Posts Tagged ‘Family’

As I mentioned in our post about the food in Singapore, there are indoor markets with giant food courts all over the city.  Since we’re not big on shopping we had mostly just focused on the food section, but after a delicious meal one day we decided to take a wander through the rest of the market.

We were in luck for our fabric project!  One of the first stalls we came across had some gorgeous designs on nice cotton fabric.  Perfect for quilting and so much easier than our searches in many of the other countries! We had trouble deciding what to buy as there were lots of pretty patterns.  In the end we picked three that were thought were unusual or a bit distinctive.  Very happy with these ones!

Singapore Fabric

Sorry, this post is a little out of order since it was before we got to Singapore.  I still want to show of our fun Malaysian fabric though!

Our time in Malaysia was so jam-packed with action that we hadn’t had a chance to search for the fabric right up until the last minute.  After a pretty damp day in Borneo we were all set to fly back to Kuala Lumpur and head out to Singapore the next morning.  As we pulled in to the airport I realized that this might be our last chance to get any fabric from Malaysia!

Of course, there wasn’t a fabric shop at the airport, but they did have a great two for the price of one deal going on sarongs!  This meant that we wound up with much more fabric than we really needed, but the patterns are awesome and will definitely remind me of that part of the world.  And maybe we will even keep one of them as a sarong.

Malaysian sarong fabric

In between all of our temple watching we had a chance to explore the town of Siem Reap.  We were extremely lucky because the town had suffered from some serious flooding the week before we arrived.  It was bad enough that a couple of people died and there were still sand bags and lots of water about when we got there.

Flooded street - right outside our hostel!

The city and our hostel (Rosy Guest House) were drying out and recovering from all of the water.  It didn’t affect us too much though and we considered ourselves really lucky to have decent weather for temple viewing.

Siem Reap is a pretty touristy place.  There are lots of good restaurants (a good thing), but lots of people hassling you to buy stuff (and they are PUSHY here).    Honestly, it got pretty tiring constantly being shouted at to buy things.

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Well, after a bit of a story behind the Hong Kong fabric, the Thailand fabric was very straightforward.  Basically, there were lots of cute shops on Koh Tao, the island where we learned to SCUBA and one day we were walking along the street and noticed some absolutely gorgeous fabric in one.  Seriously, I think this is my favorite so far.  Totally unique and so, so beautiful.  We snatched it right up and shipped it off to my mom.

And here it is!

A little wrinkled, but you get the idea...

Close up of the flowers

And just because they are adorable, here’s another picture of the island dogs sleeping on the beach.  They have their own little sleeping spots!

Cute!

Buying fabric in Hong Kong turned out to be a bit of a different experience than anywhere else we’ve been so far.  We looked up where we might be able to buy some fabric and found a whole lot of shops all in one area of town.  Hong Kong has a great subway system, so we took a ride over there and this is what we found:

Hong Kong's typical fabric shop

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I have to start this post out by thanking Phil and Joanna, without whom we never would have been at the Little Bush Camp in the Sabi Sabi private game reserve.  This is absolutely the most luxurious, incredible place I can imagine for seeing these animals and I feel beyond lucky to have spent three nights there.  My photos definitely do not do this place justice.  It was perfect.

Our swank room!

The food was amazing (and endless) with lots of delicious choices for each meal.  I was stuffed constantly!

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Once we had the camp set up we got to start relaxing.  I found this to be a very laid back part of the trip.  Mornings and evenings we got to go on walks on our beautiful island.  We saw some animals (although nothing as spectacular as in Chobe) and enjoyed the landscape.  It was so nice to get some solid hiking in after spending a lot of time in vehicles!  We saw zebra, lots of kinds of antelope, elephants, hippo, lots of birds, and a snake in the big tree IN OUR CAMPSITE.

Island Scenery

We hiked around a giant baobab tree near the camp

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We were so thrilled to see so much at Chobe that we were really sad to leave.  Fortunately the next part of our safari was to be a similarly awesome (though quite different) experience.  We were headed into the Okovango Delta (after another day’s worth of driving) – a place that is unique in the world for both its ecology and its culture.

En Route - Early and Cold

The Okovango Delta is the world’s largest inland delta – it is a huge area whose geography changes with the seasons.  In the low season, it behaves much like a normal river plain would – grasses and a few river channels (along with wild animals) can be found then.  But in high-water seasons (We were there in August which has a high water level) the islands sink under water and become marshes separated by hundreds of small islands. (more…)

In the afternoon after our walking safari we headed out to see the famous Victoria Falls.  They were on the low side since it is the dry time of year, but still impressive.  We had about three hours of walking around and taking photos, so I’ll just share a few here.

The spray was pretty intense!

Mom and I hiking around

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I can’t believe I forgot to post this with all of the Turkey posts!  But better late than never, so here is the lowdown on Turkey’s contribution to our wedding quilt.  We knew that we wanted to look for fabric in Istanbul’s famous Grand Bazaar.  You can read about the rest of our shopping trip here.

Even though Istanbul is known to have amazing textiles we had an epic quest trying to search for something that would be appropriate for use in a quilt.  In general the fabric we would like to find would be made of cotton or something similar, be a strong, thin fabric that isn’t stretchy, see through, or too coarse.  In the USA you can buy fabric specifically designed for quilting, but this is not the case in most other countries.

The first thing we found that would maybe have worked was a table runner.  We would have needed to cut it up and only wanted a small bit of it.  It was expensive though and we ultimately decided that we could probably do better.  It wasn’t easy though and even our final choice will be quite a challenge for my mom to put it into the quilt with so many other different types of fabric.

And here is our choice!

Turkey Fabric

It is a pashmina made of cashmere.  We loved the pattern and the colors and it is incredibly soft.  Perhaps it can even be used in one big piece on the back of the quilt or it will just mean that there are little soft patches on the front!