London 2013 - Give Me Liberty

I've been getting requests to share my fabric purchases from London. Not one to keep anyone in suspense, here you have it!

Within four hours or so of my arrival in London and before I'd even eaten a proper meal, Leanne took me off to Shaukat for some Liberty love. Tana lawn before dinner: my kind of London experience!

rolls and rolls of tana lawn

Prior to the trip, I was warned that this shop can be overwhelming but I was pleasantly surprised. Not only were we the only two customers in the store, it was beautifully air conditioned (man, London was an oven while I was there - I haven't sweat that much since Bangkok in '91), spotlessly clean and very well organized. My mission was to come home with some small pieces of fabric that I could use to make the Liberty Spool Quilt from Alexia Abegg's Liberty Love book.

Shaukat's minimum cut is a 1/2 meter, but lucky for collectors like me they also sell remnant pieces for 1, 3 and 5 pounds sterling, depending on the size. Leanne and I quickly took to the remnant piles and dug for our favourites. 

Most of these pink prints are from a strip roll up I purchased at Liberty.

Darker prints that I will use for spool ends in the quilt. Some were traded at the Saturday night marketplace held at retreat.


eep! It's Hello Kitty!

The next day we were part of a lucky group from retreat that was selected to participate in a designer talk at the Liberty of London store. After some initial confusion and traipsing up and down stairs and elevators between the store and the office building behind it, we settled into a lovely cool conference room.

 

First a young designer with the company talked about collaborations with artists in some recent collections. Then Liberty's passionate archivist gave us a history of the company and it's flagship store, followed by a slide show. She shared comparative photos of the archival designs that inspired modern counterparts for the Stile (which they pronounce "steel") collection of quilting cottons. The excitement didn't end there for me.  After the talk, I went down a staircase and exited the office building through a set of doors into an alley behind the main store. Wrong move. I set off the Liberty Secret Service. All at once I had 4 Italian men dressed in black with ear pieces running down the alleyway from both buildings! Hehe, my bad. Luckily, I could play the innocent foreigner and no harm was done.

Some photos from inside the store:

Origami cranes hang above a display table

foxy door stops!

Sarah Fielke's book for sale on the fabric floor

Awards display in the office building lobby

walk this way to beautiful fabric

There you have it: Poppyprint's Liberty rampage of London! 

Next up, all of the beautiful handmades that came home with me from Fat Quarterly Retreat.