The Auckland Vintage Textile Fair

If you are in Auckland this Sunday, and this event looks like your cup of tea, then go! Then email me, tell me how amazing is was, send me photos of your beautiful purchases, and make me cry with envy.

The Auckland Vintage Textile Fair

Sunday 13th September 2009, 10am-5pm

Admission $5

Alexandra Park Raceway, Epsom, Auckland

Need inspiration?

I love books. Yes, I look at blogs but for me, nothing beats a book. This is one shelf above my workdesk. There are books on Marimekko, Florence Broadhurst, Lucienne Day, art deco textiles, Frank Carpay, textile history, textile science, contemporary NZ textile artists, embroidery and handicraft techniques and much more. I share my home with three other avid readers so we have a lot of books. But even then I'm not satisfied.

I have a page in my notebook and a document on my computer listing books I want to track down and read. Some I look for in bookshops, some I stalk on TradeMe, some I drop hints about until they turn up as birthday presents, but many, many others I find at my local library. How great is that! And then next to them on the shelf I find other books, just as good, that I'd never heard of.

Here in Christchurch we are incredibly lucky to have a superb network of council run public libraries. Now I know that within every library there are people who carefully decide how the collection (books, magazines, CDs, DVDs, databases etc) budget gets spent. Once upon a time, in a library far, far away, I was one of those people.

In my opinion, the people at Christchurch City Libraries making the buying decisions in the areas of craft, textiles, fibre arts and contemporary textile design are doing an astonishingly good job.

So if you are having trouble deciding on a project to use up a treasured piece of fabric in your stash, or if you leave Stash reHash with a big pile of fabric, yarn and craft supplies and need inspiration for how to use it, head to the library.

A story from the stash - Part 4

The final piece of that blue fabric came out of my stash a few weeks ago when I stitched the poster for Stash reHash.

For the past few years I've been participating in Christchurch's local version of the worldwide movement dubbed "the handmade movement". Like thousands of other makers around the world, I've been handmaking goods for sale and selling them on Etsy, Felt and at contemporary craft markets such as Craft2.0.

I've snooped around in the enormous and incredibly prolific Interwebland craft and design community. Much as I love dipping in to various blogs and getting a cheap (free) fix of eye candy, I'm often heard shrieking "Who has the time to photograph and write all this stuff!" I've also bemusedly followed the mainstream media's take on the movement. I'm not one for violence but if I read another lazy, old, old news article about how "nana crafts" are cool again I'll take to someone with my knitting needles!

I've also met a wonderful community of makers in Realworldland. I've met makers at Craft2.0 and Crafty Business meetings and worked with them on Slip. We've shared tips, advice and contacts.

We've also shared loot from our stashes. We've informally gifted, pooled, donated, swapped and sold goods to each other, but felt the time had come to do something more. We've discussed how picked over the op-shops are and how divine various fabric markets we've been to around the world were, including the legendary Salvation Army fabric fair in the States now in its 21st year. We've watched as fabric/textile markets/fairs have sprung up recently throughout New Zealand from Nelson to Waiheke, Marton to Auckland.

So I felt it was time to have our very own divine, irresistibly fabulous fabric and craft supplies market in Christchurch. I could be wrong, it has happened before. But I hope not.

A story from the stash - Part 3

A year ago I fished a remnant of that blue fabric out again. This one is a little trickier one to explain. Yup, I made a doll.

My one brother is lucky enough to have five older sisters. We don't usually buy each other birthday presents but we make an exception for ages with zeros. Four of us have leapt the latest zero hurdle and all the other siblings have chipped in to buy us a beautiful necklace from a contemporary jewellery shop.

The last time we were organising this, my brother must have started to get worried. He let us know that when his turn came he didn't want a necklace. He wanted a Nudie Suit.

Well that is an excellent idea and he would look mighty fine in one. The problem is getting hold of one. The few that aren't already owned by Chris Isaak go at auction for more than the average annual NZ wage. So I decided that for a joke I'd whip up a wee miniature Nudie suit to be going on with until a real one came into his life.

Then I heard that The NewDowse gallery in Lower Hutt wanted members of the public to make party guests for a doll called Huttette's 21st birthday party. Huttette is the youngest member of late textile artist Malcolm Harrison's "The Family". I'd first seen and loved that exhibition when studying fashion and textiles in Wellington decades earlier. I'm not a doll person but I thought I'd kill two birds with one stone and I made Mr Grifta, pictured above.

So back into the stash I went. For his suit I used that old blue fabric.

Mr Grifta was originally supposed to be the sort of guest you dread having at your party. He's Huttette's naughty friend who she has loads of fun with but hasn't introduced to anyone. He tends to go too far. I'd intended that he'd have fake sick all down his front, nasty stains down his suit legs and that he'd be displayed in the gallery lying in the recovery position. But somehow after sewing on all those beads and sequins, I just couldn't deface him. According to my partner that means "He isn't art. He is just a doll".

