London, the last word.

When we go abroad we always grocery shop, take a look in the drugstores, visit book and record stores and visit yarn stores. These places give you a quick look at what residents like and use in everyday life.

However, many items from the British drugstore Boots are available at your local Target and iTunes has just about put the record chain HMV out of business. I didn’t get a chance to go to Waterstone but I did buy a book (titled “Wool”) at Healthrow.

Even with those places crossed off our list we still found plenty to do.

Waitrose has a sheep cake:

Casa Brindisa is a lovely spot in South Kensington with delicious tapas. A little 3 years old girl sat at the table next to us – we were amazed at her ability to eat the jumbo sized green olives. She would have eaten then all if mom didn’t tell her to try the green peppers!

I love the entrance for Liberty, I wish you could smell these flowers:

And after you walk into the store you look up and see this:

I always stop by Liberty to look at the Rowan stock, the entire line. Believe or not, Rowan can be hard to find in NYC yarn shops. I picked up the Spirit pattern book by Kim Hargreaves & some Regia sock yarns (Kaffe Fassett and Kristin Nichols):

You can’t shop at Liberty without seeing their gorgeous textiles. I’m learning how to quilt so I was thrilled to see Liberty fabric hexes for English Paper Piecing. I can hand sew these into something unique:

We didn’t have time to visit Nest. My first and only visit several years ago revealed a charming yarn store that carried mainly British & European fiber – many aren’t available to me in the US.

We did have time to visit to Loop. This is my third visit and I found that their stock overlapped with many other US stores I’ve gone to. I was disappointed that the Wollmeise was basically brown skeins and that each skein was £29 (that’s almost $45 US).
They do carry some UK hand-dyers but again none of the colors appealed to me.

I did pick up some crafty magazines, another Kim Hargreaves pattern book, Quirky and Kate Davies’ Colors of Shetland book which contains essays & patterns:

My last shopping stop was the haberdashery department at John Lewis on Oxford Street. I quickly scooped up this striped Debbie Bliss Rialto DK yarn. To my recollection I’ve never seem variegated yarn from Debbie Bliss. I love these colors and have a project in mind.

That’s it! Hope you liked this little taste of London. I’d love to hear about your travel tales.

Starlight, Starbright

I’m taking a “Dear Jane” class at City Quilter. The classes are held once a month and each of the four class shows you a different method of putting the over 100 unique blocks of the Dear Jane quilt.

The first class taught us how to hand piece & hand sew the Starlight, Starbright block (A-13).

After tracing the template onto freezer paper, ironing the paper onto fabric and cutting the pieces from the fabric, I’ve sewn the pieces into sections and my next step is to sew the sections into the block.

I love the bright and colorful fabrics i choose for my DJ quilt. I figure if I cannot make all the unique blocks I’ll make as many as I can and make a smaller quilt.