A few weeks ago I met a local stitcher, Maria, who put me onto a very good merceria/haberdasher in another part of the city I don’t know well. As errands in the pandemic have become ‘outings’ of some significance, it was a treat earlier in the week to visit it and find some more flourescent threads, which I’ve been collecting and using for a while now – some of them are in this photo.

The background fabrics I bought yesterday, on an outing to a wonderful store where every fabric is priced per kilo. I had shopped there once years ago, but as it’s out of my normal ‘circuit’, I’d forgotten it until I met Maria. So yesterday’s outing was to that shop. Outside the closed door to the shop are hand gel and number dispensers. Only 5 customers are permitted inside at a time, so by the time my number was up, I’d focused on two clear goals – (1) to ask to see some black and grey fabrics, and (2) see if there was anything in non-knit flourescent fabrics.

These are not fabrics for patchwork but use as backgrounds for appliques…. I’m thinking of those leather bits. I found a great polysester, almost gabardine weight. The vibrant flouro greeny yellow really pulsates, quite irresistible, and I snapped up the 2+m left on the bolt. The grey was very pleasing (2m) and of course they had black (2m) My tally was 6+m of 1.8m wide fabric for $535 (pesos) which is about US$12.60.

As a side note – I’ve always thought grey and yellow work well together, and was pleased with the recently announced Pantone’s colours for 2021 – a gorgeous video clip (1min). For only the second time ever, this year Pantone chose two colours, Ultimate Grey, a middish grey, and a very bright yellow known as Illuminating.