Iowa City Book Festival 2010: Sunday

Today was the "A Day in the City of Literature" portion of the Iowa City Book Festival.  All different book discussions or book-related activities were spread out all over downtown - I was having trouble figuring out the times on everything (plus parking downtown is a pain on Sundays because of the special parking on the street for churchgoers).  I decided to go to the Book Crafts event at Home Ec Workshop since there's yarn and fabric there, too (I could have gone to the bead shop for a book-making demonstration - I think that's what was there but I really don't use beads much).

The book craft activity wasn't anything terribly special - you could color/sticker your own bookmark or accordion book, so it was like a kids' event we have at the bookstore - so I decided to look through the yarn instead.

I found:

Malabrigo Worsted in Sotobosque - a really beautiful pink-brown-black kettle-dyed yarn.  It reminds me so much of an Iodine Clock demo, only pink instead of yellow.  I think I'll make the DNA Helix cable scarf out of this instead...maybe.

I also came home with some (more) sock yarn.  Malabrigo Sock in Primavera - pretty, no?


I didn't find any fabric I liked there - I was looking for something specific and, while Home Ec has great cotton prints, I didn't see anything in the color I needed.

So I went to Jo-Ann - which is turning into Wal-Mart, I am not kidding.  There are ketchup and mustard refillable containers for sale and a bin of cheap flip-flops near the door.  Really?  I understand that people like to decorate flip-flops but the containers and other crap are a bit much especially considering it took me nearly an hour to find good quality fabric.  Then I had to find the right color, also not easy because the selection of good quality material for dressmaking/couture sewing is pitiful; if I made quilts I'd be in business because they've got everything under the sun in cotton quilting fabric.  I miss my Hancock fabrics. *sob*  I want to go to Mood!

What I really needed was a nice, smooth fashion fabric to make a sash for a new dress (dress is ready-made but the sash that comes with it leaves something to be desired).  Since the dress is such a unique color green I wanted to use a darker shade of green instead of matching directly (if I had to, I would have used black, but I got lucky in the end).

The dress color is on the left, the new hunter green fabric is on the right.  That will definitely look pretty as a sash.  I got 3.5 yds so I'm going to cut (very)wide bias strips, fuse them with interfacing, seam them end-to-end with flat seams, and then sew the sides together to make a nice sash without any wrong sides.  It should be long enough to wrap around my waist twice before tying it off.

And we all wonder when those skills our moms taught us will come in handy!

So that was my day in the City of Literature!  And here I sit at my blog, typing away and knitting madly instead of reading.

I can't wait to see what they do for the festival next year!

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