bendigo = good?

in a complete reversal, i actually found myself driving through the leafy streets of bendigo this past weekend thinking, "wow, this little town is GREAT!". i've been spending almost every weekend there recently because my mother-in-law is in the hospital and i've never really being that fond of benders since i spent my first year in australia there. this brief respite in negative thinking came after an extremely fruitful morning of thrift shopping for the following amazing fabrics:


upholstery weight, nubby and right up my alley. $3.00 for about three metres


super heavy weight cotton, beautiful pattern and colours but not really my personal style. $1.50 (!) for about a metre and a half


three heavy cotton napkin/placemat type thingies in a crazy scandinavian design. 30¢ for all three


super faded and beautiful 50's tablecloth, love the acorn trim. a mere $2.00

plus much, much more that i won't show because, really, how many pics does one post need? what was really amazing was that i had extremely low expectations when i set out as i had hit the exact same shops last saturday and found tons of great stuff then, as well. i'll have to get the addresses of the shops i go to in case anyone finds themselves stranded in the country and wants to make the best of it, as i routinely have for the past couple of years!

but what really made my fondness for bendigo swell just that little bit was finally visiting the Bendigo Woolen Mills (no link 'cause they don't seem to have a website, sorry). i can't believe i actually LIVED in bendigo for a year and didn't even know the place existed or that it's taken me so long to finally get over there since i found out about it earlier this year. the factory store is AMAZING. amazing.

amazing.

out front there are two huge bins, one filled with big bags of felting fleece at 50% off their marked price:

so i got this bag for $3.50! i have no idea what i'm going to do with it! but $3.50! and it's so soft!

the other bin has bag after bag after bag of "scraps", all for 50¢ to $1.50. i picked out about 6 bags and spent most of the afternoon winding ball after ball after ball of beautiful yarn. so satisfying, i love a bargain. now true, these scrap bags are a bit hit and miss because a few really do contain merely scrapslengthshs that are too short to even bother tying together to make a ball, but my haul had way, way more hits than misses so i'll definitely be back for more.



back to the actual shop, you walk in to find more gorgeous, natural fiber yarn in every (nice) colour imaginable at really great prices and then venture a bit further to the "BARGAIN ROOM" for heaps and heaps of deals. whew. it was a bit overwhelming, really, i was a bit giddy. i bought a few big balls from the bargain room, plus my bags of scraps, plus my felting filling, all for under $20.