How high does your heart leap when you’re expecting a parcel of fabric and the doorbell rings? This high? Thiiiissss high? After spending all this week under starter’s orders whenever the doorbell goes (and by the time I’ve thrown myself down two flights of stairs to the door the postman has usually already rung twice and is filling out one of those “we’re desolate with despair to have missed you” cards), today I thought I’d play it cool.
So when that familiar ding-dong sounded, I simply sat back and let Robin get it. “It’s for you” he said, clutching a fat parcel with an amused and tolerant look that said “we both know what’s in this, don’t we?” “My faaabbbbric!” I exclaimed with high glee as I relieved him of the squashy parcel. Hurrah!
The parcel is from Trim Fabric (an online store I’ve never shopped at before, but I would again- this was dispatched the day after I ordered its contents). Inside was a mixture of sensible fabric and wild card fabric designed to jangle the old optic nerves. The sensible fabric is a yard of a linen cotton mix jersey in navy blue. It’s so sensible it’s hardly worth me showing you a pic, but in the interests of thoroughness here it is on the right. Well, there we go.
The desire to work with cotton linen mix jersey grew out of buying a T-shirt in that fabric combination from Toast. It’s cool. It’s quite soft, and it’s a total swine to iron. It also has a very low level of stretch, which will be interesting from a design perspective. The T-shirt I acquired is to the right. Sorry- they’re sold out now apparently. (But there’s loads of good stuff left on sale at now almost affordable prices…)
The pic at the top of this post is the wild card. It’s an oatmeal coloured 100% linen ground, with the most amazing embroidered roses, all done in cross stitch, in pink and scarlet and mustard and chocolate. The colour combination means that the embroidered roses are very far from being at all “twee”. (I’ve re-photographed this fabric, as the pic on Trim Fabric’s website has more of a yellow/orange tone, although that could be my monitor.) The linen is I guess a skirt/dress weight, with a quite open weave (I think it would probably need lining). Of course I have absolutely no idea what to make this fabric into, but am very much enjoying looking at it every time I walk past it. What would you chaps do with it?
2 Comments
July 18, 2008 at 4:35 pm
wow your postie is way nicer than the ones I’ve had - I once caught mine slipping the “we missed you card” through the letterbox so I opened the door and asked for the parcel. At which point I discovered that a lot of postmen are really lazy and never bring the parcels on their rounds, expecting no one to be in and not even ringing the bell to find out!
The crosstitch fabric is lovely, but a tricky one. With a print that large scale, though, you’re going to need a really simple design to properly show it off without too many seams to interrupt the design… How much yardage do you have?
July 18, 2008 at 4:43 pm
Melissa- I’m scandalized by the insight you offer into the world of postmen behaving badly!
I have 2 yards of the fabric…
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