Stash-diving

 This week I've been deep diving in the various stashes, pulling out things to work on.

I had this Time for Tea digital panel that I picked up a few years ago after seeing it online.  I love pretty china in real life.  I pinned it up on the design wall and tried out various coordinating fabrics which matched colours from the panel.  But I found that most of them 'shouted' too loudly and overshadowed the delicate colours of the print.  So in the end I've gone with pastels for two borders, and an inner border of a coordinating digital print, that let the print shine as the star.  It's a wallhanging size.

I have a small collection of Dutch repro fabrics that I bought about 20 years ago when they were quite expensive (for me).  I made one small wallhanging then have been sitting on them ever since because they seemed too good to use.  I've been feeling for a while that I need to use them for something, then this free pattern for a Home Sweet Home tablerunner from Primrose Cottage came along.   So today I have sewed up my own version with a slightly modified border.  This will look cheerful on the table.

I've started a Japanese redwork zip pouch embroidery kit that I won in a raffle a few years ago.  I had to translate the directions.  The kit includes all the fabric and even the zipper.

The reason I could start a new embroidery is because I finished the stitching for the French kit for the embroidered houses zip pouch.  After I finished the houses, I tea-dyed some woven stabiliser to knock the white back, then fused it onto the back  of the linen as a stabiliser, before stitching the border.  I'm pleased with the overall effect, quite whimsical.  It's supposed to be sewn onto the front of a zipped pouch - no fabric provided in the kit but there are instructions for how to sew it.  I'm wondering if the stitching might look better though on a tote bag or a pincushion drum.

After tidying up my dollshouse room, I found the little resin food kit that I bought in Tokyo in 2023.  I bought it thinking that the supplied plates looked 1/12th scale, which turned out to be correct.  What I didn't realise was that the resin is UV resin, and needs a UV lamp or a sunny day to harden it. Our sunny weather promptly turned to days of overcast grey but eventually this week there was an afternoon with some intermittent sunny spells.  So I translated the Japanese instructions using Google Translate and sat down to have a go.  It turned out to be exceptionally fiddly, trying to mix resin colours and get them into the tiny silicon molds - and all over my hands and everywhere else. And trying to cut out tiny printed plastic embellishments to add to the resin, without pinging them into space, and having them stick to my resin-y hands.  Every time you added something, it had to go back outside to sit in the sun for 10 minutes or so.  But eventually I achieved three plates of French desserts which I think look fairly impressive.  The macarons were supplied so really you were just sticking them together on the plate with resin.  The hardest one (and the messiest) was the strawberry pudding which required multiple stages of hardening.  The waffle things with the sauce also were fairly elaborate.  But I'm quite pleased with them, I will look out when I'm back in Tokyo in case I can find other variations.

In my quilt shop for scale

And I finished my handmade book.  It has a decorated cover, a ribbon bookmark, and a proper spine that holds the 160 pages.  My page trimming was a bit rough although after taking this photo, I found out from a Youtube video that you can sand the page edges  to smooth them, so I tried that which improved them somewhat.  It was quite fun making an actual real book, I'm quite pleased with it.

More decluttering this week - we took some big bags of books and clothes to the charity shop and also a handmade crochet granny square afghan which I have been feeling guilty about for over 30 years.  It was a wedding present from a cousin-by-marriage and I really appreciated all the work she put into it and she hauled it all the way from Canada to the UK for the wedding.  But it was scratchy and due to the holey nature, never as warm as a nice soft patchwork quilt.  In some houses we displayed it as a throw, but we've never really used it.  So that's gone off to the charity shop and hopefully someone will love it and take it home.

