england

It’s weird to say that you can walk into fabric stores — which are, by definition, riots of color and print — and feel a little bored, but I’ve been struggling with that in the past year or so as I’ve become more familiar with What’s Out There. There aren’t that many manufacturers of quilting fabric, and there’s a strong faddish element to what’s in / out / hot / not at any point in time. 

I’d heard about Liberty fabrics a time or two before actually getting to handle them in San Francisco for the first time, and I understood the allure once I handled them for the first time. They are light, tightly-woven, and silky in only the way that high-quality cotton voile can be. They don’t feel like quilt fabric, because they aren’t quilt fabric. They’re a different, lovelier, animal.

They’re also hideously expensive. 

I shot a lot of photos in Europe. The collection is available at http://www.flickr.com/photos/domesticat/collections/72157631548498001/ and is broken down by city and by theme, but since I’ve been asked a few times, I thought I’d pick just a few photos to tell the overarching story.

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…and we’re home. This is the unofficial part of the trip that falls between ‘the end of the trip’ and ‘the resumption of real life.’ I am home, and hobbling on somewhat sore and extremely tired legs, and I’m dealing with the oddity that is culture shock in my own country.

On the nine-hour flight back, I tried to think through some of the questions I expected to be asked.

How was it? Amazing. Time stretched in strange ways; in the moment the trip felt long long long, and then the moment I got in the cab to go to Heathrow, I could feel time contracting, making the entire trip feel like one quick blur. I know I spent a week in Germany, and it now feels like five minutes, if I don’t stop to think about it in detail.

Did you enjoy it? Yes.

Were there down sides? Yes.

I don’t know who among you reading this will be shocked and who will stand up and yell ABOUT DAMN TIME, WOMAN.

I’ve been facing this decision for some time, and through a multitude of tiny steps I inched my way toward it, nailing it down by unofficial degrees, but never being brave enough to take a step that would commit me fully and financially. I seeded the ground earlier this week, not explaining to my friends what was going on but saying “if I don’t commit by the weekend, beat me senseless.”

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