Learning how to choose fabric comes down to three questions, every single time. What does the pattern actually ask for? How should this fabric drape and behave once it’s a garment instead of a flat cut of yardage? And what will you really pay for it, once shipping and swatches and the inevitable extra half-yard get added in?
Most fabric regret traces back to skipping one of those three. You fall for a gorgeous print, ignore the fact that the pattern wants something with four-way stretch, and end up with a dress that fights you the whole way through construction. Or you buy the right weight but the wrong hand, and the finished piece just feels off. If you want the fiber-level basics first, our fabric fundamentals guide covers how fabrics are made and behave, and the full fabric directory is the place to browse every type by name. This guide is the practical layer on top: how to pick correctly for a specific project, and where to actually buy it now that the fabric-shopping map has changed so much.
Some links below are affiliate links. Prices are 2025-2026 estimates and change often, so always check current pricing.
The Choosing Framework
Start with the pattern, not the fabric you already love. The envelope or the pattern’s fabric requirements section lists specific suggestions, and those aren’t arbitrary. A designer picked cotton lawn instead of ponte knit, or wool crepe instead of quilting cotton, because that fabric is what makes the garment hang and move the way it’s drawn. Treat the suggested fabrics list as your shortcut, and only deviate once you understand what quality you’d be trading away.
Once you have a fabric type or two in mind, learn to read the language stores use to describe drape. Words like fluid, flowing, liquid, or soft drape mean the fabric skims the body and moves, which is what you want for dresses, blouses, and wide-leg pants. Words like crisp, structured, or tailored mean the fabric holds its own shape, which is what collars, blazers, and structured skirts need. A listing that never mentions drape at all is worth a second look before you buy.
Weight matters just as much, and it’s usually measured in ounces per square yard (oz/yd2) or grams per square meter (gsm). Three rough bands cover almost everything you’ll shop for:
- Light (under about 7 oz/yd2): voile, lawn, chiffon, lightweight rayon challis. Good for blouses, linings, summer dresses.
- Mid (about 7 to 11 oz/yd2): quilting cotton, poplin, chambray, ponte, mid-weight linen. Good for shirts, dresses, casual pants.
- Heavy (11 oz/yd2 and up): denim, canvas, wool coating, upholstery weight. Good for jackets, structured bottoms, bags.
If you’re shopping knits, don’t stop at the stretch percentage on the label. Stretch tells you how far a fabric extends, but recovery, whether it snaps back to its original shape afterward, is what actually determines fit and how long the garment lasts. For everyday knit garments like tees and dresses, look for roughly 3 to 5 percent spandex or elastane content. For activewear and swimwear that needs to hold its shape under real strain, look for roughly 8 to 15 percent spandex.
Here’s a trick that costs nothing: before you buy anything new, go flip the care labels on the clothes already hanging in your closet. Note the fiber blends and weights in the pieces you reach for constantly, and separately note the ones you never wear because they pilled, wrinkled unbearably, or just felt wrong on your skin. Build those into a running love list and a never-again list, and shop against them. Your own closet is a better fabric consultant than any review section.
Finally, match care requirements to how you actually live, not how you picture yourself living. A hand-wash-only silk for a toddler’s play dress, or a dry-clean-only wool for pants you plan to wear weekly, will get neglected fast no matter how much you loved the fabric in the store. Our fabric care guide is coming soon and will walk through washing, pressing, and storage by fiber type, but the short version for now: pick fibers whose actual laundering fits your real routine.
Where to Buy Fabric Online
The fabric-shopping landscape looks nothing like it did five years ago. JOANN filed for bankruptcy in January 2025 and closed its remaining stores in stages, shutting the last 444 locations on May 30, 2025. That ended roughly 80 years of JOANN as a brick-and-mortar fabric and craft retailer and put about 19,000 employees out of work. Before that, Amazon quietly shut down Fabric.com in October 2022, folding the 30-year-old brand into its general marketplace as a cost-cutting move. If a roundup you’re reading still links to Fabric.com, it’s out of date. Between those two closures, the two biggest go-to sources for casual fabric shoppers simply disappeared, and buying moved to a wider field of specialty independents. That’s actually good news if you know where to look, because independent shops tend to know their niche far better than a big-box aisle ever did. Below is where to buy fabric online, grouped by what you’re actually sewing.