Korean food, sumo, various crafts and a new interest of bookbinding

 I don't need supper tonight because we drove up to my old stomping ground of Leicester for an enormous lunch at a Korean restaurant I found online.  I've never had Korean food, so I wanted to try some of it before my upcoming trip to South Korea in late April.  I worked in Leicester for three years until we were suddenly sent home for the first COVID lockdown in March 2020.  It's only five years ago but feels like so much longer - the COVID time distortion effect once again I guess.  Today I tried tteokbokki (Korean rice cakes in a spicy sauce) and a big bowl of bibimbap (a bit like a buddha bowl with veg and seafood on top of rice with an egg on top of it all), kimchi (fermented cabbage) and radish pickles.  It was all delicious and not overly spicy (I'm a wimp when it comes to spice) but I asked the manager and she said they have toned it down for the UK palate and that it will be spicier in Korea.  Some of the things I ate are made with soy sauce which contains gluten, which is going to be the case in South Korea where apparently food allergies are still not widely understood.  I haven't reacted too much so hopefully I won't starve while I'm there for two weeks.  Afterwards we walked around Leicester a bit which is a lively city with loads of charming lanes of cafes and boutiques lined with period buildings, and had a look at my former office. It made me a bit nostalgic for work but only in the sense of having skills that I was using to productively resolve casework - I do not miss all the politics and people nonsense in the slightest.

The big excitement this week was that tickets went on sale for the 2025 sumo tournament at London's Royal Albert Hall in October.  I had paid out to become a Friend of the RAH to be eligible for the pre-sale, which turned out to be well worth it as most of the tickets went then, and people trying to buy in the general sale a few days later had very slim to none pickings.  I queued up an hour in advance in the online waiting room, then randomly got allocated position 2146, so had to wait another 30-40 minutes before my turn came up.  Seat availability was literally disappearing off the seating plan before my eyes, but I managed to grab a couple of seats for the final day in the Circle.  Still expensive but not the eye-watering prices of the better located Stalls. Hopefully we will be able to see ok. There are people in the sumo Facebook groups who have paid £600 or more for their seats - you are starting to reach a level where it wouldn't cost much more to fly to Japan.  Who knew there were so many sumo fans prepared to come to London?

This week I finished another cross stitched house in the Buildings of Britain SAL, this is my fourth one.  It's turned out well apart from I completely bodged the 'B' in 'Belfast' - you have to squash an uppercase 'B' into a single square of aida cloth, very difficult to do, I had about six tries then gave up.  I shall have to fix it later.

After finishing that, I returned to working on the French embroidered pouch kit.  I'm belatedly thinking that I should have backed the linen with some iron-on stabiliser before starting to stitch, but it's too late now.  It's starting to look quite cute, with all the little details of each house.

I sewed the binding onto my American embroidered panel Paducah quilt kit and have hung it up in the hall.  Due to the different densities and textures of the quilting around  the different styles (applique, embroidery, piecing), it is not hanging very flat but instead is a bit bulgy.  It might calm down with age as the fabric softens over time.  It was the first time that I have tried to quilt around embroidery, it turned out relatively well I think.  I'm still not incredibly keen on the asymetrical design although I think my modifications (the additional 9-patches with the butterfly block to help square it up) give it more balance.  The embroidery is quite cute, and I have happy memories of stitching the blocks while I was in Japan a couple of years ago for language school.

After sewing on the binding, I went back to the Double Wedding Ring quilt and sewed another block for it.  Try as I might, the blocks are still coming out wonky.  I am just not a precision sewer.  Hopefully it will all quilt out ok.

On the loom, I have started on a scarf in a finer weave than I have previously tried, using the second heddle I purchased which is a 12.5 dent  so suitable for fingering weight yarns.  I've warped with a Yeomans Panama cotton, and I'm weaving with a Denis Brunton Magicolour yarn which changes colour every so often.  The effect is a little more subtle than I was hoping, but it's good practice for me as I am still trying to get better selvedges and avoid the edges narrowing in. It's also a longer warp than I have previously worked with.

This week I pulled out the little laser cut kit for a Maori wharenui or meeting place, that I bought in New Zealand.  The basic tab and slot kit was just white on one side of brown MDF, with the addition of a decorated red front and a window/door.  I should have taken a 'before' picture.  I wanted it to look more like the actual meeting places that I visited, so I consulted the many photos I had taken.  I've painted the roof and interior porch, added painted red pillars and decorated black roof beams, and drawn on the suggestion of board siding, and put it onto a base.  It's still obviously a toy but has much more of the look of what I actually saw.

