Cake and quilts

More accurately, it was lunch, with shared cake for dessert and twenty minutes of quilts on the way home!

Had lunch yesterday in Rokeby Road's phenomenally successful and minuscule cafe, Boucla, with best mates Shelley and Deb for a leisurely catch-up.

It's such a neat little cafe, with great food. If you're a Perth-ite, and especially if you're a Subiaco-ite, you won't need any info about Boucla.

Its decor and food are Greek with a little bit of something from Morocco, Turkey, and the Middle East. The effect is colourful, scruffy and friendly.

They have excellent coffee, so excellent, in fact, that when we were recruiting for Bondi in its early days, we stole one of Boucla's most popular hosts and baristas, Steph, to come to San Diego and work for us.

It's tiny. You sit elbow to elbow with guests at the table beside yours, squashed into nooks between the furniture groaning under the weight of giftware and goodies. You can never go to Boucla without there being a crowd already there. There's even extra seating outside the door, with kelims spread over milk-crates. Prosaic but efficient.

After lunch, Deb walked up the street a couple of doors to start work, while Shelley had to work extremely hard to persuade me to visit a brand-new local quilt shop, Materialise, in Aberdare Road, Shenton Park. (It has a website, materialiseyourlife.com, but I'm unable to open it so far.)

It's a beauty: walls of fabrics in sublime colour and pattern, inspiration, and room to move.

the decor is simple and stylish and doesn't get in the way of the fabric — you can see everything without worrying there's something you may be missing.

I can imagine spending many very contented hours in there trying to choose one glorious piece of fabric over another: a delectable dilemma!

In November last year I went with Shelley's daughter, the lovely Iman, to Purl's patchwork shop in SoHo, NYC, and was as underwhelmed by it as I was by its highly-touted knitting shop just a few doors away. 

Materialise is way better.

And it's in Perth!