Designer and apparel fabric. Mood Fabrics is the Project Runway store, known for huge designer-fabric breadth plus a dedicated deadstock and closeout section. It runs a free swatch program (earn one free swatch per $10 spent, up to 5 per order), which makes it easy to check hand and color before committing, though prices run higher than budget stores. Stonemountain & Daughter Fabrics is a 45-plus-year family-owned shop out of Berkeley, California, offering curated, splurge-worthy apparel and quilting fabric with knowledgeable staff behind it. Prices sit on the higher end, but the curation and customer service cut down on guesswork for special projects.
Knits. So Sew English specializes in knits, French terry, modal spandex, bamboo spandex, and ITY, with detailed fabric descriptions aimed squarely at garment sewists. It sells through both its own site and Etsy and has a strong following among knit-garment makers. Raspberry Creek Fabrics covers apparel knits too, cotton lycra jersey, French terry, swim knit, and performance and athletic knits, and it grew from a small Etsy shop into an in-house textile printing operation, so it’s a good source for exclusive knit prints you won’t find elsewhere.
Quilting. Hawthorne Threads, now rebranded to Hawthorne Supply Co. (though still widely called by its original name), curates quilting-cotton collections plus indie sewing patterns out of a renovated warehouse in Red Hook, New York. Fat Quarter Shop specializes in quilting fabric and precuts, fat quarter bundles, jelly rolls, charm packs, from major quilting-cotton brands, and its weekly “Precuts of the Week” sales are a reliable way to try new lines cheaply.
Budget and deadstock. Fabric Mart is family-run and has been in business since 1977, selling designer closeout and deadstock fabric at steep discounts, including a rotating 70-percent-off section. Because it’s closeout stock, selection changes fast, so if you love a bolt, buy enough for the whole project since it may not be restocked. LA Finch Fabrics is woman-owned and sources LA garment-district deadstock and cutting-house remnants, cottons, Ponte, denim, rayon challis, at affordable prices. These are one-of-a-kind lots too, so what’s in stock today may be gone next week.
Specialty and technical. Blackbird Fabrics, based in Vancouver, Canada, is a curated shop for natural fibers like linen, TENCEL lyocell, and EcoVero viscose, plus deadstock and BF-exclusive prints, and it ships worldwide with free shipping over $150 to the US and Canada. Spandex World is the stretch-fabric specialist, Milliskin, printed spandex, mesh, built for swimwear, dancewear, costumes, and activewear, and it also publishes fiber and care guidance for working with high-stretch synthetics. Seattle Fabrics covers outdoor, marine, and technical performance fabric, Sunbrella, GORE-TEX, softshell, athletic and power mesh, along with outdoor-gear patterns. Worth knowing honestly: the physical Seattle storefront is closed to walk-in shoppers, but the company still fills online and phone orders and ships as usual, so don’t plan a visit, just order online. Dharma Trading Co. has sold ready-to-dye natural-fiber fabric (cotton, rayon, hemp, linen, silk) plus fiber-reactive Procion dyes since 1969, and it’s the go-to if a project calls for tie-dye, ice-dyeing, or custom-dyed yardage rather than a printed fabric. Organic Cotton Plus carries GOTS-certified organic cotton in jersey, interlock, flannel, and canvas, including undyed greige fabric ready to dye or print, and it’s the right pick when a project specifically needs certified-organic fiber, not just “natural.”
Custom printing. Spoonflower lets you upload your own design or shop independent-artist prints, custom-printed to order on 25-plus base fabrics. Print-on-demand pricing runs higher per yard than stocked fabric, but it’s the answer when you need an exact print or repeat that doesn’t exist anywhere else.
Indie and vintage. Etsy is a marketplace of independent sellers, useful for unique prints, vintage and retro fabric, and small-batch indie designs. Quality and shipping speed vary a lot by seller, so lean on shop ratings and reviews rather than treating Etsy as one uniform store.
How to Buy Fabric Online Without Getting Burned
Buying fabric sight unseen is a skill, and it’s learnable. A few habits will save you from most of the common disasters.
Read the entire listing before you add anything to your cart. Fiber content percentages, fabric width, weight in oz/yd2 or gsm, and stretch percentage all change how the finished garment looks and behaves, and skimming past any of them is how surprises happen. If a listing gives weight in gsm and you think in ounces, the conversion is simple: 1 oz/yd2 is roughly equal to 33.9 gsm, so divide gsm by 33.9 (or multiply by about 0.0295) to get oz/yd2.
Learn to decode the drape language, the same fluid-versus-crisp distinction from the framework section above, because photos alone can’t show you how a fabric will hang on a body. Study every photo in the listing, especially any scale reference, a ruler, a hand, a model actually wearing the fabric, so you can judge print scale, opacity, and drape realistically instead of guessing from a flat swatch shot.
