September 25, 2014

Scottish fabric!

This will be the last post based on my holiday, I promise. There is just this one more thing I wanted to show you and I think you can relate to this: I bought fabric. I know a lot of sewing bloggers make a habit of buying fabric as a souvenir but I have done that before. Most of my holidays just don't take me to places with good fabric shopping.
This time, I knew I was going to in Edinburgh on the last two days of my trip, so I googled for fabric stores there beforehand. That way, I found Edinburgh Fabric,  which promised a great selection of, among other things, Scottish wool. The store also happened to be conveniently located along the main road between our bed&breakfast and the town center. 
So, I went fabric shopping when on holiday... Poor E was content to just stand about while I pondered the huge rage of fabrics on offer. I was immediately drawn to the wools, both because the weather was starting to turn autumn-y and because there were some many British and even Scottish varieties. There were really tempting crepes and gorgeous handwoven tweeds but in the end, there was only one kind of fabric I could really pick as my souvenir from Scotland:

Tartan. Proper, 100% wool Scottish made tartan. I just had to pick from a large selection of different designs. Having no family links with Scotland myself, there was no obvious choice.
I picked this sett purely based on its look and colours (the background is actually a rich blue, not grey like it looks in the picture. It's nearly impossible to photograph fabric properly and the colours of my fabrics are much richer in real life than they look in this picture). It was labeled "Holyrood", which I thought was appropriate because I used to take a lot of long walks in Holyrood Park when I was living in Edinburgh as an exchange student (only for a single semester) years ago. 
The sett doesn't appear in the book of Scottish Clans & Tartans which I also bought (there are 150 in it) but that would make sense because Holyrood is, as far as I know, not the name of a family or clan. Historically, the Palace and Park belonged to the royal family so it's unlikely that another dynasty took its name from it. That makes it likely to be a fairly modern design made either to celebrate something about Holyrood or just to sell to people like me.

The other fabric is a thin wool in a rich bluish purple. I love that colour and because it was in the remnant basket it wasn't expensive.
I have 1.5 meter of each, so now I only have to decide what to make with them.

5 comments:

  1. That is a great shop. I love to go there when I am in Edinburgh, especially as they have a good range of silk velvets. Your fabrics are beautiful. There seem to be quite a few non-clan related tartans these days, which I think is fab as they can go nuts with the colours then. x

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  2. Great souvenir. It was so nice to read about your Scottish holiday. Still on my list of places to visit.

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  3. Beautiful fabric. I still have souvenir tartan from that same shop.

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  4. nice choices!
    hope to see what you'll make out of them :)

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  5. This fabric is stunning. When I went to Edinburgh, I went to the Tartan Weaving Mill on the Royal Mile. It was incredible to watch them weaving the tartan fabrics, then to go into the gift shop and see kilts made from the same fabric! I wish I could have bought some wool fabric while I was there. Maybe next visit.

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