HANGING BY A THREAD
By Frances Chapman

I went fabric shopping today. I had purchased a little sleeveless dress yesterday, and decided I’d get more use out of it if I made a little jacket to go with it. It seemed a simple plan, so I trotted off to the local fabric shop, where I found a piece I liked and asked about a pattern (in sign language). They said they didn’t have patterns, so I went around the corner to another shop. There I found an equally acceptable piece of fabric, but got the same response when I asked about a pattern. They suggested I try the second floor of the grocery store for ‘patrones’.

Since I needed to pick up some groceries anyway, no problem. In response to my sign language and poor Spanish, the young man there looked at me like I was from Mars. Now schlepping my little bag of groceries, I proceded to the big fabric shop downtown, La Parisiano. Sure enough, they had an equally acceptable fabric, patterns and thread. This would be easy.

It seems McCalls is the only game in pattern books, and one of their patterns costs as much as $15. Then I discovered some racks of patterns, where I found a little jacket pattern for $1.75. I took it to the cashier, who told me I had to take it to the notions counter. There, the clerk wrote up a sales ticket and told me to take that back to the cashier, but she would have to deliver the pattern there. I took my pesos and sales ticket to the cashier, but she told me she could not take money for patterns. I had to pay downstairs for the pattern and bring the receipt back up before she could give me the pattern.

That all done, I finally was armed with the pattern for yardage requirements. I went downstairs to the cutting table, where they promptly cut me 1.5 meters of the fabric, gave me a sales ticket and said (of course) I could not take my unpaid-for fabric back upstairs to select matching thread. I decided that maybe I could skip a step by waiting to pay for the fabric and thread together, since the cutting lady gladly cut a small piece of fabric from the bolt for a thread match.

So up I went again, where after waiting about five minutes I learned that one has to take a number when it’s busy. After another five minutes of waiting, I was able to give the clerk my swatch so she could match the thread. To my utter amazement, after she wrote up the sales ticket, she said I could pay for thread upstairs and promptly bagged my purchase while I took the sales ticket to the cashier’s window and returned to her with the receipt.

Now all I had to do was take the fabric sales ticket to the cashier’s window downstairs, pay, then take that receipt to the pick-up window to get my fabric, and I’m out of there! Mission accomplished with only four stores and three miles of walking. And they all wonder what we do here all day!