Apparently it's not just computer whizzes and rock bands who start businesses out of their garages.

Two years ago, Nancy and Jack Arnold, owners of what is now Santa Fe Fabrics, 1100 Don Diego St., cleaned out their garage in Eldorado and turned it into a fabric store.

They advertised on Craigslist, and fabric hunters from their neighborhood and beyond eventually descended on their home.

Nancy Arnold, a disgruntled former real-estate agent, said she and friends were having trouble finding a decent selection of fabrics from which to make their own clothes and those of their families.

"People showed up in droves and everyone that came in would say, 'Yeah there's no good fabric in this town, it's slim pickins.' ''

She said that although there were specialty shops that would turn fabrics into pillowcases, duvets, wall hangings or most anything except normal bodywear, it was a cloth drought for home sewers and stichers.

But running a fabric shop out of a house-attached garage had its drawbacks.

"Fabric would move from the kitchen to the garage depending on the weather, or if we were cooking something really stinky we would have to move it back in the garage," Arnold said.

Apparently bacon-scented silk was not a big mover.

It wasn't long — January 2010 — before the couple moved the bolts of cloth, buttons and bows into a small, funky corner of the Mercado shopping center at Don Diego and Cordova avenues and then into the Dulce coffee shop building.

Nancy Arnold has had a long history with cloth.

She had been a print buyer for years, after growing up in Southern California, "where there were fabric stores everywhere" at least until the mid-1980s, when the big chain stores began selling the cheaper clothing now often made in China.

"So the fabric stores started closing left and right — those good little stores," Arnold said. "So it left this vacuum of people who loved fabric and loved to sew and would sew whether it made financial sense or not."

Arnold said that as a child, "my mom, my grandmother, my aunts, everyone in my family always sewed — from generations ago. That's just what we did."

She even started making her own clothes — the bell-bottoms and jammies of the '60s — when she was 8.

It was Santa Fe's creative energy that inspired the Arnolds to open the shop.

"Santa Fe people create," Nancy Arnold said. "There is something here that inspires people to make things. Living in Santa Fe and loving fabric was my good luck; we needed a fashion fabric store, so I taught myself how to create one."

Customers at Santa Fe Fabrics negotiate paths through colorful bolts of variety fabrics including a variety of cottons — batiste, velveteen — as well as many types of silk, linen and wool along with Mexican oilcloth and decorator fabrics.

"We couldn't list all the fabrics we have; you'd never get through the list," Arnold said.

Besides do-it-yourself clothes makers in homes, the shop's customers include fabric designers, textile artists and church clerics in need of liturgical vestments.

Jack Arnold also noted purchases by fabric shoppers for New Mexico-made movies including Crazy Heart, True Grit and Cowboys and Aliens.

"They are especially looking for those 'old-time' cotton and textured fabrics for Westerns," he said.

No stop is complete at Santa Fe Fabrics without pursuing the Arnolds' eclectic collection of buttons. They include buttons from around the world made from wood, metal, semi-precious stones, elk antler, and water buffalo bone and horn, snail shells and mother of pearl.

"The animals are not harmed for those buttons," Nancy Arnold insisted.

She also offers sewing classes on various days of the week.

ON THE WEB

• SantaFeFabrics.com