Fiber & Fabric Mania! A Travel Guide

Fiber & Fabric Mania! A Travel Guide
Gifted by Direction Press
www.NeedleTravel.com
Reviewed by Jessica Nichols, Editor of FaveQuilts.com

If you're the type of quilter that spends her vacations hunting down the best local quilt shops, the Fiber & Fabric Mania! Travel Guide is for you! This book serves as a directory for every needlework shop in the United States, so you can explore the wonderful world of fabric wherever you are!

Fiber & Fabric Mania! A Travel Guide lists the stores that sell materials and supplies for knitting, quilting, needlepoint, crochet, weaving, spinning, cross-stich, and embroidery all across the United States. The guide focuses on local shops, so big box craft stores are not included. This book celebrates the uniqueness of local shops and their singular sensitivity to regional tastes and trends. The focused approach allows you as a crafty traveler to experience the flavor of local crafters wherever you go and also gives you the opportunity to make crafty friends all over the nation.

The Fiber & Fabric Travel Guide is convenient and easy to use, particularly when you are roadtripping, because it is organized by state and by city. At the beginning of each chapter, you will see a map of the state (or several maps of specific regions, for larger or more populous states), which shows major highways and lists all of the cities and towns that have fiber or fabric shops. This makes it easy for you to plan roadtrips geographically around the shops you would most like to visit. Or, if you know you will be driving along a certain highway to reach another destination, you can plan rest stops in towns that have shops you'd like to see. If you know you will be stopping in a particular town, you can then look up that town within the chapter (towns are listed alphabetically), and see if the fiber or fabric shop in that town suits your needs. You can easily identify what kind of needlework a shop sells by the symbol listed next to its name. For example, all shops that would be of interest to quilters are marked with a "Q" symbol. This system can also be helpful for finding shops near your hometown. Flip open the book to your state and run down the list looking for nearby cities or shops that are marked with the symbol for your favorite craft. Each shop listing also includes the address, so you can easily plug the address into a GPS, even if you are already on the road when you decide to visit a shop!