I think more than sewing/fashion/design, I love textiles. Saturday I went on the rampage for fabrics for the SalonCon dress, and managed to hit four stores in less than an hour. My routine was always the same:

1. Enter the store, gauge the light.
2. Check swatch.
3. Turn on crazy fabric laser eyes (I know it’s lame, but it’s the only way I have to describe looking at fabric in the back of a pile and knowing it’s the weave and weight you want).

The guy at the second store insisted that they had bronze/purple cross-dye silk, and brought me gold/purple.

“I’m sorry,” I said, “that’s too yellow for my fabric.”

“Check your swatch,” he said.

“I don’t have to, it’s too yellow.”

“Check!” he insisted.

I slapped the swatch on the counter, and he got an eyeful of really vomitous tonal contrast.

“I’ll check the back,” he offered lamely.

I will say this in defense of the second-store guy; never has such a seemingly innocuous dress been capable of such a shift in color. Looking at it now by artificial evening light, it is an entirely different color then the dress that was sitting there all day.