Fabric Market ‘Mecca’

Hold on to your caps all you crafty fabric, yarn, button, textile lovin people and grab a bucket to drool in…a BIG one.You are going to like this.

While in Guangzhou, China last weekend one of the more memorable things we did was visit the Zhongda Fabric Market.

The stats:

• 4 different Zones: Fabric Zone, Fur zone, Support material Zone and Curtain/hometextile Zone
• covers nearly 50,000 sq.m.
• more than 1000 brand traders
• You can find: silk, cotton, colored fabric, fabric for men’s garments, satin, chemical fabric, fabric for wedding dress, jean, lining, plush, flocking, paillette, lace, buttons and on and on and on.
• If you can imagine it, they have it.

Walking in was stunning to the senses. There were hundreds of people going about their business on the ground floor hauling bike loads, car load and arm loads of fabric to and frow. The sound of car horns was almost overbearing. And looking up the levels just keep going and going and it seems impossible to ever cover everything.

The shops offer FULL service. It looked like textile war planning with teams of people seated at tables with hundreds of different samples in front of them and books and notebooks for strategic planning. They help you pick, plan, and match what you want to make and then send it to the seamstresses to be completed asap.

We wandered around for quite some time (several hours), just looking with mouths hanging open…and slightly dazed and confused looks.

The amount of things to see was overwhelming. I think the boys were more fascinated by amount of stuff than actually interested in shopping for fun new fabrics (I was dancing a jig on the inside I was so excited), but they were both good sports.

Thankfully the shop owners were very friendly and okay with snapping some shots of some favorites.

I purchased the following fabrics. They were both SUPER-duper cheap, just about 10 RMB ($1.46 USD) per meter and YES you can haggle. The blue circle one will end up being pillows for the guest room and the black Asian inspired fabric will be a table runner for those Chinese dinner parties we’ll be having once we return from our adventure of living in China.

We didn’t end up seeing everything. As you can imagine that was nearly impossible. But we learned a few things…

Strategy for next time (and there will DEFINITELY be a next time):

• be prepared with patterns/examples
• bring along a translator as gesturing can only get you so far (you can imagine what acting out pillows and table runners is like)
• come on a weekday when 1000 of the stores are actaully open (we didn’t find the raw silk stores as it appeared they were all closed on the weekend-yes I’m still crying)
• take advantage of having the seamstresses there and plan to make time to have things made
• find golfing near by for the boys (at least a full round as that will give us at a half day at the fabric market)