Broadway Quilts to close up shop

The closing of Broadway Quilts is more than just losing a shop with fabric bolts in every imaginable color. It’s the loss of a gathering place.

Store proprietor Gery Rosemurgy said it’s like the TV sitcom “Cheers” when the accountant who stops in for his daily beer walks in and everybody shouts his name – “Norm!”

“We’re all kind of friends here,” Rosemurgy said of her customers and staff. “It’s a little different than going into a CVS.”

“Quilters are really good people,” she said. “When the war started in Afghanistan, we sent over 700 quilts to wounded soldiers. When the fires struck, we sent 819 quilts to children in Lake County.”

And when the most recent catastrophe, the COVID pandemic, hit in early 2020, face coverings were hard to come by, but Broadway Quilts’ sewing circle, in partnership with the Sonoma Community Center, made and distributed 7,000 masks in three months.

“Quilters are good-hearted people,” she said.

Rosemurgy said the shutdowns of the past two years have been difficult for the business.

“I don’t really want to fight this anymore. I’ve sort of been fighting the headwinds,” she said.

The future is unpredictable and she learned recently that the cost of raw cotton is going up 70%. “It’s just a bad business environment now. I just don’t see myself staying in business.” It is time to retire, she said.

An email sent to her loyal customers announcing the store closure – and a 40% discount on everything – brought scores of mostly women to the store on Broadway.

“When I got here at 11:30 there were over 100 people in line clear out the door,” said a longtime customer from Petaluma who declined to give her name because she also shops at the Quilted Angel in Petaluma. “I don’t want to seem disloyal,” she said.

Since the closure was announced, two lines wind throughout the store. In the first line women stand holding bolts of fabric – sometimes piled high enough to obstruct one’s face – waiting to have the material cut to length. “It took an hour” for people to get through the cutting line, Rosemurgy said of the process on the first day of the sale.

The second line ends with Rosemurgy at the cash register greeting everyone warmly and ringing up purchases. She said she is able to tough out the non-stop line without so much as a bathroom break because the store is open limited hours – from 11 a.m. to 3 p.m.

Customers in line chatted with one another and talked about how sad it is to see the closure of the only fabric store in Sonoma. They mourn losing the relationship with Rosemurgy and the staff, too.

“I feel like I’m hugged when I walk in the door,” said Ellie O’Connor of Petaluma. O’Connor and others said they would miss the products in the store, too.

“It’s small, but the selections are right-on,” she said. Others praised the quality and variety of fabric.

Broadway Quilts is a gathering and teaching space, too. Chrissy Brady said, “I learned everything here. I’m totally in shock (about the closing.)”

A group of women from Concord said on Saturday that as soon as they heard the news, they hopped in the car to scoop up some bargains. Other shoppers said they found it difficult to stop shopping because “it is just too enticing,” one woman said.

Jennifer Fitzhugh, a quilter who has been running her TopStitchers quilting business out of Broadway Quilts since the store opened on April 15, 2010, said she will be moving her equipment out of the store when it closes and set up shop at her Petaluma home. Fitzhugh was amazed by the long lines and particularly wowed by a woman who filled her walker with more than a dozen bolts.

Rosemurgy said the lines haven’t stopped since she sent out her newsletter. She’s overwhelmed by the kindness customers have shown her.

A quilter herself for “probably 25 years” she had left a job in Napa and “kind of got bored” when she decided Sonoma needed a quilt store. The location at 20525 Broadway, a stone’s throw from the intersection of Leveroni/Napa Road, was “the perfect location,” she said.

“I don’t need to be on the Plaza, I’m not going to get that kind of foot traffic,” Rosemurgy said.

Broadway Quilts has been a destination. “Quilters are obviously artists whose medium is fabric,” she said. Every year she always made sure to take time to make a quilt that she really wanted to work on, not just something for the store. She is looking forward to spending more time with her grandkids, gardening and more sewing, of course.

“I’m so grateful to everyone who has come in and supported us. I can’t tell you what it means to me,” Rosemurgy said. “I’m a little overwhelmed.”