Etsy shop update

Just 1 item to show you, though I have 3 more sets of these waiting on the ironing board to be ironed and photographed and probably another 2 sets to cut out and a set of odd bits to iron and list...and and and...that's a lot of ands!

Bundle of 14 vintage cotton fat quarters over in the shop





I also thrifted a lovely little something yesterday for the shop that's currently in the process of being washed and dried, here's a wee sneaky preview:

Inspiration

Things that have inspired me this week...

Adventures in Dressmaking is doing a blog swap with Sweetie Pie Bakery and I love this idea of this men's shirt to tunic tutorial. I've got my eye on several of Andrew's old shirts!



Ayumi of Pink Penguin wrote this post full of amazing photos from Tokyo's quilt festival. Some of my favourites:







Sew Happy Geek at Excell Crafts posted this brilliant purse with exterior card pocket tutorial, I plan to have a go at it over the weekend!



What are your plans for the weekend? ♥

Halibut and Herring review

Just up the road from me is a lovely little gift shop called Halibut and Herring. It's so cute and quirky, they sell a range of handmade soaps and bath bombs (mostly made in Scotland and they smell divine!) as well as handmade bags, purses and cushions and random little gift things like a hedgehog shaped nail brush or bath crayons (to draw on tiles in the bathroom!) or a rubber duck with a doctors outfit on (I want this, he looks like a vet!). At the moment they have a range of gorgeous velvet (to continue the velvet theme) bags and cushions, I couldn't find a photo on the internet and I felt a bit weird photographing them in the shop but they're deep teals and mustards with birds and tree patterns, so pretty!



The shop itself is painted really bright colours, I especially like the teal theme they seem to have going and every time I've been in the shop workers have been lovely, greeting you with a cheery "hello!", and "goodbye!" or "thank you!" when you're leaving. Halibut and Herring has a nice range of prices as well, you could pick up a little gift for a couple of pounds or a proper present for £20-30 or more.



The window display is always very eye catching, it makes me want to go in and buy everything or run home and frantically sew all night. I love this scotty dog hot water bottle cover, so cute!



So if you're ever in Bruntsfield or Morningside, be sure to check out Halibut and Herring!

P.S. If you're into sewing and have a minute or two to spare, have a go at Sewaholic's questionnaire. It's for her business class and the sooner she graduates, the sooner we all get lovely new Sewaholic patterns to play with! I hope the link works, I've done it already so it might just direct you to a 'you've already done this survey' page but if that happens, you can check out the original link over on Sewaholic.net.

Tapestry swallows

I have a bit of a thing for tapestry. I feel quite hypocritical because when Danny and I were younger, we used to laugh at the lady who lived across the road from us because she had a tapestry bag. Being in our early teens, we thought this was just the saddest thing EVER and used to mock her mercilessly behind her back. I'm so ashamed. The irony is, I love tapestry now, one day I'm going to be that middle aged, slightly frumpy lady with the tapestry bag that the obnoxious teens across the street will laugh about. Circle of life and all that, eh?

My current purse is tapestry, as is my favourite clutch bag. I have a pair of lovely thrifted tapestry cushions and now have just been gifted this half-finished tapestry of swallows from Andrew's mum.



It used to belong to his Granny, until she couldn't really see well enough to sew anymore, so it came to Viv when they cleared her house after she died. She's in the process of sorting through her house now, since they've had 2 grandparents die in the past 3 years the house is FULL of amazing vintage treasures (and quite a lot of rubbish!) so a lot of it is being passed onto Andrew and I. Some of it I'm under strict instructions to sell on Ebay for her and some is for us to keep and use ourselves. I really like this tapestry, I'm going to finish it off and make it into a cushion cover I think.

Vintage and fake fur - yay or nay?

I had a brief debate with my friend Alison recently, after she got rather annoyed (and slightly heckled) a girl in the street wearing a fur coat. On passing glance, I couldn't tell if the coat was fake or not but that, Alison stated, was not the point. Fake fur these days is so convincing as to be almost impossible to distinguish from the real thing (this theme popped up over on Did You Make That? recently as well) and thus possibly compounds the idea that wearing fur is somehow fashionable, attractive and, as Karen from the aforementioned blog put it, "something to aspire to."

Since talking about it with Alison, I seem to be reading about fur everywhere. Debi over on My happy sewing place recently posted about a lovely 1940s jacket she made for herself, out of fake fur. It is gorgeous and she looks stunning in it, but again the question pops into my head, if it looks just like the real thing, how is it any different to wearing the real thing?

