Sunday Stash #198 – Achieve

Okay, so a few weeks ago, things got out of hand, and I’m totally blaming Alyce. You see, she told me she was going to be coming to Sydney for the first time, and she asked that I give her a fabric tour of our great city. The one thing I will say is that she has impeccable taste in fabric tour guides! After she had been gracious enough to show me around Tokyo numerous times, it was the least I could do to return the favour. As if I needed any encouragement to take a day off work to go fabric shopping though! You can recount Alyce’s full day of events here, but I must say she is rather damning about how much fabric I bought. Damning … okay, okay, but true!!! She manages to share all of her purchases in one post, whereby this Sunday Stash is dedicated to the first shop, where we began our day!

Achieve Australia is a non-profit organisation with a mission statement to provide services and support to people living with disabilities. One of the ways they do this is through this amazing Fabric Op Shop they’ve created in Meadowbank, Sydney. When I say amazing, I’m talking, like blast from the totally rad past with accoutrements of the future, and elements of today. I found all of the fabrics below for bottom dollar prices. Since the shop is run by fabric donations and volunteers, all of the sales benefit the organisation. Doing good, while also buying fabric? I may not be a certified altruist, but this gets me pretty hot tamale close!

All of the notions and fabrics are sorted into types. So there’s a wall of dress fabrics, an aisle of shirting, a case of batiks, and cabinets of quilting cottons just to name a few. (I won’t even detail the amount of notions and other craft wares–old and new–filling up the space). Each piece is marked individually based on its size, so for some of these I paid as little as $0.50! The most I paid was $11.00 for 2 metres of this teal upholstery fabric. It’s heavier than a quilting cotton, but not so much that you couldn’t add some of it into a quilt. Regardless of the crazy-cheap price, I would have rescued it for its iridescence alone! The way the teal shimmers into a royal blue with a sprinkling of light is just divine.

I couldn’t help but pick up a few batiks to flush out my batik rainbow stash. Plus, the resist on that bottom green one is of elephants, which definitely gave me pause, but I’m trying to grow as a fabric individual. (You’ll notice I skimmed over the pink cats in the first image). I think Alyce would also attest that I was in a weird fabric mood that day, picking up all sorts of craziness that I might normally pass by. But did you read the part above about doing good while also buying fabric? Yeah. Exactly.

Blue with metallic sparkles, check! Followed by a 1984 post-modern, Denyse Schmidt influencer, check! Then there were giant polka dots in salmon and rust, and what could be an off cut from any of David Butler’s Parson Grey collections. I remember saying on the day about so many of these older, “no name” fabrics, that if you slapped a current designer’s name on them, the modern quilt world would salivate and lick ’em up!

This was another large piece of yardage I bought. It reminded me of a Lotta Jansdotter print, and at $4.50 for 1.5 metres, I stuffed the whole thing in my cart. I don’t normally do large scale prints, but I’m at this place in my fabric life where I’m ready to start trying terrifyingly, new things. The pink on it is reading a bit bright in this photo, because it’s actually a lot paler, so it feels late eighties / early nineties, which you know is back in a big way.

So, yeah, that was all in like the first hour of my day with Alyce! And trust you me, we, okay, me me me, was just getting started! I have a few more weeks worth of Sydney fabric shopping to show you, there is that much! Plus, I’m going back to Singapore tomorrow, so I’m sure you can guess what that means. Uh oh! But one final thing before I leave you. This, yes this below, it is gonna be big, boy.

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