in the trees

Grey Wolf taking a roll call and gretting responses from seemingly the entire forest.

Hello !

The main place to shop for fabric in Paris is in the Barbès neighbourhood in the 18th arrondissement. (Marché Saint Pierre)

I always start my shopping at Sacrés Coupons on rue d'Orsel, they sell cuts of fabric at cheaper prices than by the metre (the cut are usually 2 or 3 metres).

On the same streets are the multiple Moline stores owned by the same family. Some also offer cuts, some fabric by the metre, and one has very gorgeous brocade and other luxury fabrics ; it's pricier but I sometimes find interesting stuff there for historical costumes.

At the top of the street at the crossing are the two big fabric stores of the Saint-Pierre district : Dreyfus and Reine. Both of those are multiple-storeys buildings with hundreds of types of fabric by the metre.

For other sewing notions, when I'm in the area I go to Mercerie Saint Pierre (rue Charles Nodier). You can also find some knitting supplies there, but for yarn my favourite store is Lil Weasel on Passage du Grand Cerf (different neighbourhood tho, this one is in the Saint Denis area)

A really cool place for ribbons, trim, buttons and other notion is Ultramod, it's quite famous and a little picturesque.

There are 2 distinct systems (<-wikipedia link) that, as you can see in the table below, sometimes use the same word to refer to different sizes.

And yes it can be very confusing.

To answer the question, yes, french uses the same scale as spanish, the long scale, in which a "billion" means a million million, or 10¹².

Misty morning, Northern Ireland