Autumn Zebra

Near the Farmer's market on Saturday was a woman with a small stall of things apparently made by indigenous Mexican people. I think she was also Mexican herself. There were some fabrics and some jewellery, and also lots of Frida Kahlo postcards and some bags with her on (which hadn't been made by the indigenous people, she just really liked her). They also had these beaded animals where brightly coloured beads are stuck onto a wooden form. For some reason Mexican people like bright colours, whereas in NZ no one particularly likes colours at all... There were wooden turtles where the shell lifted up like a lid so you could put stuff inside and the top of the shell was beaded, which I considered getting as a present for Mum, but I thought they'd be very expensive. Instead I got the first thing I liked, which was a beaded deer, and when I said I wanted to get it, she said "Really?!" and seemed very surprised, and said NZ people didn't buy those ones usually. I th...

Since the last fortnight was Fair Trade fortnight, Trade Aid plus Forest & Bird were showing films at the Academy Cinema for $5 incl. free coffee/tea/hot chocolate and chocolate (fair trade of course; a product show case of sorts). We saw the one today where the feature ( The Greening of Southie ) was about trying to build a "gold" standard ( LEED certification ) building ( the MacAllen Building ) two years ago in South Boston. It was quite interesting: they used bamboo for the floors, a kind of mdf made from wheat straw, etc. Apparently, no one in the USA had really heard of dual-flush toilets - you know the ones with two buttons, for more or less water? Yeah, they really made a big deal of that aspect - partly because toilets are funny I guess, but given that this type is practically normal, it seemed really weird to talk about them at all. They sort of made all the labourers, cement workers, etc look/sound like morons, which was a shame, although they also appeared...

Random pics of things I made or liked or whatever... It seemed like a good idea to follow the inspiration in the Spotlight catalogue and make food covers out of mosquito net with fabric around the edge as a presnet for my Mum. However, I discovered I don't really understand about getting a wide fabric border around a corner, and it was a total mess and really annoying. I wanted to sew one edge on, then fold it over and sew the other edge down on the other side like you can do with bias binding (as this seemed like it would be like a giant binding, essentially), but out of 4 sewing books, only one gave instructions for this kind of thing and those instructions were more-or-less "when you reach the corner, leave enough fabric to mitre it" and then when sewing down the other side "mitre the corner" - ok, not very specific there. I had the most success folding it in half first and sewing down both edges at once, and just messing with the corners when I got to them,...

I think I'll try and post some pictures from Christmas, before they become completely irrelevant... I made shopping bags to put everyone's presents in (except my husband's because I do most of the shopping so it would be like giving the bag to myself), out of fair trade cotton calico and leftover scraps of fabric I had. Since it's fair trade, and not on special, it's rather expensive, and with the cost of labour these shopping bags would cost about $50, as compared to $2 like they do when you get them from the supermarket. Of course, mine are a bit fancier than the $2 ones, but still... However, it was lovely lovely material, it felt very nice and it was really nice to sew. The weird thing is that cutting it felt a bit like cutting some silk I had- like the feeling through the scissors was similar in the way it sliced through it. Very odd. For those that like cutting fabric, you could cut this all day; it was lovely. So I did some of it batch-wise, and some of it in...