#Joann fabrics rant

[aristotlencheese]

tldr: stop being fucking assholes to Joann’s employees. If you’re sale shopping refrain from making that super funny (it’s not funny) joke about how loosing my job is convenient for you. And know that I hate rich people. Someday when we’re hungry I have the last name of the first people I will want on my plate.

As a Joann’s employee I am pleading with the public. STOP TRASHING MY GODDAMN STORE AND THEN GETTING MAD THAT ITS MESSY. WE KNOW. We have 3 people working at any given time, MAYBE 4 on a special occasion. STOP grabbing overstock bins and using them as your carts. 9/10 times you empty them into random parts of our store and then when we go to find them for a customer or to put them out if we have any time WE CANT FIND IT. It’s not cute, quirky or funny. I fucking hate you so much will call my poor assistant manager to back me up when I tell you to not do it ever again, and I’m not going to be nice about it.

My queue is a mess, you think you’re cute for putting your tag on my shelf but in reality it’s just something I will be written up for. My aisles are a mess, it’s not funny when you take the appliqués and hang them up to make an inappropriate word because I will be yelled at by some grown woman for letting it happen. My cut counter is a mess because you invade my coworkers space to take a look in our carts of go backs and just throw things wherever you want. My bathroom is a mess because you throw toilet paper everywhere and plug our sinks with it and leave the faucet running.

Even working at 100 percent running through the store I can’t get everything done. And to top it all off I have to stay even later because people don’t understand that closing time means people need to be out of the store, not it’s the last minute to shove yourself in the door and promise you’ll only be a minute (it’s never a minute).

So please I’m on my hands and knees groveling and begging for everyone to just shut up for 10 fucking seconds while I’m helping you so that I can tell you you are swiping your gift card wrong and that my computer is slow instead of running your mouth complaining about how “this is why you’re losing your job” (actual quote)

It’s not. I’m loosing my job because Rich people got together and decided playing poker with thousands of Americans jobs was fun enough the first time to do it again. It’s because there’s an entire company (looking at you Gordon brothers) who just buys and liquidates stores to turn a profit. It’s because Rich people who don’t have REAL jobs can’t be bothered or trusted with what the public want for the life of them. It was never about your money, only their money. It was never about people not wanting to work only cutting corners to give the people at the top bonuses.

So if you do any of these things or get upset when I let a couple of the thousands of homeless people in our city sleep under the old now unused cart return under the awning I will get upset I will tell you to mind your business I will put you in time out and make you wait for my manager to ring you out.

You’re Adults and you need to start acting like it.

Cosplayers, Furries and other crafters and artists of Tumblr, I love you so much. I will miss you and so will most at our store (except for our judgey old lady clique but tbh they only work mornings so it’s okay)

[chaoticgabby]

"Why are you sad that Joann is closing? Why not take the opportunity to contribute to other, much better local crafts/quilting shops?"

A lot of people dont have a local craft store or quilt shop. Most people dont have anything like that. What replaces Joann are the only other big-box stores: Michael's & Hobby Lobby (and let's not get started on why people would not want to shop there).

That's the reality of urban sprawl & the monopolization of an industry. You are more likely to have access to a big-box store than a "local crafts store." So, yeah, people who aren't from a major city are going to be sad about Joann even though it killed off any mom-and-pop fabric shops years ago. People aren't in praise of Joann. People are devestated now that there's nothing left.

There are thousands, probably tens of thousands of shoppers, including local artists who sourced their materials there & grannies who can't just take a day trip to the next city to get yarn. A lot of these people live in RURAL buttfuck America & can only afford to go to the next city to stock up.

Not to mention the fact that apparel sewists have no use for quilting fabrics. Im speaking mainly for my own community, the cosplay community, which primarily uses apparel fabrics or fabrics that are unique or comminly used, such as a heavy duty fabrics, vinyl, & Yaya Han's own contribution. Yes, it is lovely to pay a visit to any local quilt shop, if you have one, but it does not replace Joann.

And finally, Joann is just ONE example of a big-box store that monopolized an entire industry & is now losing out to ONLINE retailers, or conglomerates such as Amazon. Same thing happened to Party City. Can't find any brick & mortar party shops anymore.