The real thing:

This week I have been dabbling in a new interest: bookbinding.  I've watched quite a few videos, and I used my new Epson Ecotank printer to print off 80 sheets of doublesided colour journal pages.  I'm using a cherry blossom Japan themed set of graphics purchased from Vectoriadesigns on etsy, with the idea that it can become my travel journal when I get back. Very pleasingly, the printer ink levels for black and cyan barely moved, while the ink levels for magenta and yellow only went down less than 1/4 inch, despite printing 80 doublesided colour sheets.  My old printer would have used up a full set of cartridges, at least. After trimming the white margin off the pages, I folded signatures of 10 sheets each, and then sewed them together using kettle stitch in preparation for case binding.

After sewing the signatures and weighting them down, the spine is treated with PVA glue

Next I will be making a cover out of a 50p thrifted book (the insides are discarded). Fun to try something new, and as is usual when you are a multi-crafter, I already had some of the necessary tools: an awl I use for sewing, bookbinding glue I use for cartonnage, a bone folder I use for dollshousing and card making and so on.

DS has expressed interest in having more quilts for his new house, so I went through my vast collection to see what I am prepared to part with.  It made me realise that my tastes have really changed with the times: I am much more into the modern brighter colours now, and more whimsical designs, whereas before I had a long phase of reproducing antique quilts in darker colours and heavier styles. I also used to rescue vintage tops when I found them at a good price on trips to America and felt sorry for them, and I would fix them and maybe add to them then quilt them onto a modern backing.  I felt very torn about several quilts - while they no longer 'spark joy' for me, I still remember how much time and effort went into them (extreme amounts in some cases over years) and some of them cost a lot to make due to fabric ordered from abroad, or because they were a kit etc.  The rest of my brain was remembering my m-i-l crying in her cluttered room surrounded by things she can no longer use and hasn't used for years, and I know I need to downsize my collection.  I haven't counted for quite a while, I think last time I totalled up there were about 35 bed quilts and a lot of smaller things.  You can't sell them in the UK, I used to try and was lucky to get back 70% of the cost of the materials.  So giving them to my only son seems a worthwhile avenue (he already has several).  I picked out 7 or 8 and spread them out on his old bed to have a look at them, then put one back that I still like.  I'll take the others for consideration, although I expect most of them are not his girlfriend's taste either.  

Feeling like spring

 Suddenly it is feeling like spring is just around the corner: we've had a number of beautiful sunny days this week, the garden is full of snowdrops and crocuses (and a few primroses that haven't yet been gobbled by the slugs), there are buds on the roses I pruned in the autumn and I even spotted some early daffodils blooming by the side of the road today.  It's still dropping down to freezing at night, so we're not out of the woods yet.  I've dug out the Spring Flowers quilt that I made about 25 years ago, and hung it up in the hall (the creases haven't hung out yet). I think this was an Quilt in a Day pattern.

I came across a free stitchalong for the Rosa Supply Case, a pattern from Clover & Violet for a handy little zippered book-shaped organiser that is very customisable.  As part of the sew-along, the designer filmed some helpful videos explaining various techniques, and there is a private Facebook group to show off all the makes.  When tidying up my sewing room, I had re-discovered a pack of slow stitching materials including scraps of lace, vintage textiles, trims, embellishments and so forth, that I had purchased from a textile artist at the St Ives show I think.  So I decided to use those materials to make the Rosa Supply Case.  I had to add in a piece of vintage embroidered textile from my m-i-l's stash and a bit of my own fabric, to make a sufficiently sized cover.  It was quite fun coming up with a crazy patchwork design and loading on lots of different trims. As well as using up the slow stitching pack, I also finally got to use a lace 'S' motif that I bought in Tokyo in 2019.

For the inside, I customised it to hold my supplies for quilt binding, and continued the vintage theme. A fun project and I love the way it turned out.

I finished the first two woven fabric placemats and realised I don't  have enough fabric left to make two more.  I am still struggling with maintaining a consistent width on the loom (that's why they are overlapped in the photo to conceal the worst one :)   ).  DH and I are now using these on the table, so I guess I'll find out in a while whether or not they will survive the washing machine.

