Day 1 in France: TissuMarket and Vagenende

I’ve never been good at taking photos on the go. I can remember maybe once I get done with visiting something notable…. So this ‘documenting my day’ is very new for me.

While I’m in France as part of a work tour, I do have bits of free time that I am spending judiciously.

Upon arriving in Paris, Wednesday, ss soon as we all checked into our hotel a bit after 1 pm, people were tired and decided to nap. Of course I wanted to nap too, but I had places to go! lol

Most of the fabric and yarn stores in Paris shut down for August. So you can imagine my delight when I found out that TissuMarket will be open the whole first week of August, until they too went on summer holiday.

I don’t recall going here last year with my Stitching Up Paris tour guide, Barbara… But she recalls taking us there first. Which is honestly why I probably don’t recall going here.

Whenever I go to the FIRST fabric store no matter where I am, I generally get overwhelmed and don’t purchase anything. I was running into the same issue on this visit. But the longer I was lingering in TissuMarket, the more I was able to calm down and look at fabrics with a fresh eye.

I did end up purchasing a few (to me) beauties:

The delicious pink is a silk charmeuse (2 meters) destined to be some pajamas, the black & white is a irregular pleated piece (only 1 meter) and then I got this wonderful blue mystery fabric (4 meters). I only asked for three meters but there was a dye issue near the end of the third meter so I was ‘gifted’ a whole extra meter – I’m pretty sure it was b/c I was a patient shopper. The one lady who was working was juggling 6 people all at the same time, poor thing. I remained patient and pleasant, and helped her move things aside for other customers and helped tie up bolts. I’m calling it a karma-win.

This blue is either a silk crepe or a viscose crepe. I’m going to have to give it a burn test to see which it is. Let’s just say I fell in love with it so hard, I didn’t care if it was silk or viscose.

I totally wished I had the luggage space for some wool coating as they had some reasonably priced aqua Melton. Yuuummm

Directions to the train took me thru a lovely park, full of local Parisians. I wished I had enough free time to just sit here with a book and macarons.