Now apply that logic to local groceries & brick-and-moratar businesses, and you start to see why people grieve over things like this. Local stores have been gone, and they've been gone for years. And they have left a shell where a thriving town once was. People HATE big-box stores, but it is ALL they have. And youre telling people not to grieve?

[homesickatspace-camp]

Oh, great. Another staple of the crafting world bites the dust. Joann is closing all its stores, and honestly, it’s just another reminder of how awful the economy is right now. People can barely afford rent, groceries, and gas—who has money left for hobbies? Crafting used to be an affordable, creative escape, but now even buying a few yards of fabric feels like a luxury.

Let’s be real—Joann didn’t just sell fabric and craft supplies; it was a haven for DIYers, small business owners, and anyone who wanted to create something with their own hands. Now, thanks to rising costs and shrinking budgets, fewer people can even justify spending money on hobbies. And when people stop buying, stores shut down. It’s a vicious cycle, and we’re all paying the price.

Small businesses that rely on Joann for supplies? Struggling. People who loved taking their kids to pick out craft projects? Out of luck. Employees who spent years working there? Unemployed. And where are we supposed to shop now? Not everyone wants to buy everything online, and other craft stores are either disappearing or jacking up prices because they know they can.

The worst part? This isn’t even surprising anymore. We’ve reached a point where companies we grew up with are dropping like flies because no one can afford anything extra. First, it was restaurants, then bookstores, and now craft stores. What’s next? Are we just going to sit in our houses, staring at the walls because even having a hobby is too expensive?

Joann closing isn’t just about losing a store—it’s about losing another piece of normal life, another reminder that everything is getting harder and more expensive. And honestly? It sucks.

[myemuisemo]

The Joann closure list is baffling

The 500-store closure list is out, and it's bizarre. They're closing the nice, newish, well-maintained store in Turlock and keeping open the tatty little understaffed store in Modesto, the one where they turned the heat off in January. (Yes, it's California; but it's like being in a refrigerator -- the poor employees!)

I feel like I should have checked to see if they already closed Modesto when I wasn't looking. Turlock is a slightly smaller store, but it's also paying almost 20% less rent per square foot (someone did a spreadsheet from the bankruptcy filing!) and sited in a shopping center with appealing anchor stores. The Modesto store crouches miserably in a back corner of the Target parking lot, behind the drive-through Starbucks and the former site of the used-book store, with no signage visible from a major street.

You can't tell me Modesto was making massive sales numbers when the shelves were always empty.

Sacramento news station KCRA confirms that Modesto and Roseville are the only stores in their broadcast area slated to stay open.

People from Stockton are not going to drive to Modesto for fabric and yarn. No Stocktonite ever has said "let's go to Modesto to shop." It is not a thought that can be thunk by a resident of Stockton. I feel like Joann's corporate decision-makers are creating a situation where most sewists and crafters forget their store exists, because it's not worth the drive to browse in person nor to get in-store pickup for online purchases. This is not Los Angeles, where people drive 40 minutes for whatever. This is a long haul through the near-perpetual traffic jam at the CA-99 interchange with the Manteca Bypass, followed by the horrors of the Briggsmore Overpass, which is so baffling that the Modesto Bee used to have a humor columnist who regularly pilloried it. I can negotiate the Briggsmore Overpass with ease because I was born to this life, but outsiders freak out.

My mood is worsened by having compromised my ethics because I only needed a $2 pack of thin elastic, and Hobby Lobby was the one craft store directly on the way home from today's meetings. They are proof that hell has a really good real estate team.

Honestly, the only thing Joann corporate could have done to make me happy is to be entirely other, better people for the past 30 years. Don't devour local fabric stores, don't over-expand and over-leverage, don't cut staff below sustainable levels, and don't conspire with a major liquidator to fail at recovery from the first bankruptcy. Give me a time machine.

[yossdillo]

this! THIS!!!

