Mad Men Shocker and some Fabric Pr0n

Spoiler alert!  If you haven't watched episode 11 yet, please close this window now.

OK, so we've all watched it?

WTF? 

And as soon as I saw this scene with Peggy meeting Tom, I thought, "Why is she wearing such a Joan outfit?!?".  Oh wait, yeah.  I see the parallels they are drawing. 

But I have to say, I love this.  If we have another Mad Men challenge over at TSW, I'm doing this one. 

And didn't you all love it when Joan wore her Wave Dress from the previous season?

Anyway, now that I got that off my chest, I wanted to follow-up from yesterday's pattern treasure post with this fabric treasure post.  Gaze upon the haul I'm trying to stuff in my medium-sized suitcase:

De Gama cottons and wax prints. 

 Double sided shwe shwe

 Some scratchy mystery fabric, made with what appears to be linen warp and tinsel weft.  As soon as I saw it, I had to have it.  It reminds me of something from long ago that I can't quite put my finger on.  I know it looks tacky, but I just had an immediate gut reaction to it.

 Mandela border print shwe shwe.  (Funny story:  when the lady was cutting it, she accidentally cut through Mandela's left ear, and then she stopped and cried, "Sorry sir!  Sorry sir!", while rubbing the cut portion!)



 Linen in basic colours for trousers / dresses.



 Shwe shwe panels for making skirts.  You cut along the white dashed lines, align the panels and add whatever binding / closure you want to the waist.  The ladies at the shop measure your waist in centimetres and calculate how many panels you need.

Twill for making trousers. 

 Venda prints.  The one of the right is to make my friend a Venda skirt like my orange one I wear a lot.  Shhhh...it's a surprise.



Cotton voiles.

All this (plus some fabric I got for a friend) added up to about 40 metres and I believe I spent about $100.  The prices in Rand are about equal to what I would pay in Canadian dollars, so with the exchange rate being 8:1, I had a hard time saying no to anything.  For example, at one shop linen was 15R /m(~$1.90) and I would pay between $12-20/metre in Canada.  It's very, very tempting to go overboard.

Thanks to Jill over at The Sew Alongs for leading me to Focus Fabrics, the shop that caused me to hyperventilate slightly.  (Turns out that by some strange six-degrees-of-separation thing, her husband works with someone I work with at UCT, but I'll save that story for another time.)  Right next door was a shop I hadn't visited before either, called something like "Exciting Ladies Fabric Shop" (I would have put an apostrophe in there somewhere, but whatever).  The fabric cutter kept dropping the price whenever I tried to verify the cost per metre.  I really wasn't bargaining, but just trying to calculate the damage!

So I think I've eaten up my travel allowance.  I know you're supposed to use your per diem to pay for food and transport, but C'MON!  Who amongst you wouldn't skim a little off the top for shwe shwe and Venda prints?!