Al was sweet enough to agree to be my sherpa Friday morning and we headed off to the fabric markets at Sham Shui Po, which is a neighborhood a few stops  down from where we are staying in Kowloon.  I would like to take a moment to mention that the MTR – the public train – is very user friendly.  You buy one card – the Octopus card – when you arrive in town and use it for everything public transportation.  The signage is very clear and I have not had one iota of trouble figuring out where I/we are going.

I had read up on the fabric market online before going, so knew pretty much what I was going to see and where I was headed.  My goal was to buy some souvenir fabric for quilting at home.  This ended up being more of a daunting task than I imagined – so little time, so many choices, so much greed in my evil, evil heart.

 not just “fabric” – leather. ribbons, buttons,  huge contractor garbage bag sized bags of buttons, belt buckle stores, button stores, thread stores (didn’t dare go there, honestly, I had to control myself…)

The first thing that challenged me was that we are talking wholesale here.  These are the folks who actually print your fabric.  So the shops do not have the fabric, although some do, it is mostly wall upon wall of cards of fabric samples.  You can then order it and it takes a couple of days for them to pull it from their warehouse, which is a couple of days I don’t have and also how could I possibly decide?   I passed by many of them and finally got nerve to ask “how much are the samples?” only to find out – samples are free.  Which is the point at which I needed to remember it was Lent and I should curtail my greed and I only have one suitcase and….here’s my stash. I did buy some cotton quilting fabric and it was hard to choose that as well.  My purpose in grabbing all the samples was that I would like to make  – ahem – a sampler quilt of the fabrics.  However, once I am home I am going to take a good look at it all and perhaps order some from home.

I liked the hamburgers because it will inspire me to actually create the quilt I’ve had in mind every since I found the frogs BBQ-ing fabric and the red checkered table cloth fabric with ants on it – it’s been a vision in progress for at least 8 years…Al chose the yellow daisies, I chose the geometric for Terri (we always laughed that I’m into flowers and she’s into wacky) The little mama and baby sea lion were what first caught my eye and the blue was just an impulse buy as I walked along.  Great color.  Those close ups of the bicycle fabric were because when I was making a bicycle themed quilt last year it was very difficult to find bicycle fabric – so of course…here it is, I only had to come to Hong Kong.

The rest of the day revolved around the same area but more of a general market scene – mostly cheap crap but I did buy some stuff – a business card holder for some of my credit cards, some hair thingies in every color, a neat bagel shaped box, a fan (with horses for 1954 of course), the usual dangly thing that can work as a souvenir Christmas ornament and Al’s jade chopsticks…

  a shop of carabiners!!!!  not sure I’d depend on them for El Cap in Yosemite,  though

 serious shoelaces, dude my sherpa

That night we again played poker and I lost more playing Texas Hold ‘Em than I did buying stuff at the market. I started out so well, winning at first,  but honestly, I had terrible cards for most of the night.  When I ran out of money I went over to the couch and…you guessed it…dozed until it was time to go back to the hotel.