Free Fabric Fatigue

Can you believe such a thing as "free fabric fatigue" exists? Yesterday saw me at the fabmo.org building in Mountain View, the town where Google has its HQ, about 45 mins drive south of San Francisco. I was with Ambur, who does actual installation art pieces and exhibits them and everything but I had found it and suggested going after some google research consisting of "Fabric San Francisco" typed into the search engine. I therefore felt responsible for our presence and concerned it might disappoint.

It didn't disappoint. That is just part of one table and there were at least five, plus rolls of fabric in boxes and stands around the room. And then there was the room of wallpaper samples...

...and then the room of tile, marble and vinyl bits.

BUT...after half an hour of going through endless piles of silk, wool, cotton and the odd polester/viscose thing I was feeling like I'd had my fill. There was TOO MUCH free stuff. Much like my first visit to Scrap when I first got here. Still, I managed to pick some up.

Neutral linens - either for embroidery backgrounds or for ickle niece's height chart.

Interesting patterns - some embroidered.

Woven.

Dotty.

Wool (yes, that is a real Ralph Lauren label - this was high end stuff).

Pure silks and silk/cotton blends.

That's most of it but there is more, plus some slate tiles I'm making into coasters, some vinyl for carving and printing and some cotton fabric bits for patchwork.

There can't be many more free/discounted fabric places left for me to find...

Hunting the White Elephant

When I heard about the Oakland Museum White Elephant Sale my mind went back to the flea market I visited a few days before leaving Tokyo. That had been ginormous. There was no way this one could be as big. Ha.

19,000sqft. They had everything. 

(I wanted all of these hangers but limited myself to just five at a dollar each.)

I fecking hate brussel sprouts. Why would someone ever make this tureen?

Since Pooch hasn't yet been paid either wages or transfer costs we are on a budget and I only had $50 with me. Plus I don;t know where we'll be living or what we'll need for the place. My take-home was therefore confined to some pristine photo albums, lovely vintage photo frames, beautiful silk padded hangers and this:

Fabric had been washed, ironed and sorted into 1lb bags. I got three plus a few odd FQs. I also got a novelty scrap bag.

I'll be adding these to my collection of scraps for my niece's i-spy quilt.

I am hoping there will be similar sales in about a month's time when we'll be moving into our proper flat.

Chinese New Year Parade!

This was my first ever chinese new year parade. I am sure there must have been one in Tokyo but I seem to have missed it. This one is quite epic - even Pooch came along.

Lots of big dragons...and a few little ones.

This float was shooting glitter everywhere. So pretty!

Lots of small children dancing and twirling things.

And then there was a dragon overload.

The little kids watching squealed with delight as they came snapping at them. And special mention to the dragons up poles in the back of cars.

Pooch, who like a lot of hounds does not like crowds or loud noises, defied my expectations by liking the marching bands the most.

This one was about two hundred strong. There were also the alternative ones. These kids were playing buckets.

The kanji for this year's animal can be translated as a goat, ram or sheep. Being a dedicated knitter, I have to go with the sheep.

Awesome.

Finished Objects Abound and Knitting Too

It is *so* good to have a sewing machine and space for fabric again. I have been using the one shoulder bag for 10 weeks now so I whipped up a new one this week.

I even used one of the new stitches on my sewing machine - an arrow - on the pocket flap.

The sewing machine itself (a Singer 7258) is rather noisy and not as smooth as my pre-Tokyo Brother but we are getting on very well nonetheless. The main fabric and several of the squares are from what I found at Scrap when I visited last week. I also used that for this little notebook cover using 1/2 inch hexagons.

I learnt from my previous notebook cover that the flaps need to be as wide as possible to stop the covers falling out.

All important shopping list and cafe/shop destinations noted there.

I was making many notes at the second knitting group I attended this week which was in the Haight. I don't know why but I always thought the T on the end was silent, but it's not.

The people there were really friendly and one of them is even a WWE fan! It was so cool to have a conversation about wrestling with someone other than myself! I also gave my ridiculously girly knitting an airing.

Isn't it obscene? The UK Knitting and Crochet Guild have an online challenge to knit something for a baby in March so I decided on something I would never normally knit and set out to make the most girly thing possible. It is using this free Drops pattern but I've changed the chart to reduce the long carries of yarn behind and I'm only using two colours.

Last night we went out for dinner with some friends and I wore my penultimate finished object of this post - the Crazy Stripes Tee.

I could not be any happier with the fit of this. The length is perfect, the negative ease is elegant without being nasty, the overall fit is great. The pattern was excellently written too in a large range of sizes - I can see myself knitting this again in different colours.

And then finally, I have started making a set of coasters, of which two are finished.

These are inspired entirely by Pins on Pinterest and also gave me the chance to try my sewing machine's blanket stitch function, which is very handy for raw edge appliqué. I only used it on the cat's stripes but it worked well so that opens up another avenue of sewing to be explored.

Scraptastic Fabric

When we moved here Pooch told me the names of some neighbourhoods I should avoid. Naturally I listened carefully and instantly forgot these because I am second only to goldfish when it comes to memory and lack thereof. It turns out, hilariously, that the moment I was left on my own, once Pooch had started work, I travelled straight to one of these, called the delightful sounding "Bayview". Bayview is where you end up if you travel due South from our flat, through the neighbourhood of Dogpatch (not making these names up), and on further. The place I was actually aiming for was called "Scrap - a source for the resourceful" and is between Bayview and Bernal Heights - the latter being ok to go to during the day but not so much after dark.

To cut a long story short, no one died and I duly arrived at Scrap.

This place was A.M.A.Z.I.N.G!

I'd been to two UK scrap stores and they were fun but...meh. This one was a crafter's paradise - regardless of the craft but especially for fabric users. The guy at the till actually thanked me for taking a huge bag of fabric and assured me they never ran out so I should come back again soon.

See the sign at the top? "Small rolls, 15 for $1". Ha. I'm not going to say it's worth the risk of being shot because that would be flippant. It is pretty awesome though. Plus there were books and patterns.

Endless amounts of everything - including used and virgin cine film, slides, offcuts of every wood, plastic, metal you can name, frames, paints, glass...just everything.

I liked this jar - "$8 including green thingies - $5 without".

What are the green thingies? I have no idea. Who cares. The only thing I couldn't see was knitting yarn. The reason for this was apparent at check out.

Looks good though. When I got there the man asked me if $8 would be all right for my shopping basket full. A lot of the fabric there would be more than that for 50cm. I insisted on $10. My fabric haul...

Later divided into blue, green, red and yellow.

Special mention for the two cat prints.

A vintage pattern for a dress I had and used to wear all the time when I was 19ish (the red model but full length).

Plus a few vintage pattern books for a certain friend I'll be seeing on a certain knitting holiday in a month's time.

My new sewing machine - a Singer - arrived yesterday so I have used the fabric to cut out some coasters. I thought they would be a good small project to try out the machine on. I will report back on progress!