Cultural: Our auction site - Allegro

The USA has Ebay - and Germany has Ebay as well. They tried it in Poland, but a website called Allegro already had the market.

It’s our auction site. It’s the place we all use. Well, almost all of us do.

I was reminded exactly how much is available when my son and his wife came—they bought all kinds of stuff on it!

Things I had never even though of buying on line—like cornstarch!

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So, do they have fabric? That’s really what we want to know, right?

Let me show you.

It’s mostly the same kind of fabric I can buy wholesale. I won’t buy it from Allegro, for the most part, though I’ve found some good deals on line.

Actually, Allegro is what helped me realize I could buy bolts of it directly from the wholesalers, though. Since we have an official charitable organization, we can buy it from them without a problem. I had originally seen bolts from someone who had bought them and didn’t want them anymore. It helped me wonder, “I wonder how they did that!|

If we want to find the more expensive, “quilt shop” cotton, then we need to go to a couple of Polish websites that exist.

But that isn’t about this post. This one is about Allegro.

However, I’ve been able to find a few “lots” of cotton fabric - nice fabric - several bolts at a time - it was the best way for me to afford it. That was before my sis started the store, however.

Let me show you a couple of searches for cotton fabric.

Those are prices in zlotys - which is about 3.6 or so to a dollar. You have to watch for how much length you are getting. This is the same cotton that they sell especially for bedding. I buy it by the bolt to use for my backings.

I decided to search for more expensive - and this is what I found - these 20 meters of solids are $64.70 in USD at today’s exchange rate. The color of that burgundy is very nice - but the description doesn’t say what the weight of the fabric is, so I have no idea at all if it is suitable for quilting. If it were, I’d be pretty tempted to get some of that as that seems to be a difficult to find that fully saturated color around here and it is super nice to have when working with my charity quilts for the adults! I may write them and ask what the weight is in grams. The typical weight here for cotton I’ve been using is 125-135 grams.

I guess what I wanted to say to you is this simply - we do have a really nice auction site!

We’ve found a lot of things on it that we couldn’t find locally without searching high and low and wasting a lot of time! My son showed me that there are even a lot more things on it than I was even aware of!

I did a couple more searches - I found a set of 24 fat quarters - special deal - they say - for 300 zl - or $78.26. I actually didn’t realize that Gutermann had a brand of fat quarters! - I only knew them as a thread company!

Here’s a book that I could buy. It’s $43.30 at today’s exchange rate. Nah. I think I’ll give it a pass. True - it is big - has 66 patterns in it.

I think this one takes the cake though.

This person is selling 5 fat quarters for $22.96. Hmm. That rivals your highest Local quilt shop prices! I remember going into a quilt shop in Germany many years ago with a 5 euro note and hoping I could buy something. I bought about 9”. It was funny. I was determined not too spend more than that. To this day, I liked the fabric I bought! I’ve used it up!

Other than this, there aren’t the “deals” that you can find on the US based auction sites when it comes to cotton fabric! We just don’t have a deep enough tradition of quilting/patchwork to make that happen!

But we can buy just about anything we actually need to function and a lot of things to help us enjoy life here. Electronics, books, clothing items, etc. We can get them here!

It’s just things like quilting rulers, specialty things for quilting, some plastic rings to be used for fidget quilts - that I can’t find here easily, or at all!

But I’ll figure it out and try to use what I can find here!

And now you know!

This is my sort of short cultural post for today!

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Be sure to check out what my sis has for you in the store!

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