Thrifted Fabric and a Gem

Okay, so first off, some advice. When you are sorting through a jar of buttons, and are scooping them back into the jar, either pay attention or keep your cup of tea very far away, or else you'll wind up with button-flavoured tea.

Mmm tasty.

In other news, I went thrifting the other day! I love scoping out the fabric and crafty area at thrift stores. My local Value Village has this great section devoted to fabric pieces, and I often luck out with multiple metres worth of some interesting fabrics. For example, I once found 2.5 m of a lovely stretch denim for $6 and 2+ m of a navy fine wale corduroy for $4! Sweet!

I was drawn to this blue knit right away. Don't ask me what it is beyond a knit, because I haven't a clue. I like the solid colour, and the drape is lovely. Plus you can't go wrong with a 1 m section for $1.99! While this was meant to be another version of New Look 6807, I'm really liking the cowl-like neck on Mabe here, so maybe I'll have to try my hand at adapting this pattern to incorporate this detail. Will definitely be stalking Tanit-Isis and Steph's (from 3 Hours Past) cowl neck alteration posts (although maybe not so extreme of a cowl).

I thought that this was just a 2.5 m length of plain white rib knit (for $3.99, woo!), but I obviously didn't look close enough while at the store, because it's actually a long tube of plain white rib knit. It's about 3/4 m wide when laid flat, and I'm awfully confused. Loooong tube dress maybe? Oh well, there's enough of it to make something, even if I'm not sure of it's original purpose.

For some reason, I really liked this olive green knit, despite not normally being a huge fan of the colour. Then I found the olive green leather-like poly-something-or-other, and immediately pictured a knit t-shirt with the leather-like details at the shoulder and neckline. Haven't worked it out exactly, but it'll be fun to play with a pattern to figure out a design! Plus each piece was $1.99, so yay!

Besides knits, I also lucked out in finding about 4 m of this unique striped shirting (top) and 2.5 m of grey corduroy. The shirting is destined to be a...shirt of some sort (yeah yeah, so unique) or maybe a dress (we'll see), while the corduroy will be a pair of trousers, whenever I overcome this trouser fear I've developed somewhere along the way.

Actually, I just picked up 7 m of suiting for 99 cents/m at Mitchell's today for the sole purpose of trying my hand at trousers. It gets too cold here in the winter to pull off dresses and skirts, and ~6 months of winter means I really need to get over this fear and make some bloody trousers already. So that's what I'll be doing. Just as soon as I pick up my copy of Pants for Real People from Mom's place.

So I see some tops and maybe some trousers in my immediate future. Which of course means my next project will probably be a jacket, because that's how I roll.

Oh, and look what I also found at the thrift store: