tessuti fabrics

I've died and gone to fabric shop heaven. I swear. This place is gorgeous. No more Spotlight or Lincraft madness for me. This is how finding beautiful fabrics was meant to be.

Tessuti in Flinders Lane, Melbourne, near Russell St. Plus they also have shops in Sydney.

And they have a cute blog too.

I'm in the process of making 2 new skirts in light of my success with sewing and printing hanabi. So I've purchased some luscious dark, dark denim (almost black) and some cherry red 100% linen. I could have bought a lot more fabric in that gorgeous shop but kept myself in check. I am proud to say this as I am known to go overboard with these things. My new challenge is going to be learning how to put a lining in the red linen skirt. That will be interesting.

all stitched up

This post is a bit of a show and tell because I've made my first skirt ever! And what's more surprising is I even like it :) It's made from very dark light-weight denim with a very simple pattern that falls just below the knee. But it does have a zip! This is a big deal as it took 5 goes on crappy fabric for me to get it right. I patiently unpicked the mistakes very time to re-use the zip until I finally understood how to do it properly. I listened to about 4 podcasts from craft sanity while I was sewing so I had good company. The skirt's not finished yet as I plan to screen print either hanabi or dragonflies on the front of it when I get around to repairing my silk screen after it spontaneously burst 2 nights ago. I think this top from Queen (swoon) looks perfect with it.

Edit a few hours later: I printed hanabi on the skirt (see 2nd pic). It took 3 layers of red to get it to stand out like that on the denim because it's so dark. I was saved by Jezze's innovative credit card method of screen printing.

macha froth

I'm craving a really good cup of macha today. The kind that you can make yourself in Ippodo in Kyoto and you can drink along with a delicious Japanese sweet. It looks just like this pic from Ippodo too. All frothy and gorgeous green. I think the craving is because I had a late night and for me a cup of good macha is a tonic like the way some people eat big greasy breakfasts. Weird I know but it works for me. So does the Ippodo website. It's too cute for words. So I've taken a few illustrations from it to share with you here.