Not so Mellow Yellow

Yellow is one of my favorite colors.  Not to wear -- yellow makes me look yellow, and not to decorate with (although our bedroom is a deep dijon-mustard gold), but just as a color in general.

It's happy, it's cheerful, it's . . . a difficult color to wear.

And because of that, I'm always on the lookout for yellow garments at the thrift store to incorporate into my work, and I hardly ever find any. You would think that someone out there would have bought a gorgeous, but unflattering, yellow dress in her time - and gotten rid of it.

But no.

Recently, a couple of sewing friends came to town and we went on our annual fabric pilgrimage.  The place is wholesale, but will do retail if you show up and ask nicely.  Since most of their stuff is high end, I tend to stick to the remnant boxes in the front of the store.   (They're appliance boxes, so plenty of room for remnant goodness!)

One of the first things that I saw, which made me do a total happy dance, was a chunk of brilliant, sunny yellow cotton. The next thing was a second chunk of it.

My day was made.  (I'm easy, right?)

All this yellow goodness was going to last me for ages.  It was going to be incorporated into a dozen different projects, accents on dresses and strips in patchwork, a little everywhere, to make it last.

Which, of course, is why the first thing I did was to cut out a dress.

The appliques are made from  some Hawaiian shirt fabric brought back from a co-worker's vacation (I asked her for fabric, and she brought 4 fat quarters of different colors -- pretty, but never large enough to make something from).  The green stems are from a set of lime scrubs from the thrift store.

Red and green ornamental stitching at the hem, red buttons, green buttonholes.  Obnoxiously charming, or charmingly obnoxious?  You tell me.

That's what friends are for

Last May, for the Philly PR Weekend, a few sewing friends stayed at my house.  Elizabeth brought a great hostess gift - wine and fabric.  The fabric was beautiful, a gray, pink and black plaid, pictured here.

Unlike the wine, which didn't last long enough to have its pictuer taken, the fabric has been aging ever since.  But this past weekend, I finally decided what it wanted to be, and I pulled it off the shelf.  And there wasn't enough.

Normally, 2 yards is plenty for most projects.  Because of the complexity of what I have in mind, I needed more like 4 yards.  I knew where the fabric came from, and I tried there.  No luck - sold out. 

I mentioned to Elizabeth by email that I was looking for more of the fabric, and she said casuallly, "I have 2 pieces at home.  I'll put them in the mail for you tomorrow."

She's getting a thank you in the form of something from my stash, and my gratitude for helping a fellow sewist out of a tight spot.

This is why I love this community. 

A little enabling

For all those I couldn't persuade into fabric in Chicago (and I was actually VERY restrained for me; normally I'm a champion enabler), Fabric.com just got in a whomping load of Liberty of London tana lawn.

Major weakness of mine.  It's $28.98 per yard, which is painful but below any other price I've seen recently.  I have to narrow my choices down from ALL of them to a few.  This will be difficult, but I can't buy it all. 

Right?  Right.

Either/Or

So I'm having a dilemma. After a few too many jackets and cold weather projects, I decided I needed sonething spring-like to perk me up.. I chose Simplicity 2936 (View A, the yellow flowered one, but with no sleeve ruffles). I pulled one of my oldest stash fabrics off the shelf to use for this blouse.

This fabric has not only been in my stash since I moved out at age 19, but prior to that it was in my mom's stash, and she liberated it from my great-grandmom's stash when my grandmom died when I was 8. This poor fabric had been folded up for well on 50 years, and no one ever cared enough to cut it up. Until now.

My dilemma is until I finally unfolded and washed this fabric, I don't think I ever realized that what I liked was the reverse of the fabric - when I took it out of the dryer, I saw all these little dark blue flowers and didn't recognize it at first. I think I like the reverse better, especially for this blouse.

The left side of the photo is the reverse; the right is the right side, which I don't find as interesting - the dark flowers are too dark, and I like the slight smudginess of the orange and aqua on the reverse. Both sides have a slight sheen, but there's more visible texture on the right side.

So it sounds like I've basically convinced myself here, but I'm open to opinions. Right side? Wrong side? Wrong side with accents of right on placket and sleeve bands?

A little retail therapy

I turned down a trip to Reading yesterday to go outlet shopping with a friend because, I said, I didn't have that much shopping to do and going to the outlets would only tempt me to spend money I didn't need to spend. So, instead, I did it closer to home.

We got the car for a few hours and went over to NJ to do a Sam's Club run (the kitties were running low on necessities), and while I bought the cat stuff, I also got the boy a sweater for Christmas, some munchies for the kitchen, picked out a cute top for his sister and added 3 bottles of wine to the stash.

I asked if he'd mind going to Jomar, which is a clothing/housewares/fabric outlet in South Philly. I hadn't been there in about 5 years, but I've just finished repainting the dining room and am in dire need of curtain fabric. It's a 3-window bay, so lots of curtain fabric. And I remembered Jomar as being inexpensive and slightly tacky, but I don't require garment-quality from curtain fabric, so I thought it would be an okay place.

Jomar's not easy to find. The address is 22 Jackson Street, but along the river most of the street numbers start at 100, at Front Street. So this was below Front Street and the river, in and amongst all these old factory buildings, some of which have been converted to outlets for sneakers and ethnic foods and scary clothing. One of the streets to get into the parking lot has been so neglected by the streets department that it still had cobblestones. He just kept looking at me, hoping I knew where we were going. I knew. I could smell fabric.

In less than an hour, I got 15 yards of a really pretty poly-blend lace for the sheers, 5 yards of burgundy, 5 yards of gold, one pre-made curtain packet with the exact same 2 colors, 8 yards of chenille fringe, 5 yards of gold/white/burgundy piping, a 2 yard chunk of burgundy velvet, oh, and about 10 yards of assorted fabric for me, including a charcoal gray with light blue windowpane plaid pant-weight wool. All for $99 and change.

So I feel better. Even though I probably spent more than if I had gone outlet shopping with Dianne, it was (mostly) all stuff that I did actually need. More on the fabrics later, after they've been washed and done up in some kind of curtain configuration.