New in Blue

I made another welcome visit to Beautiful Silks on the weekend. Having tried out the samples I'd picked up last time, I was ready to stock up. I'm very excited about this new fabric-yarn. It's a silk waste in the form of torn strips. Perfect for dyeing and mixing with all sorts of other lovely things. Here it is in blue, fresh from my dyepot.

I've promised myself some time in my studio this afternoon to start working with it--or should that be playing with it?

Beautiful Silks

My outing to Beautiful Silks on Saturday afternoon yielded a bag full of goodies.

I couldn't possibly sample their entire range, so I bought a few fabrics, some recycled sari silk and a small amount of high-twist mulberry silk yarn. They're all destined for my dye pots. Some will also require me to develop my sewing skills a little further if I want to hem them into scarves.

Meanwhile I'm just enjoying the beautiful drape and lustre of the fabrics. 

Good Morning

Here's my plan for the day so far.

First: finish waking up. I bought myself a new coffee cup yesterday--just because. So I will wake up with a smile on my face. Then I have class. It's week three of the Make Craft Your Business course. One of the women in this group does cyanotype. It's a traditional printing method which uses sunlight to develop the colouring agent. It makes the original blueprint. I love it. So I've picked out some openwork crochet to lend her. It will be fun to see how it prints.

Depending how much energy I have left at the end of the class, I might head down to Beautiful Silks. I've been thinking about my crochet flowers in the light of the realities of selling. I've figured out that the biggest component in the cost of what I make is my time. So I'm looking at using more really great materials so I can make the most of the time I put in. What could be better than silk? --hand-dyed by me! Last time I was there, they had some lovely white silk yarn in an 8-ply equivalent thickness. I expect to come home with some.

Beautiful Silks is just around the corner from Brunswick St Fitzroy and a street full of great cafe's. That would finish off the day just nicely. 

Bountiful Beauty

The highlight of yesterday morning was a visit to Beautiful Silks with friends from the Experimental Spinning group. What can I say . . . rooms full of beautiful silks: yarns, embroidery fibres, fabrics, dyed and undyed. What's more the people there seemed to be both knowledgeable and passionate about their products. I came home with a tiny taste of stranded embroidery silk and ribbon; a catalogue of yarns and a lust for more.

From there we went just around the corner in Bruswick St Fitzroy to another treasure house. This time Jasper Coffee:
You can just imagine the smells that greeted us as we walked in. The front of the shop is full of coffees, teas, coffee pots, tea pots, cups of all shapes and sizes. And then there's a cafe and courtyard. We sat in the shade, sipped and munched and talked. The talk got quite heated a couple of times when we discussed the pros and cons of protecting Australia's local publishing industry. It was great to be in the sort of company where silk and the value of Australian writing were the topics of conversation.