Artquiltmaker Blog

I was visiting Grama over the weekend and took a few minutes out of the constant care and cleaning to visit with Susan, have lunch and take a trip to the quilt shop in Northridge. I used to live near Northridge and the place looks so different now. I don’t know if my eyes have different standards for how streets should look or if the streets have really changed or if I never went to this area of Northridge. The area we drove in had lots of concrete, not much green, signs stacked on top of each other right near the sidewalk to announce the businesses in each strip mall. I guess I am not used to seeing the types of strip malls they have here. I don’t know.

Regardless, Susan came and got me (what a saint) so Mom and Grama could go to Grama’s lunch bunch. She also did all the research and found a pizza place that served GF pizza and a quilt store right down the street. Perfect!

The pizza place was called Pizza Rev and they had GREAT GF standards for handling the ingredients. The only thing I didn’t like was how loud the place was. However, Susan and I could hear each other and we couldn’t really hear the people around us, which was good. I would go there again in a heartbeat.

We chatted quite a bit at lunch. I am interested in Susan’s remodeling project. Of course, she had questions about Grama, we talked about our kids and, of course, quiltmaking!

Much too soon, we had to go to the quilt store. 😉 We could have talked for a long time.

Candy’s Quiltworks is a big shop. In the picture above, you can see that there is one of those rolling doors like auto garages have. The walls were cinder block, which is odd to a girl from earthquake country. I assume it is reinforced, but in an earthquake, I think I would run outside.

None of the above has anything to do with the shop. Candy’s has over 10,000 bolts of fabric, at least according to one of the clerks. I believe it. Their entire front wall and one side was filled with bolts of batiks. One entire side wall was tone on tone fabrics. The middle was filled with different lines of fabric, mostly together, as well as an aisle of blacks on whites and whites on blacks.

The quilts in the photo above are two of the sample quilts they had hanging. I thought there was a lot more space for samples, but perhaps they were in between hangings? The one with the white background looked like it could be a Jelly Roll quilt. I thought it looked like an updated log cabin version.

This is part of the Notions area. They focused on Creative Grids rulers (saw a Tumbler and a strip maker as well as others), but also had some specialty rulers from Eleanor Burns.

I didn’t see any Fons & Porter rulers, but they have a wide variety of the Marti Michell rotary template sets and rotary rulers such as the 60 degree triangle rulers. I also saw the Clear Angle ruler needed to cut the hexagons in that strip piecing method I used (originally on Little Bluebell’s blog) a few years ago for the Attack of the Hexies quilt.

This is also where they keep their sale fabrics – $5.99/yard. Can you believe how many bolts of sale fabrics they have? I didn’t really do more than glance at them, but it seemed like a lot of novelty prints.

The shop had these racks of books all over the store. I wasn’t in the market for any books today, so I only took a quick look at them. From what I saw, they were a little off the beaten path. It was an interesting mix of books and I think you would find some interesting titles. I think it would have been a little difficult to find a specific book.

There were  a wide variety of panel projects hanging all over the store. In the photo with the books you can see some Halloween panels (the one with the pumpkin looks like it has a Halloween bunting as well), a gingerbread house panel. I saw panels from which you could make aprons and other small accessories.

These things are hard to display. I don’t see them in quilt shops up north, so I don’t know if they sell or not. I got one as part of a pack when I bought the fabric to make the Frosted Stars quilt. I thought it was fairly hideous, but I used it for the back anyway. This was a good way to display them as shoppers couldn’t avoid seeing them. The annoying thing was that we had to hold them out of the way for each other so we could see the fabric.

In another area, I saw Aurifil thread, mostly in neutrals. I saw a HUGE selection of DMC floss.

TFQ and I have been lamenting the lack of tone-on-tones now that solids have returned with force and bold modern prints are such the rage. I love solids, but sometimes you need a good tone-on-tone to add interest to your fabric selections.

Candy’s has you covered. This is a picture of HALF the wall of tone-on-tones. It looked like they had every tone, shade and hue of tone-on-tone imaginable there. I was very disappointed that I didn’t need to buy some tone-on-tones to fill in for a project.

Near different groups of fabrics, the staff has posted patterns and pamphlets with different ideas for quilts, bags and small accessories as well as baby projects.

You can see a little peek on the top of the bolt shelves of other stuff. The tops of the shelving were stuffed with different things: Jelly Rolls, patterns, kits for handbags (we saw some by Riley Blake that had everything you needed to go home and start sewing a gift.), fat quarter packs, though not a lot, and a multitude of other stuff that I can’t even remember.

I don’t think I have ever seen this many batiks in one place. It was an amazing number of batiks.

I don’t like those kind of shelves, normally, but in this case I think it worked well for two reasons: 1) the aisle was big enough to so I could get far enough back to see the different shades and tones; and 2) there were a lot of bolts of batik fabric.

I was kind of looking for a background for the Russian Rubix. I was thinking of a white with some grey on it. Shockingly, we didn’t find any of those colors. There didn’t seem to be any white batiks at all.

I really could have bought a piece of almost every one of these batiks. I am really noticing how they glow in projects near regular quilting cotton.

On top of the shelves, you can see more of the samples and projects.

I have never seen as many novelty fabrics in one place. They had as many junk food fabrics as a person could wish for. I saw some of the RJR food fabrics and was tempted for the other two food quilts I want to make, but refrained.

We saw a ton of baby fabric. Susan noticed the American Jane Punctuation fabric and several other lines from a few years ago. They might be worth calling if you are looking for something out of print.

There was a whole aisle of Asian fabrics.

We really had a short amount of time to visit this store, so I wasn’t able to look in detail at all of the fabric. It will definitely be worth another trip.

Actually I may not have seen this much fabric in one place in California ever. I have seen this much fabric in one place in Lancaster County Pennsylvania.

This is a shot from the restroom across the store to the opposite wall. The back door, where we entered would be to your left if you were in the store.

In the area to the left of that rounder of pink were all of their charm packs. there were piles of Jelly Rolls that were just the beginning of the Jelly Roll Extravaganza (not to leave out Anthropologie strips and Bali Pops) available at Candy’s.

They also had patterns galore in that rack and all over the store.

The store was a bit messy. I think it is hard when there is so much inventory. All in all, though, worth the trip. As I said, I would go there again.

Vital Statistics:
Candy’s Quiltworks
8549 Reseda Blvd
Northridge, California
(818) 349-7397
(between Napa and Chase)

There is no sign in front and the windows are tinted black. We went around and parked in back, but found out that there was a front door later.

Why Should You Care: you might have to travel to Northridge someday. This would be a great shop to visit if you need to get away from a conference or a little too much family for a few minutes.