Sunday, August 22, 2010

Ladies who Lunch - Part 4

I'm VERY late to this party - since everyone else posted practically the next day !

But, since this will be my whole vacation post, I'll start at the beginning and lead up to the good stuff. As we often do, we spent some of our vacation visiting friends in Toronto. Normally, we have no plans, it's downtime (& shopping LOL) This year, I had one day planned for me, the rest we played by ear.

In my last post, I mentioned, amongst all the SM pics, that we spend some time visiting antique shops, consignment shops and the like. Last year, we carted home two pieces of furniture - this year one new piece came home with us. As an aside, I don't go "just" to buy furniture - if I could find these kinds of deals in Montreal, I'd snap 'em up !

Our house has NO cupboard space - my tiny galley kitchen in our old apartment has more cupboards than this house does. We've been looking for a buffet/sideboard type of cabinet for a long time. The intention was to take off the lunch counter in the pic below and replace it with storage.

An hour after we got home, the counter was off and replaced with this...please, please ignore the mess !



Now the good stuff !

When I knew we were going to Toronto, I emailed Connie and let her know. Connie, who should list mindreading in her list of talents, absolutely recognized the hidden (but not extremely subtle) message in my email - 'please, please come to Toronto and shop with me!'
And so she left her family to take care of business for the day and did just that :-)

Here we are at the start of our morning. I didn't know that Toronto had their own version of New York's Sewing Man sculpture. We've got a very large thimble, with concrete buttons surrounding trees as seating and a measuring tape imprinted into the sidewalk - pretty cool.





There's no point rehashing the trip down Queen Street as Connie has done a wonderfully complete post on the subject here...The down low on fabric shopping in Toronto

And that's not all ! I emailed Reethi and Connie emailed Sue and they met us for a while at lunchtime. We managed to catch up on the past couple of months, eat and get in some bead shopping before they had to get back to work.

Here's the 'Friends' shot - yes, we all have the same pic. We gave our cameras to a gentleman in Downtown Fabrics and he took one for all of us - we probably should have changed positions a little bit LOL !

The haul (from left to right):

16 yards of black poly/cotton broadcloth (I picked this up at a local thrift shop for $5.99) It's sure to come in handy.

Downtown Fabrics...
The wild print is a Nina Ricci cotton
Below that is a blue cotton, for a shirt and a purple and light blue knit for tees.

The steel blue and red fabrics are technical fabrics. The blue (cotton/nylon) from Chu Shing Textiles and the Red from Affordable Textiles.

The only fabric with a plan is the blue cotton/nylon - I've got a skirt that is just a titch too small and I'd like to try to copy it.

The yarns are both sock yarns, the yellow from Romni Wools on Queen Street and the other from Creative Yarns in Scarborough.

And that was my phenomenal vacation this year - I sure hope we can do it again sometime !!!!!


6 comments:

  1. Me, too! Me, too! (Next time.) TOny's son lives in Toronto ;)
    Glad you had a great time, Claire!!
    Soft hug,
    Rhonda

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  2. Great rundown Claire! Seeing your fabrics makes me wish that I picked up that blue toned knit! Maybe next time. Love the kitchen furniture update!

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  3. That sideboard is beautiful. My house doesn't have enough closets, either, because the house was built when everyone had "domestics" and "less stuff". I remember your furniture finds last summer, and am so jealous!

    That sidewalk measure is awesome; it looks like a wonderful day. I love your fabrics, and I'm glad I'm not the only one who buys colors that excite her with no definitive plan.

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  4. Ooooh, I LOVE your print. And I really need some technical fabrics. Maybe I should plan a trip to Toronto...

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  5. If only I lived on that coast. Love that new buffet. it's fabulous and works so well right there.

    Fabric looks great. How is the sock knitting coming? g

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  6. Oh Claire,that buffet is so gorgeous. And you make me want to go to Toronto for fabric shopping. i just have o see that giant thimble,etc.

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Thanks for talking to me - I love comments !