Oooh, haberdashery!

I am pleased to report that the good old haberdashery shop is alive and well in Bulgaria. They are quite small but very compactly and neatly stocked with a huge array of sewing items. This is quite separate to fabric shops, of which I have seen a few and they really are not much to write home about (I even saw one that apparently sold fabric by the kilogram...).

The particular haberdashery shop I visited was called "From Needle to Thread" which in Bulgarian is the same as the expression "from top to toe" in English. Indeed, they did have everything from A to Z, to top to toe in the world of sewing.

The shop didn't look like much from the outside.

But inside, from wall to floor were buttons in boxes (with the button examples sewn to the front of the boxes), walls of threads, rolls of delicate laces, coloured trims, servicable tapes, buckles, tabs, clips, zippers poking their coloured tabs out of yellow boxes and decorative pins shining in the light. All the DMC and Anchor threads were in little pull out draws behind the counter. In fact, most of it was not self serve, you needed to ask, to get permission to look and then chose.

There were beautiful glass top counters with ribbons laid out like displays of coloured sweets and all the little bits of sewing equipment of needles, hoops, thimbles, tapes, cutters, markers....oh my there is too much to name!

For one Lev (about one AUD) I bought a blue measuring tape, made in Turkey, with a pretty funky font on it.

No problems here with going to the shop and the little thing you want being out of stock. Eat your heart out massive commercialised Australian craft chain store...yes, you know who you are!

I didn't have my camera on me, so pictures are courtesy of the shop's website.