Wednesday's Wanderings #51 - I Heart New York

I heart NY!

It was one of my best fiber trips to New York City. 

Armed with a list of places to visit, a group of us headed to Manhattan.

 One of the locations was new and other places were new to me.   We touched down at 10AM and walked our feet off until we boarded the bus at 5:00PM to head home.

Our first stop was to load up on Dupioni silk, but on our way there we walked down 38th St and what did we find?  Shops filled with trims and notions and all sorts of embellishments.

Zippers in every size and color that you could imagine.

And check out these feather boas and racks of trim.

                                                   My favorite place - Butterfly Silk

Location: 257 W 39th St.

I had trouble controlling myself.  I have not met a color of dupioni that I did not covet.

Look at these gorgeous colors! 

 luscious pinks

a bit of orange and yellow

 wonderful greens

and my favorites - blues and purples.

I do have a project idea that is marinating in my brain.  Now I can't wait to start.

Then we headed downtown to 15th Street to check out Chelsea Market.  I had never been, but have heard lots about it.  We planned on eating lunch there and so did a lot of other people.  A lot.

It's indoors with about 35 shops off of a main concourse and I had a list of shops to visit to finish my holiday shopping.   Chanukah is early this year.  It starts Saturday night.

 We were really lucky to snag a table to eat a yummy lunch to fortify ourselves.

Most of the shops had a food theme.

 Eleni's was featured on The Today Show as one of the best cookie bakeries in town.

And they had cupcakes too!

I can't show the goodies I bought as gifts, but my kids will have an inkling when I write that

Jacques Torres, master chocolatier, had the most tempting shop of all!

Chelsea Market was well worth the trip.

 Next stop was the Lion Brand Yarn Flagship store, just a few blocks away.

 The window was amazing.  Everything in that window was knitted.

 Even the birch tree.

 Marimekko is a Finnish fabric company that was started in the 1950's.  I made my first quilt from their fabrics back in the 1970's.  The fabric with bold bright designs disappeared for a while, but now is making a resurgence.  I don't remember the price I paid when I was a graduate student, but now it is a bit out of my price range.  The quilting weight fabric was $45/yd and home dec weight was $75/yd!!  We shopped with our eyes.

 The City Quilter, located on 25th St was our last stop.  It is a great quilt shop with lots of contemporary fabric. We needed one last fabric fix. We were pretty tired by the time we arrived.  I wish that one of us had worn a pedometer.  I don't know how many miles we walked, but it was a lot.  Our bags filled with what we had bought were getting pretty heavy by this point.  They let us leave them behind the counter at the register.  That rejuvenated us enough so that we could buy more fabric. Just what we needed.

Since I visited last, they opened up some space and created a gallery for art quilts.

There was an exhibit of Judy Blaydon's quilts.

On our way to catch the bus to head back to Philly, we stopped to look at Macy's holiday windows, but this display of Michael Kors' red sequin stilettos really caught my eye.

So my block for the week summarizes our adventure in NYC. 

I printed a map of Manhattan depicting our route.  I created the map with Mapquest, cropped it to focus on where we went and printed it on EQ Printables.

 After quilting it along the avenue and street lines, I added the marquees and the footprints.

 I really heart NY!

How about you?