Harper's Fabric & Quilt Co.

Harper’s Fabric & Quilt Co. is a fifty-six-year-old quilting cotton and sewing shop on Santa Fe Drive in downtown Overland Park, running more than a hundred classes a quarter alongside machine sales and in-house repair.

Description

Harper’s Fabric & Quilt Co. occupies a storefront at 7918 Santa Fe Drive in historic downtown Overland Park, a few blocks of pre-war commercial buildings that form the oldest continuously retail strip in Johnson County.¹² The shop stocks quilting cotton and garment fabric across a deliberately wide stylistic range — the store’s own description spans “civil war reproductions to the newest modern designs” — and states that it carries only high-quality quilting cotton and garment goods.¹

Teaching is a substantial share of what the business does rather than a sideline. Harper’s advertises more than a hundred classes every quarter, graded from beginner to expert and open to students “from ages 9 to 109,” across quilting, adult sewing, youth sewing, hand embroidery, and machine embroidery with mySewnet software.¹ Individual class sessions are booked through the shop’s own online calendar.³

The shop is also a premier dealer for Husqvarna Viking and PFAFF sewing machines, carrying embroidery machines and sergers alongside standard models, and keeps a certified in-house repair technician who services machines of any brand or vintage.¹ That combination — fabric, instruction, machine sales, and repair under one roof — is what the store means when it calls itself a one-stop shop for sewing.¹

Harper’s is listed in the Visit Overland Park destination-marketing directory, the city’s convention and visitors bureau.²

Ownership and history

Harper’s Fabric & Quilt Co. celebrated its fiftieth anniversary in January 2020, placing the shop’s founding in 1970.⁴ The identity of the original founder or founders — and the origin of the Harper name — is “; the present owner does not carry it.

The owner is Elaine Johnson. As of April 2020 she had worked for the company for forty years and had owned it for twenty-five, which places her arrival at the shop around 1980 and her purchase of the business around 1995.⁴ These are ownership and employment dates and should not be confused with the founding year.

Johnson and the shop drew local press coverage in April 2020, when Harper’s responded to the COVID-19 shutdown by selling mask-making materials to home sewers through a curbside crate outside the storefront — customers window-shopped the display, phoned Johnson to select and pay for materials, and dropped finished masks back into the same crate. Johnson estimated she had received and redistributed more than a thousand masks in three weeks.⁴

Named staff appear on the shop’s own site and CVB listing, though the two disagree on which of them manages machines: Kim is identified as the certified in-house repair technician on both.¹² Staff roster beyond first names is “.

Links

• Website: https://www.harpersfabricandquilt.com/

Services

• Quilting cotton and garment fabric, reproduction through contemporary prints¹
• Quilting classes, adult sewing, youth sewing, hand embroidery, machine embroidery and mySewnet software instruction — over 100 sessions per quarter¹
• Husqvarna Viking and PFAFF sewing machine, embroidery machine, and serger sales; machine trade-ins¹
• In-house sewing machine cleaning, tune-up, adjustment, and repair, any brand or vintage¹
• Online store¹

Sources

Footnotes

1. “Our Story / About Us,” Harper’s Fabric & Quilt Co. (official site), accessed 2026-08-26. URL ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹ ↩¹⁰ ↩¹¹

2. “Harper’s Fabric & Quilt Co,” Visit Overland Park (Overland Park CVB) business directory, accessed 2026-08-26. URL ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. “Scrap Sew-ciety (September),” Harper’s Fabric & Quilt Co. class booking page, accessed 2026-08-26. URL ↩

4. Leah Wankum, “Downtown Overland Park businesses pivot efforts during COVID-19 shutdown,” Johnson County Post, 14 April 2020. URL ↩ ↩² ↩³