Spring and Tweed

(Spring & Tweed. Sounds cute, If I ever open a dress shop I think I'll call it that).


Garden first. My pansies, despite still being the weeniest little seedling-sized poppets you ever saw, have flowered. I love pansies. I swore I wasn't going to plant non-edibles in this garden, but I can never resist their blotchy little faces. They've been my favourite perennial since I was a child (always hated petunias, ever since childhood, by the way. Too weak and wilty. Not like the springy, compact pansy). I'm going to throw down some poppy seeds too in an unused bed, as the packet assures me they virtually take care of themselves.

I've put down sunflower seeds, with the aim of using the flowers as supports for climbing beans. I've read that it's doable. I bought the only non-dwarf sunflowers I could find. The packet says they can grow up to 4.5m tall! I really hope they stop at about two, else they'll hit the house eaves! Tomato seedlings will be purchased and planted on Wednesday, along with the pumpkin seeds, as it'll be raining then (saves me watering in the beds).

And I might get a zucchini too. Badly Coloured Boy thinks he doesn't like eating zucchini, but we'll have a garden full of tomatoes and beans if I don't get something else down (and neither of us eat raw tomato anyway - I'm planning a LOT of pasta sauce).

Completely un-in-tune with the seasons, I bought this:

Brown tweed (up close it has some bright grass green flecks), to make McCalls 5466. It's a free download off sewingpatterns.com's sister site for a little while! Though beware, it is some sixty-something pages to stickytape together. I went to Fabulous Fabrics to get my tweed. There are very, very few garment fabric stores in my city, and this was reputedly one of the best. Its formalwear range was really, really lovely (and I didn't even let myself go upstairs to the bridal collections), and it did have better quality stuff than is available at polyester-central/ Spotlight. But it was a lot smaller than I expected, so I was a little disappointed by the range. Their sales staff were amazing though (cf: Spotlight basilisks). They knew all about how dressmakers worked, they had references to good suit hire companies, they went and found the matching zip and thread for me after they cut my fabric, they knew what gabardine was, they could tell me what would happen if I did try machine washing dry-clean only wool (answer: shrink, fade, pill, in that order).

There was a really lovely pale grey check wool that I would be making this dress out of, except that it was dry clean only. I hate paying for drycleaning. I really do. Plus I never actually get round to taking things to the cleaners. My tweed is machine washable. Because (despite paying out on Spotlight) it's pure polyester. There was a hand wash wool/ linen/ viscose, but I didn't love the pattern very much, and it was very expensive. At least I won't mind terribly if I mess this up a little.

I think I'll have to try and work out which was the fabric store in Victoria Park that I liked. I can't remember the name or the address. It's owned by an Indian family, and it specialises in fabrics used by women who do still make all their own clothes. That is, (predominantly) immigrant women who still dress traditionally. They have masses and masses of sari silk, African print cotton, and a squillion kinds of black crepe (for hijab and abbeyahs). Shopping there is like shopping at some kind of international marketplace. One reason why I love it. The other is the reasonably priced silk suiting fabric.