TL;DR as someone who used to work at Jo-Ann's, while I'm not happy about them being shut down I'm also not surprised.

this was going to be a bunch of tags but adding to the post is easier to read: I used to work at one of these places and even before I left they were making bad decisions for the stores, and everyone on ground level was feeling it.

a few examples off the top of my head:

•lots of pre-made stuff and home decor, not a lot of raw materials for crafting

•things we had: fully finished bird baths and lawn decor, kits for making just licensed character crafts, modular interior decor that was all boring

•things we didn't have: materials for soap and candle making, variety in things like yarn, buttons, and thread, wool roving and felting supplies

•insisting on having classes and not putting in the effort to make that system viable (this is why I left BTW, I was putting charge of education and that damn near killed me and is worth a separate rant on its own)

•focusing more on seasonal decor and finished items than staples that crafters were coming regularly to pick up

•not giving our direct supervisors enough hours to make sure the store was appropriately covered, the longer it went on the worse it got; we slowly went from being slammed on weekends and holidays to being slammed consistently throughout the week.

•we had two framers during my time there. both of them were highly skilled individuals with knowledge in different kinds of art and preservation. neither of them were given the time, respect, or compensation they deserved and went off to better jobs.

•and that brings up something else, I realized the work environment was bad when one of our co-workers quit, went to a grocery store chain that is very difficult to get a job at, and came back to visit looking 10 years younger and I will swear on a Bible that's true!

honestly though, one of the things about a job that a lot of people will say rings true: people don't leave jobs, they leave management. my supervisors unfortunately were not up to the task of properly mitigating all of these issues, and instead of fighting for what we needed to do our job well just pushed us to work harder even though we were exhausted, undermanned, and underpaid. I'm fully aware that this is something they suffer from their own supervisors, but the blame chain has to end somewhere and it looks like it ended with the company being shut down.

I'll probably think of more points after hitting reblog on this. I feel bad for any of my old co-workers who might still be there with this going on, I hope they get appropriately compensated for their jobs suddenly being taken from them but I'm not holding my breath. it's just really unfortunate overall, in some misguided attempt to keep the company relevant corporate made decisions that killed it. this isn't even talking about a removal of the slew of highly useful coupons and/or taking competitors coupons, which made life easier for some of the customers (heaven forbid!), or how prices went up on everything to a point where even buying a spool of thread seems like a big decision now. doesn't even cover how another Joann's in my area regularly has issues with keeping the store properly lit, all of the stores getting leaky roofs, the apps being pretty much useless because theft is such a problem...

I really hope that other craft stores in our area take notes, because I see that Michaels and Hobby Lobby doing a lot of similar stuff (at least customer-facing-wise) and I do not see it going well for them either.

People are blaming CRAFTERS for JoAnn closing stores. As if interest in every kind of handmade craft hasn't skyrocketed over the last five years. As if these stores haven't priced themselves out of business, and replaced all of their crafting items with cheap decor. More and more people are teaching themselves to knit and crochet while JoAnn and Hobby Lobby and Michael's cut their yarn sections in half, and then have the audacity to say "it's a dying art."

[gracie-eilish]

hi baby girl, I miss your cute self. hope you are having a great day!

hi loveyyyyyyyyyy!!!!! ur so nice☺️🥹 i’m still hereeeeee!! gracie is just on spring break🌈🫧🌅🦄✨🪻🦋🍹🌸🌊

i’m not on spring break. spring break doesn’t exist in the real world. real world sucks lmao.

BUT i have not been writing the last few days to let my brain come back from being mush. she’s molding back together like a little ice cube in those fun shaped ice molds. fear not, gracie will be back soon if the problems at work somehow get resolved instead of dumped onto gracie😀

ANYWAYS! i shall be using your ask as a “spring break” update from gracie!

🍹me and my mom went shopping on sunday, and i got my glasses fixed so they don’t give me headaches anymore! i also was cracking up, im at that weird point in ur 20s where i was so excited about this little oil and vinegar bottle set. and then i bought it. but i have no house of my own for them so they’re sitting in my little “adult things for when i move” corner. it was only seven dollars and its pink with bows on it. a steal if i do say so myself.

🍹on monday i went to work boo boring ik but i did get my little purple jellycat bunny so day = redeemed.

🍹today i slept in SO LONG and i took a yummy everything shower. ogs remember my everything shower rants ogs meaning anyone who’s followed me longer than 20 minutes. i just got here. and then i ran errands but i got everything i needed. now im packing my little purse bc tomorrow my mom and i are going to see a show in the city so i feel like im going on a field trip. and im so excited.

🍹i also got my work schedule for next week today and omg im there so much. which is great cause ill get paid more than usual but im just a girl😭 i wanna stay home and write silly stories about billie eilish😭😂 im being so dramatic im aware, i have a literal degree in in.

