Calico Mermaid is your downtown Porterville headquarters for fabric, supplies, books, patterns, sewing & crafting classes. Our teachers are the best you'll find anywhere! We are the only authorized Handi Quilter sales & service center in the central valley, with all the Handi Quilter accessories. We just opened our doors in April, 2011, & want our shop to be a creative center for our local fabric artists.

We are Richard and Georgia, married for 34 years, and we’ve lived in Porterville all our lives. Richard's family has lived in this area for four generations and he is a Community College Geology Professor. Georgia is an elementary school teacher, sewing and crafting since she was a child.

We have raised our busy family and our children have moved on to begin living their dreams. So now it's our time to combine our creative experiences in education, administration (and quilting and shopping) together to bring the Calico Mermaid to life. She symbolizes our whimsical vision of an imaginative, inspirational space to sew, quilt, and create. Our family enjoys travel and scuba diving. We enjoy our underwater adventures with friends and family in Hawaii, the Caribbean, and Fiji very much. We always seem to visit quilt and fabric shops wherever we travel.

We hope you'll come visit our shop often to see the supplies and fabrics we have to entice and inspire you. We still have new fabric, supplies, books & patterns arriving weekly. Our local quilters & quilting teachers regularly bring their work to display & share, so there's always something new to see. It's like a quilt show every day!