The Able Sisters, and making friends with them
Mabel serves you. Sable ignores you. Getting Sable to talk takes eight days, not twenty, and missing a day costs you nothing.
The short answer
The game keeps one counter for this, and it counts how many separate days you have talked to Sable, the sister at the sewing machine. Not consecutive days. There is no streak to break and nothing anywhere in the game that resets it. She faces you from the fifth day and is friendly from the eighth.
Which sister is which
- Mabel minds the shop floor. She sells you shirts and umbrellas, and turns your own designs into clothes.
- Sable works at the sewing machine with her back to the room. She sells nothing, ever.
Day by day
Talk to Sable once on each of these days. The order is fixed.
| Day you talk | What you get |
|---|---|
| Days 1 to 3 | One of five stock brush-offs, picked at random. She does not turn around. |
| Day 4 | She starts telling you about herself. There are four chapters, one per day. |
| Day 5 | She turns away from the sewing machine and faces you while she talks. |
| Days 6 and 7 | The last two chapters. |
| Day 8 onward | Settled, friendly small talk, one of three. This is as far as it goes. |
Talking to her twice in one day does not advance anything, and on the story days it gives you a variant of that same day's chapter rather than the next one.
What Mabel sells
The racks hold eight designs: four shirts and four umbrellas. They belong to the town rather than to you, so everyone in the house sees the same eight and a change one player makes is a change for all of them.
Separately, each player carries eight design slots of their own. Mabel will put one on a shirt for 350 bells, which is also what she charges to rename one.
None of this money reaches Tom Nook
The Able Sisters take your bells through a different path from Nook's shop, and that path never touches the running total behind his store upgrades. A wardrobe bought here is upgrade progress of exactly zero.
If you are saving for Nookington's, see what actually counts toward the store upgrades.
Or read how to get the golden tools.