🍹i also took up crocheting in the last few weeks rip joann’s fabrics. but my yarn was like a dollar each so a win for gracie. and today i worked on my little blanket im attempting to make. that little crochet/sunday fic was so self indulgent. and accurate.. i was in fact making cunty caterpillars for a sec there. ANYWAYS i’m rambling.

anywhosies. i miss writing but i needed some ice cube molding time for my brain. so that has been todays spring break update from gracie🦄✨🍹🦋🌈🌸🫧

if u guys couldn’t tell this is my new fave emoji🦄

here’s another cute pic of billie as continued collateral🦄

i want to snuggle her. anyways back to “hiding” i go.

[greenlunarwitch]

It's been a busy and stressful few weeks between personal life and working overtime, but I've been channeling that stressful energy into crafts, and it's made it all more manageable. So, time to rant about all the creative ideas I've been working on lately.

First up, knitting.

My sock is coming along, slower than I would like, but I had to frog back twice. After I finished the heel flap, I tried it on and it did not fit very well at all for various reasons. So, I pulled back and tweaked a few things and also did an after thought heel instead of a heel flap (which fit much better and was much simpler to make). I started to do a 3rd chart repeat on the leg, but decided it was going to be to tight, so I switched to 1x1 ribbing instead. Right now I'm just working the ribbing until it's the length I want or I run out of yarn (I had 2 50g balls of it so I know I have plenty for the 2nd sock already).

Next, hand spinning.

After messing up the last singles I tried to ply into a sample, I spun up a few more grams of fiber and I'm going to let them rest for awhile on the spindles before I ply.

And lastly (because I've been watching a lot of Bernadette Banner on YouTube lately) I decided to learn to hand sew. So, made a trip to Joanns to see what they still had in stock, and I ended up buying more than I planned.

I picked an iron, what looked like their last darning egg, a tailors ham, a nice rigid clear ruler, some scrap remander fabric to practice on, and this gorgeous green floral print cotton that I though would look amazing as a skirt. I already ordered other tools and notions online, so I have some needles, fabric shears, thread, and such. I have some projects that I had specific fabric in mind for that I wasn't sure if I'd be able to find locally (for a reasonable price at least), so I order some fabric samples that should be arriving soon. There's a few more fabric store within driving distance, but most of them have hours that don't work with my schedule. One of them is a discount fabric outlet store that I do want to check out at some point though.

[bagelthelongfurby]

Why yes, yes I am online shopping the sale at Joann's because I'm out of town and keep seeing people do cool cosplays and I want to work on mine... I NEED TO GO TOUCH THE FABRICS THOUGH!!!! LIKE, DO I NEED INTERFACING FOR THIS SHIT OR NAH!?! How big are these stripes??? My brain can't process it in my head...

Am I going on a stupid, pointless fabric rant? Hell yeah, I am! I'm an annoying little shit.

[hamilstuck99]

It’s getting close to fall and that means i want to make a cloak again

[edjlord]

I don’t want to be essential anymore. I don’t want to be stressed beyond my limits. I don’t want to hear phantom phones at home because the one at work won’t stop ringing. I don’t want to repeat the exact same information every 5 minutes. I don’t want to deal with angry customers that don’t understand that just because you’re in line that doesn’t mean you’ll get in. We close when we close.There is nothing in the store that you can’t just order online. You were not a special snowflake before all this happened,and you most certainly are not one no. Please stop using us as a place to go just because y’all are bored! We are not a hang out; we are a business. We have a limited number of people that can be in our store. One person can’t come in until one person leaves. You are wasting our time, and everyone else’s. Go home. Take a walk. Let people in who actually need to be here.

[crotchety-old-blogger]

I actually like Joann's, but not monster prices.

[redbeardace]

It's Pride season again, so I decided to check out what Joann has to offer, given that last year's items were... An attempt.

If you don't remember (or if I didn't actually rant about it here, but I'm sure I had to have), one of the biggest complaints I had was that their entire line had a seven stripe rainbow flag. I know we're all friends with Roy G. Biv and such, but the familiar iteration of the Gilbert Baker Rainbow Pride Flag is only six stripes. It started as eight, but there was a shortage of pink, which made it a seven stripe rainbow, but then they found when it was hung vertical from a lamppost, the center stripe was hidden, so he made it six stripes, dropping indigo, which, lets face it, isn't really a color anyway.

