Weekend shopping

This past weekend was our last official holiday in Ukraine. Happy International Women’s Day to all the ladies! I really think we should take this holiday more seriously in the States – who doesn’t love receiving some bright flowers in the midst of winter? I decided to celebrate by doing some shopping. I realized that although the exchange rate here has been moving drastically in my favor, they haven’t started jacking up the prices of fabric yet. So fabrics that used to be $13 a meter are now closer to $8 a meter. Much more in my price range. So I picked up a few meters on Saturday:

These are all cottons imported from Japan. I din’t really have a project in mind when I bought them, but now I do and I’m thinking that I may need to go back and get the middle one in the pink/orange colorway as well. Hmm.

On Sunday, we headed out to Petrivka market. It’s basically an open air market where you can get anything from DVDs (bootlegged and legal) to stuffed animals to coffee grinders.  (Yes, we’ve purchased all of these things there.) There’s one fairly large corner that’s a used book market. After finding the sewing/knitting section, I picked up this beauty:

“100 Women’s Dress Styles” – printed in Minsk in 1960. The first 50 pages or so seem to be all about the crazy mathematics involved in making your own dress patterns. It seems pretty complicated, but I’m not sure if that’s because it is, or because it’s in Russian. But after that, it’s full of drawings of great dresses and what the corresponding pattern pieces would look like.

I love vintage dresses and this book’s got some great ones in it. So far I’ve enjoyed just sitting and looking at the pictures. Six bucks well-spent!