My Trip to London

I had a great time in London last weekend! After dropping off my suitcase at the hotel Friday morning I headed to Earl's Court which was the Tube station nearest to my hotel. Since I read Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere I can never view the London Underground in the same way again and many of the Tube Stations and the famous 'Mind the Gap' phrase have a special connotation to me now. If you like (urban) science fiction than you should definitely check it out, especially if you are traveling to London.

Anyway, I was meeting my friend Sami at Earl's Court and we went on a quest to find Shaukat Fabrics. A store that is supposed to be like an Aladdin's Cave of Liberty Fabrics, some even say bargains can be found there. Well there was a lot of Liberty Fabric there, that's for sure, a bit overwhelming actually! I was really excited when I found the stacks of remnant fabrics. Sami and I went through the stack where all pieces cost 1 pound each, and I dug up a really lovely fabric (the white with flowers). The 2 and 5 pound stack was more impressive and there's where I found the other fabrics. The larger pieces were about a quarter of a metre and cost 5 pound. Reasonably priced but not exactly super-bargains.

Later that day Sami and I met up with Sophie (of What Delilah Did) and we went to see an interesting exhibition called 'Making Colour' in the National Gallery. After that we sat in a park (not sure which one) and talked lots, because that's something you do in parks rather than museums. :) We also managed to squeeze in a quick visit to Liberty where I found this fabulous patchwork deer. Saturday I went to the &Stitches Picnic in Hyde Park and I wrote a little bit about that on the &Stitches blog yesterday. I had quite a lot of time for myself on Sunday and visited the Victoria & Albert Museum where I saw some beautiful embroidered garments and textiles. Especially the Chinese Silk Embroideries were very impressive. 

I received some fabulous gift over the weekend like these two pendants. The one on the left was made by Sami in her signature blackwork-on-Liberty- fabric-style. The one on the right was stitched by Sophie (from &Stitches) and the odd thing was that the motif almost exactly matched that of the dress I was wearing on the day she gave me the pendant! 

It was great to spend a few days in one of my favourite cities again and I felt very lucky to have such wonderful company during my time in London. Thanks friends!

p.s. I totally forgot to mention Pigeon Steve-with-the-Leaf who joined us at the &Stitches picnic. Definitely will write about him in the future as I'm planning to embroider a Steve the Pigeon Portrait :)

Colour inspiration: London

On my recent trip to London I picked up a gorgeous set of Liberty of London Fabrics. I took one of the fabrics as a starting point to make a London inspired floss combination. First I put together a set that was a near exact match with the colours used in the fabric but that didn't work for me. So I 'toned down' some of the colours and ended up with (from left to right) DMC six stranded floss no's  471, 321, 826, 829 and 728.  To me this palette is 'London' translated in embroidery floss colours!

London adventures

Carrot Orange Juice at Leon's

I'm totally exhausted after my three day visit to London with my best friend Caroline, but I had so much fun!  We arrived really early Friday morning and after eating some breakfast in Covent Garden we spent most of the day shopping. In our case that meant mainly looking at things and not exactly buying a lot of stuff. On the second day we planned to go to one of Europe's largest bookstores (Waterstones on Picadilly Circus) and we were quite surprised to find Picadilly Circus and the surrounding streets very much deserted except for lots of police officers.

Being the curious little bunny that I am, I asked a police officer what was happening. Apparently there was a large protest March planned later that morning. As we were more in a book buying than a protesting mood we moved along to have a look around in the bookstore. Lots of choice but I finally settled on this little stack of books:

After a stop at Leon's (a sort of healthy eco-everything-friendly fastfood chain which I can recommend to anyone visiting London, a good tip from my fellow Feeling Stitchy blogger Jo) we visited the Tate Gallery. A visit I thought was a little disappointing. Tate Gallery was located quite far away from the nearest Tube Station and due to all kinds of construction and building activities the entrance was hard to find. I had hoped to see some iconic pieces in the museum too but that didn't really happen either.

Me at Holborn Tube Station hanging out with some Egyptian Peeps of approx. my age

Our visit to the Victoria and Albert museum the next day however was great. The part of the museum I wanted to visit the most, the textiles, was closed but there was much other awesome stuff to see. And we also had a wonderful lunch there. At the museum shop I picked up some pretty reproduction fabric and a cute tea towel.

Repro Sea weed fabric from the V & A

Cute Arts & Crafts Tea towel

I would have loved to visit the Natural History Museum too but sadly we didn't have the time. We were pleasantly surprised that entry to all these museums was free as well.

I will be back again later today, to announce the winners of the Alphabet Glue E-zine!