Art Supply Shop and Fabric Market with Debbie

August 23, 2012-

Debbie and I both decided that we needed to restock our art supplies. 

The kids kind of plow through some kinds of art supplies.  Not that I'm complaining.  I LOVE the fact that all four kids are creative and want to do arts and craft projects!!!!  Painting?  Yes, please!  Creating things out of plastic clay?  Yes, please! Coming up with creative uses for old, tired items?  Definitely!

Markers, crayons, pastels, fabric crayons, face crayons…you name it!

Yes, Happy Rolling crayons. Very, very happy.

And more markers….but better make sure they work before buying them!

Stacks of water color paper. The kids love this paper!!!

The art supply market has shelves and shelves of all kinds of paints- oil, acrylic, watercolor, poster…etc.  And naturally many shelves are devoted to Chinese paintings (cool paint brushes, papers, ink, and all the beautiful things that are used to paint…why didn't I take a photo of those items????).  

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The fabric market:

Buttons…and buttons…and more buttons.

Buttons, thread and what's the sewing term for all those thing-a-ma-jiggies??? Notions? Lots of sewing stuff thingamajigs. 😉

Ribbons!

More ribbon and zippers and whatever else not…

Bolts and bolts of fabric for sale. Sew….you'd think I'd easily find cotton quilting fabric with the gazillion stalls of fabric here, right? Nope. You'd need hours and hours to search to find just a few. (lots of silky feeling fabric and jersey fabric and lightweight fabric but very little studier cotton prints).

Very pretty way to display all the fabric choices!

Stalls and stalls of fabric and tailors and seamstresses. This market has at least two floors only devoted to all things sewing!

Debbie needed to buy some buttons and other sewing thingies. No idea what they're all called.  Perhaps you've guessed by now that I'm not really a seamstress. 😉  However, I DID buy several charm packs of pretty fabric before I left the USA so that I can attempt to sew a quilt using them.  My problem is that I don't have enough of the fabric so I'm trying to find suitable choices.  I never would have guessed that would be so challenging and hair-pulling frustrating.

Another reason I wanted to go to the market is because I supposedly have a pair of shorts that were supposed to have been made for me by a tailor.  It's been a little difficult getting the shorts.  It seems that in some cases it can be very inexpensive to have clothes custom made for you however my shorts don't follow that rule. I can't remember exactly how much I paid for the original shorts (the tailor is using an existing pair of shorts I'd bought at Costco as the template) but I believe they were less than $20 USD (maybe even less than $15).  The new shorts will cost over $25 and they won't be as fancy as my old shorts.  Maybe I'll try again with a different tailor and a different pattern….maybe they're not all the same.  Anyway….it doesn't matter as I couldn't get my shorts today.  No, I haven't paid him for the shorts yet but I did buy the fabric.  So I won't be out quite as much money if I never see the tailor again.