Ladies only

ooh Lady porn!
Yes girls, its a mini photo tour of two of my local fabric shops!
Boy's - the post title is just a bit of reverse psychology, I knew you'd peak if I said you couldn't ;) cheeky!

First up, Simon Boyd, home of posh curtain fabric and superior oil cloth, not the sort of place I am usually allowed in, but we threw on a twin set of pearls and graced their premises with our delightful company.
We being Simone and I, who I was with under the pretense of 'buying curtain fabric'.
A little story...
Last year I was very ill with swine flu and pneumonia and after three weeks of being in bed only able to lay on one side and not being able to breath below my throat I was eventually taken to hospital, only for a week, but it was dismal.
I did lose a stone in weight though. Hooray!

Anyway, I left hospital a week before Christmas and farmboy, bless his cottons had been full on with the girls for the whole month hadn't had time to even think about Christmas.
So we did a mad three hour trip to town and bought as much crap as we could carry and that was Christmas.

However, being the hostess that I am I decided that a posh table cloth would make my Christmas dinner look like it had been planned to perfection months earlier and no little thing like pneumonia was going to stand in the way of my glam damn it!

So I went to Simon Boyd and blow me if I didn't spend £70 on one piece of fabric, for my tablecloth.
Look, it was near death moment and that's my justification ok!
It is beautiful.
In fact one of my friends said it looked like it had been made by elves who has now subsequently gone blind due to the level of close up skill needed to make it.
Here it is all laid out for dinner:

Anyway, Simone though she'd have a little luxury too, until she realized that to make curtains for her lounge, in her fabric of choice (without lining, curtain tape, thread, tie backs, her time etc) would cost a mere £600.
Luckily for us all I did a bit of covert snapping and now we can all pretend to shop in Mr Boyd's emporium of lush!

This is only half of the shop, maybe even a third.
The ladies that work there are a bit scary, I didn't want to take the risk of verbal abuse so I stopped taking photo's!


Next the altogether more approachable and lovely staff of Watson & Thornton the Shrewsbury equivalent of  Mood NY ( I guess!).

New season wool and cashmere

cottons and quilting fabrics

Buttons! and in those draws, Patterns!

Again this is lest than a third of the shop, there is a whole other floor!
I really have to control myself when I visit this shop, which is why I didn't take more photo's,  but  it was also rather lucky that I had just spent my allocated cash on some quality op shop finds:

 

A cutter for lino printing, an awl, long nose pliers and a darning mushroom!
Incidentally Simone never bought her curtain fabric and 

we both resisted the charms of Paperchase!

Hooray for restraint!