I don't have a problem with fake fur (I have sewn with it in the past), I think that it isn't directly fueling demand for the unecessary rearing and slaughter of animals for their pelts and besides the environmental aspects of the non-renewable energy and resources used in its creation (which is a whole topic unto itself and not restricted to fake fur at all), it is no more inethical in my eyes than wearing a jacket made out of any other material. The main argument I've heard for not wearing fake fur is, as above, it can be difficult to tell apart from the real thing and therefore could be indirectly promoting the use of real fur.

My main problem with this argument is that I don't think it's the duty of the person who's wearing the coat to provide a role model for others. If you chose to wear a real fur coat because you don't have a problem with the ethics then I feel it's a free country and you have just as much right to do that as I do to wear leather shoes or denim jeans. If other people look at you and think, "wow, I love her coat, I want one" and go out and buy the real thing, that's their choice and ethics, not yours and you're not responsible for their choices. It's like if I was wearing a fairtrade, organic, cotton sundress and someone who saw me in the street liked it so much they bought a non-fairtrade, non-organic version for themselves, I wouldn't feel responsible that they hadn't made the same ethical choices as me when it came to choosing that dress.



Now, I feel as a disclaimer I should write here that I'm maybe a bit biased. I have a vintage fake fur coat that I inherited from my Great-Grandma and I love it (especially at the moment as with my tweed jacket out of action, it's the only non-vet jacket I own that's warm enough to handle the snow!). I feel I should also state that I don't have a massive problem with vintage fur in principle either, I feel that since the animal is already dead, it would be waste and a death in vain if that item of clothing were just sent to landfill. I don't think I would buy a real fur vintage coat, but if I were to inherit one, I certainly wouldn't have a problem wearing it.

Here's one way to save vintage fur from the landfill, fur pillows. From The Coat Check. Bet they would be snuggly and warm...



I can completely understand where people are coming from with the other side of the argument, both with fake and vintage real fur. There's an episode of River Cottage where Hugh shoots some rabbits, cooks and eats the meat and then makes clothing from the pelts. If all fur clothing were made this way, I wouldn't have a problem with that either, but I could definitely understand people who did.

Woah, you can totally see through my top! Ha!



It's a tricky subject and can be so emotive for some people, but I firmly believe in truth through debate. Thanks to Alison for getting me thinking! ♥

Velvet love

I mentioned a few weeks back that I was planning on making a velvet skirt and since then I've been thinking about it a lot. I want to start it in the not-too-distant future but since I have a stack of more pressing uni stuff to get through first, I'm resorting to living my velvet dreams vicariously through Etsy.

Here are a few of my favourites...

I've been an avid reader of Clever Nettle for a while now and almost every shop update Anja posts I want to buy something! If this lovely dress was my size, I'd snap it up in an instant.



Tweed AND velvet?! Where do I sign up?! From Melissa Tabor, she has lots of lovely tweed clothing in her shop.



This lovely winter woods skirt is from Made with love by Hannah and comes with a detachable bird brooch.



I'm also still pining over the delicious blue velvet dress from Bohemia. Le sigh...to have money...

P.S. I'll be taking a wee break from blogging over the weekend, I'm off to Inverness for Andrew's Dad's birthday!

Work in progress Wednesday

This is my first ever submission to Work in Progress Wednesday with Tami's Amis. Hopefully this will encourage me to take more photos of my works in progress, rather than waiting until they're finished!



Check out my cardigan, see how it's grown! I love this wool, it's from New Lanark and the colour is called blueberry. There are so many cute colours of wool in that shop, if this cardigan works then I'm definitely going back for some bramble, pebble and heather. I should do a review of New Lanark at some point, it's a lovely place for a day out!



I had a scary moment last week where I thought this was coming out too large, but luckily I rechecked my guage and I think I'm safe! It's a Ysolda Teague pattern, 'Coraline' off Ravelry and so far has been pretty straightforward, check out my first attempt at provisional cast-on! It's growing slowly but that's more because I haven't been doing a huge amount of knitting recently, by the time I'm done studying for the night I can generally only stay awake for about half an hour before I have to give in and crawl into bed, so not a huge amount of knitting gets done. I'm away to Andrew's folks in Inverness for the weekend though so I reckon I'll get quite a bit done there.



Ooo, excitement! I love watching a big knitting project grow!