“When you’re not sure, order the swatch.” That’s the rule, and it holds for pricier cuts especially. A swatch lets you test the color under your own lighting, feel the actual hand, and see how it drapes before you commit to yardage you can’t return.
Read customer reviews specifically for color accuracy, opacity or see-through issues, fraying at the cut edge, and how the fabric behaves after washing. These are the details a product photo will never tell you, and past buyers usually will.
Check the return policy before you buy. Cut-to-order yardage is very often final sale, so factor that risk into how much you’re willing to order sight unseen versus how much you order after a swatch confirms it.
Keep a simple purchase log: fabric name, source, fiber content, weight, what you made with it, and how it performed. It sounds like overkill until the second time you try to remember which shop had that perfect ponte, and can’t.
Wholesale and Deadstock Fabric
Wholesale buying isn’t for every sewist, but it makes real sense for small apparel brands, cosplay and costuming groups, theater and school drama departments, event and dance-team organizers, and anyone sewing the same pattern in bulk. If you’re making one dress, skip this section. If you’re making twelve of the same costume, keep reading.
Buying by the roll instead of the yard can bring genuine savings. Bulk polar fleece sold in roughly 60-yard rolls has been discounted around 50 to 60 percent per yard compared to single-yard pricing, felt has run around 48 percent off, and broadcloth around 45 percent off. Treat those as ballpark figures rather than guarantees, since discounts vary by seller and fabric type. Minimum order requirements vary widely too. Some wholesalers require a business account and case or roll minimums, while others will sell a single roll to anyone with no account needed at all, so check the seller’s minimum-order policy before assuming you’re locked out as a hobbyist.
Whatever the scale, order 1 to 2 sample yards before committing to a full roll, especially from a new wholesale source, so you can confirm color, hand, and weight match what you expect once you’re looking at the whole bolt. And when you’re buying multiple rolls or bolts of the same fabric, check that they share a dye lot, because fabric dyed in separate batches can show visible color variation even under the identical product name. Add 10 to 15 percent extra yardage on top of your calculated pattern requirements to cover cutting waste, matching prints or naps, and mistakes, especially on bulk orders where reordering the exact lot may not be possible later.
Deadstock fabric deserves its own mention because it solves two problems at once. It’s leftover yardage from a designer’s or mill’s production run, excess that would otherwise go to a landfill, sold off at a discount instead. Buying it is budget-friendly and more sustainable than virgin-production fabric, since you’re using up material that already exists rather than asking for more to be made. Mood Fabrics runs its own deadstock and closeout section, LA Finch Fabrics deals specifically in LA garment-district deadstock and remnants, and Fabric Mart sells deadstock designer closeouts as its whole business model. There’s also FabScrap, a New York City-based nonprofit that collects and resells commercial textile scraps and remnants, with a second location in Philadelphia, and it’s an active, real option for individuals as of 2026, not just industry accounts.
Buying Fabric on a Budget
Fabric doesn’t have to come from a fabric store at all. Thrifted flat sheets, curtains, and tablecloths repurpose beautifully as garment fabric, and the yardage math works out better than you’d guess. A queen flat sheet, roughly 90 by 102 inches, yields on the order of 5 or more yards of standard 45-inch-wide-equivalent fabric once you account for cutting it down, though the exact yield depends on how you lay out your pattern pieces (our yardage math guide walks through calculating exactly what a pattern needs). Check remnant bins too, at any fabric store, physical or online, for end-of-bolt pieces sold at a steep discount, which are perfect for smaller projects, test garments, or accessories.
Watch for seasonal sales. Post-holiday, end-of-season, and anniversary sales at online fabric retailers are when yardage prices drop the most, and they pair well with thrifted linens if you’re stitching up seasonal or holiday projects that don’t need your best fabric anyway. Use inexpensive muslin or calico for toiles (test garments) before you cut into your good fabric, so fit problems get caught on cheap yardage instead of an expensive cut. And sign up for newsletters at the fabric shops you like. Most online fabric retailers offer a first-order discount code, commonly 10 to 15 percent off, purely for joining the mailing list, which is free money if you were going to order anyway.