Using a seven stripe flag is just weird. If you want the Pride flag everyone knows, that's six stripes. If you want a throwback, you'd use the 8 stripe flag. If you want to make a mistake, go with seven stripes.

So anyway, Joann made a mistake.

The image above is what they're currently selling on their website. At first, I thought that maybe they're still selling off the stock from last year's mistake, but then I looked closer and realized that they're not. This is a new product, still using a seven stripe flag. How can I tell? They changed the name for starters, from "True Colors" to "One Together". They also corrected a mistake: Last year's model had the Progress flag's arrow pointing in the wrong direction, and they've reversed it here. But it's still a seven stripe rainbow on the Progress flag, and the arrow is still weirdly aligned (it should be centered between the Yellow and Green stripes on a six stripe flag, but here it's centered between Green and Blue which doesn't make any sense, on a seven stripe flag, it should be going down the middle of the green stripe, so how do you even get it between Green and Blue?).

I was thrilled to see the above image and notice that the Ally Flag is gone! That was my second biggest complaint with last year's model. The Ally Flag is the physical manifestation of "No Homo" and doesn't belong on any Pride merch, especially if it displaces some other flag. With 12 slots on the ribbon, they couldn't get every flag, but they could at least have a legitimate Pride flag for that slot. And look, this year they did!

They put a, uh, kinda wonky Intersex flag in that 12th slot. The purple ring is supposed to be thicker than that, and I get what you were going for, and it's nice to see the Intersex Flag because it doesn't get much merch love, plus, it got rid of the Ally Flag, so-

Wait...

Nope. The Ally Flag is still there, it's just in a 13th slot. Oh well.

And it's still especially grating that it's a seven stripe rainbow A on a six stripe B&W background. Like... That didn't clue you into the problem there?

And then there's this fabric pattern which looks bi and pan inclusive until you look closer and realize that it's kinda not.

You do know what bi and pan mean, right...?

Still, for all the gripes about Joann's Pride collection, at least they're being supportive, in a confused parent giving an effort kind of way. That makes them miles better than explicitly homophobic/transphobic Hobby Lobby, which goes to great lengths to make sure that none of the rainbows they sell are the gay kind:

[20dollarlolita]

:D :D :D petti fabric rant was super appreciated, thank you! Apart from using the reinforced straight stitch whenever humanly possible, any tips on making clothes (especially petticoats) that can be washed in a washing machine (gentle cycle, laundry bag, the works)? Asking because handwashing is a +1 to difficulty doing thing, which means -10 to the likelihood of thing getting done, and i'd like to actually own clean clothes that i can wear. PS tell me how many tabs this causes? pretty please?

As a starter, in theater we usually only wash petticoats once per show, as part of strike. They don't usually get washed during the run. This is because we make sure that the petticoat doesn't really touch the wearer. If at all possible, we give actors high-coverage undershirts to wear under costumes. This both makes costume changes a lot easier because modesty isn't as much an issue, and makes most of the sweat and things stay in a shirt that can have dupes and can be thrown in the wash after every show with no concern for its safety and well-being. The petticoat sits on top of the a-shirt and then the waistband doesn't touch any part of the body and it stays much cleaner. The part of the costume that's touching the actor is the a-shirt that we threw in the heavy duty wash cycle, so it's clean, and the petticoat waistband not being washed after every show is less of a concern because the actor doesn't have to experience it touching them. So that's how we do it in theatrical land.

If you do wear the petticoat with the waistband touching your skin, you do always have the option of just focusing on cleaning the waistband by dipping it in water and scrubbing with your hands. You can also hack your life by handwashing your petticoat in the shower when you shower and that cuts a lot of the labor cost down.

So, part 1 for building a petticoat that's easy to wash, you absolutely want to go synthetic materials on this one. Cotton's pretty bad about wrinkling when it gets washed, and any wrinkles in your petticoat are going to reduce poof. You can iron and starch the individual tiers to poof it up again but that's like a +40 difficulty so we're in the same situation as before.

Part 2, you're going to want an woven fabric, not a netting. Net is cool but when it gets wet, it loses some of its structure, and then it will dry in that crumpled state and become smaller and need to be ironed and possibly starched back into submission and again with the +40, ironing a petticoat sucks.

