I don't know what charities are in your area. In my county, the Salvation Army Women's Auxiliary have a fabric and craft fair once a year, and collect donations one month prior to the sale. This annual sale has become a really big deal among the sewists and crafters.

The animal shelter near me is always looking for someone to make cat beds as well. It's no more complicated that sewing or serging a used quilted bedspread to a piece of flannel or toweling or cotton. They may be able to use some of your fabric.

Good Will should take them. I've bought fabric there.

A local Girl Scout troop might welcome some fabric donations too.

Our Sr. Citizens Center has a quilting group that makes quilts to sell--income helps provide services to seniors. They also sponsor a big quilt show each Fall where you can show your quilt and sell if you like--with a percentage of cost going to the Center. Maybe you have something like that in your area.Here's link to 2011 show http://quilt-festival.com/festival_2011/slideshow.html  

Our church looks for fabrics all the time. We make prayer blankets for nursing homes, shut ins, cancer survivors etc. there is always a need for fabrics. I'm sure someone will gladly take it off your hands.

Freecycle.

I agree to freecycle. Google and check to see if there is one in your local area.

Searching around to find someone to take and use your no longer needed things is a real pain in the butt.

My experiences with freecycle is that the stuff you want to get rid of - or at least the stuff like fabric that I was clearing out - ends up going really quick. I would post on the local one for my area and within an hour there were like 10 emails from people asking about the things I was getting rid of. :P Had to update my posts with "first come first serve, will notify the 2nd and 3rd respondents only - in case of 'no show'."

With the dismal demise of fabric stores and the horribly disappointing choices that still remain, if you are "lucky" enough to even have a store anywhere near where you live, good fabric to sew with is a commodity.

I know of a woman who is, essentially, a hoarder and used to sew. She has an entire room full of great stuff from the last couple of decades of the last century. She belonged to a fabric club and had made regular purchases. According to a friend who knows her better, it is all in fine shape and is stored nicely. She is a hoarder, but she is not one of those hoarders who are living in filth. She is sitting on quite a storehouse of fabric.

Fabric used to beautiful, affordable and widely available. All of that has changed, drastically.

While I agree that most fabric isn't as affordable and there's a lack of 'brick and mortar' stores that one can physically go to and shop for fabric, one can find beautiful fabric still and it's readily available for those who are patient enough to wait for it to be shipped to them.

In many ways, it is a step backwards to have to "mail order" fabric. I know that it is a lot faster with online shopping than to mail back and forth the order, the payment, and to wait for the goods to arrive, via post. But, you still cannot see or touch,and the tactile aspect of fabric shopping is very much a part of the joy and inspiration. Most of that joy is gone.

Just a little over a decade ago I could go to the fabric store and choose from a wide variety of fabrics, buy some, and fondle it and envision what it might become as I stopped at each red light. Those moments of joy with a new length of fabric, and feeling of it to imagine sewing it was such an utter joy.

With online ordering you are never sure just what it is that you are inviting into your sewing room.

I would also declare that there were at as many, if not more, choices in a average fabric store than there are in any one web site. The variety of fabrics does not exist anywhere, anymore, not even online. Many are too young to ever have known that variety. It is like explaining color to the blind. They never knew that that variety existed and they do not believe you when you talk about it.

It has all changed. Most everything today is laden with lycra and is black, or a dark solid color. Gone are the pretty prints and the finely woven fabrics. Now it is mostly stretch and dark.

It is not just about the patience of waiting for that unseen, untouched fabric to arrive via UPS. There is an entire experience that is missing, as well as the missing fabrics.

I have a relatively large independent fabric 'warehouse' nearby in addition to stores like Joann's, if I *really* wanted there's always the option of driving 25-30 minutes (during non-peak traffic days/hours) to LA. The days where it was an economical option to sew your own clothing have been long gone, those who do so are making the choice to invest more of their money in the materials and machine(s) for a customized fit and to have garments that no one else has because they are homemade not mass produced.

Places like Etsy don't just sell things that someone has made and wants to sell on a small scale online level, it's also where you can find a retailer selling whatever fabric you're looking for and you can then do another search and find someone else who has fabrics the other didn't. I was a very small child, but I can remember going to the fabric store at the MALL of all places, they don't exist in such locations anymore - and haven't for decades. Commerce, manufacturing, retail; everything changes, because customers are driving the trends so businesses have to adapt what they have to offer or face going out of business. I wish that there were more clothing retailers that sold garments made with the older techniques from the 1940's-1960's but I know that the only way to get that is to make things myself. Stretch fabrics are comfortable and have revolutionized apparel, woven materials tend to be more common in home goods and quilting but one can still find that in clothing from time to time...just not often these days.

We can lament the things which are long gone from stores, take pictures and write about how things used to be, the items we recall from the not-so-distant past, but the endless march of time and change will continue on regardless.

Jennifer, you are right that most who sew clothes nowadays are not sewing for the same purposes that people sewed for decades ago. It has largely become the province of those with disposable income and the privilege of not having a full time career.

Judging by the fact that mall fabric stores are a memory of your childhood, and the fact that your name is Jennifer, I can assume that you are my kids generation.

(The name "Jennifer" was the most popular name from that generation. I come from the previous one where girls were "Mary", "Debbie", and "Jean". )

There were fabulous fabric stores in just about any small town back in those days.

So many of the fabrics that were sold back then are no longer available and I doubt if you have ever been exposed to them in your adult life at all. Your mother's generation would have know this, but you were probably too young to be that familiar with the different ones. Many of those fabric suggestions that are listed on the backs of the old vintage pattern envelopes are no longer available. You would be hard pressed to find any of them, at all.

I am of the opinion that, in retail, the idea that the consumer shapes the market is an outdated concept. What I see is the consumer being shaped by the market. As business, commerce and marketing become the province of the faceless corporate entities these entities create the market base that they want to market to. It is no secret that potential consumers are being manipulated and steered to consume products that they never knew they wanted. Eventually, all us consumers have to choose from is what is being offered to us by corporate America.

Thus, we have a plethora of cheap and badly made clothes to choose from and very little fabric to sew with. The good fabrics are all gone and the things that are now at the fabric store, which is usually only Joanns, are things that are so awful that I would never have considered wasting my sewing dollars or time on them in the past. Many of them are no more than spun and processed plastic. Just awful!

I don't have any trouble at all buying those "unavailable" fabrics from the good old days online. And I buy almost exclusively 100% natural fibers.

That said, your local university theater department will probably be
absolutely thrilled to get your fabric, no matter what it is. And you
can probably get a tax writeoff for the donation. Get them to write a letter on department letterhead with a brief summary of what you donated. You can fill in the value.