Choose by Purpose
The softest fabrics for pajamas. Modal is an ultra-soft, silky-draping fiber made from beech-tree pulp that stays soft wash after wash and is more breathable and absorbent than cotton, which is why it’s a top pick for sleepwear. Bamboo rayon is naturally breathable and moisture-wicking, drawing sweat away from the body to help you stay cool overnight, and it’s prized for that same soft, silky hand. Tencel lyocell is made from sustainably sourced wood pulp, often eucalyptus, through a closed-loop process, and it feels smooth and silky with a cooling, thermoregulating hand and a beautiful drape. Cotton flannel is brushed on one or both sides for a cozy, insulating texture that retains warmth without overheating, the classic choice for winter pajamas. Double gauze uses two loosely woven layers of lightweight cotton stitched together for an airy, breathable fabric with a soft, slightly crinkled hand, good for warm-weather sleepwear.
Luxury fabrics worth the splurge. Silk charmeuse is a lightweight, glossy-faced silk weave with a fluid drape, the classic luxury fabric for slip dresses and eveningwear. Duchess satin is heavier, a crisp silk or silk-blend satin with body and shine, used for structured formalwear and bridal pieces. Cashmere is an exceptionally soft, insulating wool from cashmere goats, prized for lightweight warmth in sweaters and outerwear. Fine merino wool is finer and softer than standard sheep’s wool, with less itch and a smoother hand, good for garments worn close to the skin. High-quality linen is breathable and durable, softening with wear and wash, and it’s valued in luxury ready-to-wear for its texture and drape. One tip that applies to all five: closeout sections at shops like Fabric Mart or Mood’s deadstock area are where luxury fibers show up at prices you’d actually pay, so check there before paying full retail on silk or cashmere.
Everyday apparel workhorses. Cotton lawn and poplin are lightweight, crisp cotton wovens ideal for button-down shirts and blouses that need structure without stiffness. Rayon challis is a soft, fluid woven with excellent drape, well suited to flowy dresses and skirts. Ponte knit is a double-knit with structure and minimal stretch recovery loss, used for fitted dresses, leggings, and structured knit garments that need to hold their shape. Cotton-spandex jersey is the everyday knit-tee fabric, soft and breathable, with enough stretch and recovery (typically 3 to 5 percent spandex) for comfortable fitted basics. Denim and twill are sturdy, closely woven cotton or cotton-blend fabrics that hold up to wear, used for jeans, jackets, and structured bottoms.
Every pattern in our library names its suggested fabrics and exact yardage, so you can shop precisely instead of guessing. Browse the 155+ printable PDF sewing patterns if you’d rather start from the project and work backward to the fabric.
Frequently Asked Questions
How do I choose fabric for a sewing project?
Start with the fabric type or types recommended on your pattern envelope, then match weight (light, mid, or heavy), drape (fluid versus crisp), and stretch-and-recovery to that recommendation, and finally filter by care requirements you’ll actually keep up with.
Where is the best place to buy fabric online?
There’s no single best store. Mood Fabrics and Stonemountain & Daughter cover designer apparel fabric, Fat Quarter Shop and Hawthorne Threads specialize in quilting cotton, So Sew English and Raspberry Creek focus on knits, Fabric Mart and LA Finch offer deadstock and budget pricing, and Spoonflower handles custom prints. Pick based on what you’re actually sewing.
Is it cheaper to buy fabric online or in store?
Online is now often the cheaper and more convenient option for most sewists, especially since JOANN’s May 2025 closure removed the main big-box in-store alternative in the US. Online deadstock and closeout retailers, Fabric Mart and LA Finch in particular, tend to undercut standard retail pricing.
What is deadstock fabric?
Deadstock is leftover yardage from a designer’s or mill’s production run that didn’t get used or sold. It’s diverted from landfill and sold at a discount, making it both a budget and a sustainability win.
Can individuals buy wholesale fabric?
Often yes. Minimums vary by seller, but some wholesalers sell single rolls with no business account required, so an individual hobbyist can access wholesale pricing on things like fleece, felt, or broadcloth rolls.
What is the softest fabric for pajamas?
Modal, bamboo rayon, and Tencel lyocell are consistently rated among the softest options thanks to their silky hand and cooling drape, with cotton flannel and double gauze as the best choices when warmth or breathability, respectively, matter more than pure softness.
How much extra fabric should I buy?
Add roughly 10 to 15 percent beyond your pattern’s stated yardage requirement to cover cutting waste, print or nap matching, and mistakes, more if the fabric has a directional print or large repeat.
What happened to JOANN and Fabric.com?
JOANN filed for bankruptcy in January 2025 and closed all remaining stores by May 30, 2025, ending its run as a national fabric and craft chain. Fabric.com was shut down by Amazon back in October 2022 as a cost-cutting move. Both once-dominant sources are gone, and buyers have shifted to specialty independent online fabric stores.