Fabric shopping in Aachen

As some of you may have seen I recently spent a few days in a small city in Germany called Aachen (or Aix-La-Chapelle, if you’re French). Situated less that 5km from the Dutch border and almost as close to the Belgian border, this little medieval city is an interesting and pretty place to spend a few summer days wandering the streets and exploring.

One thing I like to do whilst on holiday is look for local fabric shops – having never been one for buying lots of naff plastic souvenirs, I like things I can look back on that also have a practical use. Fabric fits that bill nicely as once it has been made up into a garment etc it will bring back lots of lovely holiday memories!

Aachen is only a small city but we stumbled across a few crafty shops during our wandering. The first was this beautiful wool shop called Görg Görg. As I am not a knitter and wouldn’t really know where to start with wool buying, I didn’t go in but the shop looked beautiful! They also had a beautiful yarn-bombed bicycle outside!

On the next road along from our hotel, we stumbled across a shop called Stoff-Magie. They had a large selection of printed jerseys, a lot of which I would say is aimed a those sewing for children. They did have a large selection of sewing and craft magazines and not just current issues, so it was nice to be able to thumb through some back issues.

We wandered across the city to Der-rote-Faden. Down a quiet little street near the university, this shop again had a really broad selection of jersey fabrics, but their woven fabrics were quite limited. They did have a large cabinet of Burda patterns too and their prices seemed reasonable.

 

We then went on the hunt for Stoffe Tetik. (It sounds like we spent all day doing this but Aachen is so small and walkable that this probably only took a couple of hours to criss-cross the city!) This shop was smaller than the other two we had visited previously and again had a good range of knits for kids – is this a typically German thing? Their range of wovens was not as broad as you would find in the UK but what they did have was great. This shop also had lots of remnants hung up or in baskets outside for a few € or less. This was the only shop I bought anything from – just one metre of a beautiful pink cotton jersey print. Hayden also bought some fabric – a mature choice but it’s a really lovely quality jersey so I can’t wait to sew it up!

 

 

Advertisement