Going Japanese

I'm not going to go on and on about how great it was to visit Tokyo. Suffice to say that we had a fabulous time. Although I did spend a ridiculous amount of time drooling over pretty fabrics and craft stuff, I could happily have spent twice as long exploring floor after floor of prettiness.

One particularly memorable morning was spent in Fabric Town. Yes FABRIC TOWN!! In order to have enough energy to make it through Fabric Town in a satisfactory way, I very much recommend starting the day as we did: with a fat stack of pancakes. Oh and a 'healthy' smoothie to balance out all that jam and cream. Yum.

To prove that I'm not making this up, here is a sign for Fabric Street in Fabric Town:

Tomato was recommended in all the craft blogs as THE place to go for fabrics galore. After a couple of stops on the way, we eventually found the main attraction.

Ok, so I think there were about 5 floors of every imaginable fabric type. I have to say that my fave was the top floor, which had a massive section of colour co-ordinated 'fat quarters' for your delectation. I was so overwhelmed that I think I just stopped and stared openmouthed for about a minute. Wow.

It was inevitable that I would leave the store with a silly amount of stuff BUT miraculously it all managed to not break the bank too badly.
This is what I came away with:

A pretty selection of fat quarters:

A 'surprise' pack of fabrics, so cheap that is was impossible to resist even though it was  bit of pot luck what you got (I really like the camera fabric).

A couple of metres of misc. fabrics I liked the look of, especially the flowery one with pandas on :)

I also managed to wangle a trip to the legendary Tokyu Hands which is just lovely. About 7 floors of all things crafts and home. Of course I managed to pick up just a couple more fabric samples..

Below are some assorted pretty tapes I picked up from Tokyo Hands and Itoya.

And some cute bunny stickers I just couldn't resist:

So the point of getting all this stuff is actually to USE it. Behold my first application. Pretty from the front..

..and the back!

I'm currently trying my best to keep up the inspiration and looking up bag patterns from Cut Out and Keep to convert some of those lovely fabrics into something useable. I'm also hoping that our imminent move will mean that there just *might* be more space for crafts in my life!

White lace and promises

So I decided rather late in the day that I needed a shawl for my wedding. Yup, this pretty much exemplifies my approach to the entire event. As such, I decided to keep it simple and go with a (relatively) easy peasy number - which also happened to go with our beach wedding theme, being called Little Shells.

A dream to knit up in Debbie Bliss pure silk:

And it matched the dress quite nicely if I do say so myself!

The silk ensured that it was nice and light, while also protecting me from being frazzled during the ceremony. Here elegantly draped over a chair at our communal dining table:

All in all rather perfect despite the lack of planning, a bit like the actual wedding itself then :)