There's nothing quite this stunning in all of the WH official portrait history

[Hekate]

102. >sigh< When the last fabric store left us, one of the craft stores kept stuff for quilters

The craft store has a good selection for those purposes, and some notions.

It's too bad, really. My mother sewed clothes for us to save money, but I could hardly scratch out the time while working full time when my kids were little. At a certain point I realized there was no saving money from home sewing any more, because clothes on sale cost less than the fabric alone, not to mention my time. That would have been the early '80s.

Somewhere in there I read an article in the LA Times about the demise of home sewing for those very reasons. They said mostly it was left to hobbyists, people who really loved sewing for its own sake. The only real savings to be had was if you were sewing your own haute couture, where the cost of the fabric was incidental to the final creation of something that would have cost you thousands to purchase whole.