So we need to find a fabric that will retain its shape when wet and go back to being poofy without any labor. If you're going to wash it regularly, you also need one that has body on its own and doesn't rely on a surface treatment.

We're at 7 tabs now because I'm trying to find an online source for the fabric that I'm thinking of. Joann sells it (but not online) in only one color, as part of their Casa Collection of special occasion fabrics. They call it organdy (and it is organdy. I waited for like a month for some of that to get DU'd so that I could take it home and stick it under the pick glass. Polyester, but staple yarns, organdy). However, in the great challenge of sheer fabrics, it's tough to tell what you'd need to search to get a fabric like this. Pretty much nobody but me is going to say "is it made of a staple yarn?" and instead people just want to use descriptors that describe fabric properties, not fabric construction.

Mood has a fabric called "stiff polyester organdy" that seeeeeeeeeems to be what I'm looking for, but it's really hard to tell if it's got a surface treatment to be stiff or not. That's what I'd guess, anyway.

Important: wash that petticoat on COLD water all the time. Petticoats deflate when the fabric loses stiffness. If you wash a petticoat in hot water and then allow it to cool, all those folds that give it volume will set into place, which does the same thing as losing stiffness in the fabric. It will be stiff, but it will be stiff in an orientation that is less volume.

There might be something to be said for possibly cramming your petticoat into as tight of a space as you possibly can, and then washing it. You wouldn't get as thorough of a clean but you also wouldn't have the petticoat set into the kind of folds it would gain when you are wearing it. Back in The Day on the EGL Livejournal, storing your petticoat crammed into a tiny bag was considered an ideal way to not loose poof. We did a lot of weird stuff Back in The Day on the Egl Livejournal, though.

Full disclosure, when I wanted a durable petticoat that wouldn't deflate and could be washed, I didn't make one. I bought one. I priced it out and there was no way that I could even get the quality fabric that I needed for a petticoat for less than the cost of the Wunderwelt petticoat. I did have to make a smaller petticoat for more casual looks, which I made out of a lot of layers of crystal nylon organza because I had harvested it out of the trash after a funeral at a church my parents go to. I've made other petticoats before, because the cost of making a petticoat with a good shape that will last you a few months of regular wear is a lot less expensive than buying a petticoat, even an inferior one. But when you want long life and max poof, getting access to the right fabric, in the right amounts, is going to cost a lot more than just getting a petticoat made by someone else. Most of my fabric selections here are based on me trying to match the fabric in my Wunderwelt petticoat.

We are currently at 20 tabs but I'm looking at them and some of it is me reopening the same tab for reasons I cannot figure out. I started writing this when I was getting a car tire repaired and it's been like eight hours and I'm just now finishing it up.

[selchwife]

ok actually disregard my tag rant. i checked the site and it looks like they DO have a good shade for the artist’s hair. the website keeps like, not wanting me to click on individual shades to look at, but the “daffodil” shade is kind of a pale yellow that i think works (it’s not quite as brownish as i would like but thats fine). and it’s 6.99 a yard so like $3.50 for enough fleece to make TWO artists. jesus christ i could kiss joann on the mouth. thank you so much for your fabrics ma’am

[foofygoldfish]

🔥 - crafting?

oh god okay

on a personal note crafting while disabled is fucking hard and i hate it

okay i had a huge rant typed out but basically it boiled down to people need to support their local yarn and fabric stores more than joanns

i only ever get things i can't get from a locally owned/small business at the big box craft stores because i've watched my mom struggle for the last 22 years doing something she loves while the craft stores with none of the knowledge and plastic yarn thrive

basically always support a small business first if you have the option because shit's rough both financially and on the owners families

[knifegiver]

Hi! I'm also working on a S2 Jaskier cosplay and came across your analysis posts which are awesome! Also a couple fabric leads: For the shirt, there's a white-on-white print quilt cotton at Joann that's a very similar pattern, and there are some Indian brocade suppliers on Etsy with reasonable facsimiles of the waistcoat fabric. Nothing with the exact design, but some are fairly close.

Thank you for the compliment! My analysises are mostly rage-fueled rants but I'm glad they're still likeable :D

I will check out those recommendations, thank you so much! We don't have a Joann but where there's a will there's a way! Thank you! <3