fabrics. We did buy some winterweight for John and I'll be making him a shirt from it and blogging about it after the summer. 

A bit further on in the same town was another shop stocked with lots of diverse fabrics and run by an aged gentlemen who couldn't work the electronic till. He kept keying in the different lengths and prices of each piece and as he got 2 or 3 in correctly he'd make a mistake and wipe the whole lot off to start again. Then he'd key in the price instead of the length. I began to wonder if we weren't on the set for a new TV comedy series!  We spent longer waiting for him to tell us what I owed than it did to choose 4 pieces of fabric but as we weren't in a rush it was quite entertaining. 

There were several towns on our route through France and Spain to Portugal and eventually to Alvor on the south coast but our daily pattern tended to be to drive during the morning and find a suitable place to stop for the night by lunchtime. After a quick bite to eat we'd then set off to explore the local area only to find that the habit in this part of the world of taking a siesta and closing for several hours in the middle of the day meant that even though we may have come across a few more fabric outlets they were closed. This was maybe a blessing as it stopped me buying more than I did and if we'd been stopped on the way home we may well have been overweight [and not just from us having eaten too much and drunk too much vino - well we were on holiday as we kept telling ourselves]

Anyway the washing machine has been doing overtime and we're back to our normal routine now so I shall be getting into my sewing room very soon and putting some of the ideas I've had plenty of time to work on into practice. I'll be back soon to blog about them.