Back home

 No blog post last weekend because I was in Tokyo for a few days on my way home, then flew to Hong Kong for one night to connect with my return flight to London. I made it home with only minor delays and DH met me at Heathrow for a very late return home.  As you can imagine, the last few days have been laundry, jetlag, catching up on post and emails, and today tackling the weed forest that used to be the garden.  It was a good trip, almost everything went according to plan, my tour was pretty good, I stayed healthy and my luggage made it home with me.  I enjoyed being back in Japan for three days, I liked Hong Kong and would go back there, and I feel like I got a great overview of New Zealand.

After Christchurch, I returned to Wellington for another full day and visited a bookstore/newsagent called Minerva on Cuba Street, which had been recommended to me. They had an impressive assortment of textile books including lots of quilting books, and also a wide selection of textile magazines from all over the world including a now-defunct New Zealand Quilter magazine. I had quite an enjoyable browse but didn't buy anything, mindful of my bulging suitcase.

My last day in Auckland, I visited the arty and quite interesting Ponsonby Road area where I stumbled across Prosper Yarn & cafe, run by a lovely woman who also dyes the yarn.  I picked up a nice skein of her fingering weight 'bach' in the colourway Taliesin, which contains 70 merino and 30 linen - she said the linen content will ensure a nice crisp block when used for lace knitting.

In the afternoon, I went over to the Auckland War Memorial Museum where there were interesting exhibits on the Maori and on Pacific Islanders, including another Cook Islands quilt.

Hung nearby were some large barkcloth or Tapa with printed designs which would make great quilt patterns.

On one of my Tokyo days, I visited some places I'd seen recommended by vloggers - one of these was a great stationery/homewares store called Loft in Shibuya. This had all kinds of neat stuff, including loads of wonderful Japanese stationery.  Here is one of the displays of 3D cards (of which some came home with me).

I also  found this miniature loom kit.  It came with some textured yarns and instructions in English and Japanese, and I thought it might work to weave small dollhouse carpets.  I'm trying it out with the yarns that came with it, but I think they might be too bulky.  I might try again with embroidery floss. A simple tool but it's working quite well.

I finished my plane knitting project on the flight home.  This is a picture before I closed the toes and blocked them - they are now all finished - I got the colour sequencing fairly matching on the uppers.

It's been a bit strange to be home again after 7 weeks, wearing clothes that weren't in my suitcase, but nice to have access to my wider craft stashes again.  I've cut out and sewn another little block for the Lori Holt My Favourite Things quilt.  I have one more block to go and then the centre will be complete.  And I've been doing some cross stitch again in the evenings.  I need to think about what I will make with my Kiwiana fabrics - they are pretty diverse so it will be a fairly scrappy quilt I think.

New Zealand Week 5

 My tour is over, we got into Christchurch yesterday.  The weather has been miserable for several days now, so our last few days were a bit confined as the danger of landslips prevented us from going too far afield - one of the roads we had taken just the day before was closed due to a slip. So nothing crafty to report from the west coast of the south island although I did see some pretty greenstone carvings in Hokitika.

However, Christchurch has made up for it as I found some good shops today despite the soggy weather.  The first was a branch of Knit World, a large knitting store only a few blocks from my hotel.  They had a big selection of Rowan wool, and then loads of NZ wool, with just a little acrylic, synthetics and cotton.  They had the Decadent brand, a lovely 100% NZ wool and I had just bought two balls of their lovely mottled 'Neutrals' DK at a farm experience we went to on the last day of the tour. It has a lovely sheepy smell as well. Since I am currently carrying around 4 balls of wool (plus my own knitting) and have posted some home, I didn't buy any more but enjoyed looking around the store which had a big patterns corner, some knitted samples, and some haberdashery as well.

I got the bus out of the town centre to visit The Tannery, a converted Victorian tannery complex now housing a variety of boutique shops and cafes.  I went there to visit Cushla fabrics quilting store, which I'd seen recommended online. It turns out it's been sold and is now Sew & Co. so it's still there and what a wonderful store!  Absolutely loved their beautifully  curated displays, the large quantity of sewn samples displayed with their patterns to purchase (which makes it so easy), the riot of colour everywhere you looked, and the staff were so friendly.  The store is divided into two parts, at first it looks really small but you go around a corner and it opens up into a much bigger room.  And they had loads of stuff on sale, I assume they are selling off older stock from the previous owners.  I thoroughly enjoyed looking around the whole store and bought a cute pattern for a teapot pincushion, some more Kiwiana fabrics, and picked up a huge bargain on a McKenna Ryan kit for the quilt 'Beach Walk' (reduced from $490 to only $200, which is only £100 for me).  I sold a kit for one of her other patterns last year because I'd had it forever and realised I was never going to do it, but I really like this one and it looks less complicated than the one I had.  However it is heavy, which is not going to help the suitcase situation.  They had a really wide fabric selection: lots of Tilda, American Jane, lovely batiks, Moda of course, loads of others and I really liked all of it - would have been quite happy to take the whole store home.

Also in the same complex was 'Bolt of Cloth' with an inhouse 'marimekko' shop including bolts of their iconic fabric.

And also The Fabric Store, which had a wide selection of dressmaking fabrics including Liberty Tana Lawn, and also haberdashery and leather. I think a lot of it might be deadstock, and there were some great 50% off sales going on.

Further along is the Wool Yarn Fibre store, a small store front selling mainly handknitted or handwoven items, but behind it is an enormous room which is the local spinning and weaving guild's treasure house.  It looked like a fantastic resource: they had a huge library of textile books, all kinds of spinning wheels, floor looms, tons of room - I'm very envious. 

On the way back to my hotel, I spotted these adorable smocked dresses, possibly in Liberty cotton, in a shop window.  I tried smocking a baby romper for my son when he was little, it was a lot harder than I thought it would be and not a great success.

I finished my sumo sashiko. 

NZ week 4

 Only four days of my tour left.  We've driven all the way down the South Island to Queenstown and now are starting back up towards the west coast.  

In Kaikoura I found yarn for sale in one of the tourist shops and picked up a couple of skeins of NZ DK yarn in pretty blues.

Driving down the Canterbury Plains, I did spot a couple of nice looking patchwork and quilting shops out of the window but of course I can't get off the tour bus.  In Queenstown there was a Saturday arts and craft market near the lakeside on a lovely sunny day. There was actually a handspinner set up to sell skeins of handspun and the wheel was there - proprietor was absent temporarily.  There was also a man called Reynold Turner from Cromwell, who was selling little model houses assembled from real stone chunks to mimic the 19thC miners cottages in Arrowtown.  Another stall was selling the most wonderful handmade candles modelled in soy wax I think he said, with all kinds of kawaii details.

Today we visited Arrowtown, with wonderful autumnn colour in the trees. After enjoying my walk around the cute town, I went into the museum where I found a colourful textile exhibition by the COOTS (Central Otago Outside the Square!) which sounds like a fun and supportive local group. Several things caught my eye in the exhibition.

And in the gift shop, they had prints made from textile art designs by Sarah Auld in felt which were really cute.

In Wanaka, I came across Wools of Wanaka, which sells both knitting yarn and a variety of woollen clothing and goods.  Here I bought a shawl pattern called 'Dirty Lace' which looks quite fun, by Truly Myrtle a NZ designer,  It needs four skeins of sock yarn and they had some wonderful samples knitted up.  It's knit on the bias with simple lace patterns which look fun.