Dream Fabric

I'm slowly getting back into the swing of things and putting away all my beautiful New York buys. Before I store this fabric though I just had to share it here. I bought it at B&J Fabrics and it's a polyester satin. I was just blown away by it's beauty and although originally I only wanted to get 1/2 yard I caved into an entire yard. I'm not going to share how much it costs but to me it was worth every penny. They ship worldwide so you can check out their fabric selection yourself here. However there is just nothing like seeing the fabric in person and finding your favourite.

A colourful weekend

Despite dismal weather conditions the weekend was filled with colour. On Saturday I drove to Alva for a Textile Day and went ever so slightly mad (okay, if you want the truth, totally mental!) buying fabric for the quilt I have just started. In fact with the amount of fabric I have so far bought for it I could probably make 10 but hey, you need choice! And doesn't that display seen below look tempting? It belongs to the African Fabric shop owned by Magie Relph, who makes regular trips to Africa together with her husband Bob to replenish her stock. Now wouldn't that be fun! She also made the quilts you can see hanging on the right-hand side.

Today the rain was even more ferocious and it seemed like sheer lunacy to visit a garden in Lanarkshire, called Dippoolbank Cottage, which was open under the Scottish Garden Scheme. The name of the cottage gives you a hint about the conditions there, very wet and peaty underfoot. It rained for virtually all the time we were there and I felt lucky that my Crocs could sink into the mire and the rain then washed them clean. The same could not be said for my feet! But who cares when you are rewarded by a spendid vegetable garden, a magnificent tree house, a fernery, as well as tea and cake, a tombola and plant sales. Just the sight of the yellow iris (seen at the top) made this a worthwhile outing. Now off to wash most of our saturated clothes!

Freda's Fabrics

Yes, you're reading that correctly and no, I've not mis-spelled my own name!! Even I am not that ditzy!! The fabrics in questions used to belong to Freda Heaphy, a fellow quilter also living in Scotland.

I got to know Freda many years ago, mainly because people kept asking both of us if we knew the other Fr(i)eda so we decided to seek each other out at some quilt show or other and of course we kept meeting up at the same events and it was always a lot of fun to say: Hello Fr(i)eda! She was the only other person with the same name as me that I ever met.

Sadly Freda died some time ago and today her fabrics were being sold on behalf of her family. The money raised will be donated to Haematology Research and to Hearing Dogs for Deaf People. Amazingly enough Freda's fabric was neatly folded while in her stash and some of it even had the labels on it from the stores where she bought it. I just hope that the buying in itself gave her a lot of pleasure (in fact, I know it did) as she did not get to use a lot of it. It was beautiful fabric and as well as our name we also seemed to have shared the same taste in fabric. Above you can see that part of her stash which has now been added to mine!

It also made me feel profoundly sorry for whoever it will be that has to sort out my fabric collection once I've gone to quilting heaven as unlike Freda stash, my fabrics are most definitely not neatly labelled and folded. Instead they are heaped ( really pushed by any means possible) by colour into drawers and most also have bits cut out of them. Oh well, at least this is one thing I don't have to get stressed about myself. All I can do is to wish that unknown person good luck when the times comes!!