His bio was: "Huttette met Mr Grifta on a bus. He made her laugh. She lent him $20. She calls him "The Nine Stone Cowboy". He calls her ATM."

Mr Grifta now lives at my brother's house, probably in the sandpit. I hope a real Nudie Suit turns up soon because I couldn't face making him a life-sized one.

A story from the stash - Part 2

The late 1990s saw me fishing that blue fabric from the London fabric market out of the stash for the first time.

The lining on a favourite 1960s satin coat had disintegrated and needed to be replaced to make the coat wearable. I'd always enjoyed restoring or remodelling vintage clothes, but this time it was purely out of necessity. I had one young child and was pregnant with my second. This coat was one of the few garments to still fit me. I had little money to buy new clothes and a ridiculous number of posh dos to attend, so I carefully unpicked the old lining, made a pattern from it and went stash-diving for suitable fabrics. I kept bypassing this one as, well, it is upholstery fabric. I was big but I wasn't ready to be upholstered.

Finally it won, the job was done and the coat was put back into service. I probably looked like a very shiny Fiat Bambina but I was happy. Every now and then this coat goes on holiday to my daughter's dress-up box but it always makes it back into my wardrobe eventually.

A story from the stash - Part 1

In the mid 1990s I was living in London and working at my dream job. One day while having lunch with a workmate I mentioned that I hadn't had much joy buying useable fabrics while living there.

I'd been to stunning antique fairs, shops and markets and seen beautiful, museum-quality vintage textiles. I'd been to the fabric departments of high end department stores and seen designer fabrics costing more per metre than I earned in a day. I'd been to numerous charity shops and found plenty of treasures but minimal fabric yardage. The few everyday dress-making fabric stores I'd found sold twee or tacky fabric yet charged five times what I had been used to paying in New Zealand.

My workmate was a curator with a special interest in textiles. She was also a sewer. On hearing this she grabbed my arm, got a huntress look in her eyes and said "You are coming with me next weekend!"

So I did. First we went to the V&A and ogled the costumes. Then she took me to what I think heaven looks like. It was a fabric market run by some of her friends. It was a jumble sale in an old hall filled to overflowing with fabrics, textiles, haberdashery, yarn and tools. From the overwhelming assortment of old and new I bought several metres of a clothing designer's surplus hand-printed cotton (since made into a shirt for my partner), some retro printed barkcloth (since made into a skirt for me), several bakelite buckles, some buttons the size of biscuits and some sequins the size of coins. I bought a battered piece of textile jewellery like the ones I'd just seen at the V&A.

And I bought the blue fabric pictured above. It is upholstery fabric and not what I usually buy but somehow I couldn't resist. I have carted it around the world and brought it out of my stash and chipped away at it several times. In the next few posts I'll tell you about some of them. I only have a wee scrap of that fabric left.

If Stash ReHash is only a quarter as wonderful as that market in London I'll be very happy, and my wallet will probably end up considerably lighter.

Donations for Arthritis New Zealand stall please

If spring springing and the thought of Stash reHash has got you motivated to clean out your fabric stash but you don’t want to have a stall yourself, then I have a great option for you. Arthritis New Zealand are having a stall at Stash reHash and they welcome your donations of good quality fabric, haberdashery and craft supplies to sell on their stall.

All proceeds will go towards their excellent work providing an extensive information and education service for people affected by arthritis. From personal experience I can tell you they do a superb job. To find out more, visit the Arthritis New Zealand website.

Donations can be left at:
Arthritis NZ Southern Regional Office & Service Centre,
Level 1, 15 Washington Way, Christchurch,
during Office Hours, Monday – Friday, 9:00am - 4:00pm.

If you’d love to donate goods but are unable to drop them off yourself, please email stashrehash@clear.net.nz and we’ll make other arrangements to collect your goods.

Thanks so much.

Trash or treasure?

My stash also contains far too many of the following sorts of things: frumpy frocks in fabulous fabrics, tired tablecloths, moth-bothered grey wool Scout blankets, superkitsch souvenir tea towels, bags bleeding their beads, dyed doilies, samplers with stitches missing, tatty-edged tapestries, half finished needlework abandoned by the maker in 1942, felted (and feltable) wool jerseys.....

Someone else may look at it and see a pile of trash. I look at it and see treasure waiting to be transformed someday into some stunning new thing, though I'll freely admit I've never made anything as truly marvellous as the Frederique Morrell trophy pictured above.

If your stash contains these sorts of oddball goodies too, and you want to sell them at Stash reHash, then that is fine.