I traced off the Gail Pan BOM embroidery blocks and prepared a little travel embroidery kit to take with me on my trip.  For cross stitch, I am going to take a kit I bought a while ago to make a cute little cross stitch miniature handbag because it's on 14 count which I will have a hope of seeing in the poor light of hotel rooms at night.  For knitting, I looked through my stash and found the gorgeous skein of hand-dyed fingering yarn that I bought in Iceland from the independent dyer at a yarn shop. The dyer was wearing her own handknit 'Close to You' shawl by Justina Lorkowska which she said worked really well with the yarn. So I'm going to have a go at that pattern, I have wound the skein and prepared a knitting travel pack.

Further to my post about printing and making my own paper journal a few weeks ago, I went ahead and invested in the Epson Ecotank EG-4850 printer which promises to be hugely more economical on ink. The ink tanks are filled up from bottles of ink (see photo) which are far cheaper to buy than cartridges  It's a nice feeling to be able to just print things without having to worry about being miserly with ink.  Being a dinosaur, I still like to print hard copies of quite a lot of stuff, particularly for travel - I just find it so much more convenient to whip out my printed map or printed confirmation rather than trying to peer near-sightedly at my tiny phone screen or holding up a queue while searching for the confirmation e-mail.  So far the printer seems to be working quite well.  The scanner is definitely slower than my previous Canon printer, and the full colour prints are perhaps a little less vivid, but overall I am quite pleased with it.  I may have another go at making a printed journal.

After last week

 If you haven't read last week's post, I am referencing the traumatic experience with my mother-in-law when we attempted to make a start on getting her and my f-i-l ready for a move into a retirement flat.  It took us a full day to recover and I think it took my m-i-l even longer but she assures me she is now with the program and is trying to do a bit of decluttering every day.

Meanwhile, I have worked out my post event stress by ruthlessly tackling my own stash and evicting all of the same sorts of rubbish that my m-i-l is clutching onto: old curtains from the last house we moved out of 10 years ago, the homemade folding design wall I used  in that house before getting a proper wall in this house, all kinds of old home dec fabric I've been given and never used or that is left over from our current curtains and cushions, old dressmaking fabric left over from projects or that I've never used, five inherited tapestry and embroidery frames, loads of scraps left over from various things, jars and boxes that 'might be useful', bits of plastic tablecloth and ripped up bed linen, canvas I've never used, and a whole bunch of other stuff that 'might be useful' that just becomes wallpaper, unnoticed at the back of a cupboard.   I added the good stuff to the m-i-l pile and we took it all to charity today.  I also produced a  big pile of rubbish stuff which DH took to the dump. 

I also pulled out my two bins of batik fabric left over from my batik phase about 15 years ago - most of the leftovers in colours I don't particularly like, and I've donated the lot to Project Linus along with the remains of the jelly roll from my Checkered Dresden quilt instead of hanging onto more scraps. And I sold 14 book-type sewing magazines online, and got back what I paid for them, which freed up a chunk of bookshelf in the sewing room. I have so much more room in my sewing room now and have actually been able to clear most of the floor - I can walk around now without it feeling so much like an obstacle course.  It feels good.

I was on a roll so raided the spare coat closet and my own wardrobe, and we took two big bags of old or never worn coats and jackets, along with some of m-i-l's items, to a local charity shop.

The most unexpected result (for me anyway), is that I have impulsively moved up my departure date for Japan by a week so that I can see the cherry blossom after all.  Based on the latest blossom forecasts (which are a big thing in Japan),  I had philosophically accepted that once again I was going to miss the blossom time by a week or so, like all my previous trips.  But being haunted by last week's trauma of my m-i-l wailing in tears that she had wasted her life was quite a spur to stop and seize the roses now while I can.  It turned out that while I couldn't move the return date without spending almost the cost of another flight, I could change the departure date for only a change fee.  So now I will arrive in Tokyo while peak cherry blossom is still on the trees (according to the latest  government forecast anyway).  This sort of impetuosity is very unlike me and part of my brain is still panicking but the rest of me is looking forward to such an iconic experience.

As mentioned above, I got my Checkered Dresden quilt to top/flimsy stage.  The final border is a bit skimpy because I had run out of the green background fabric and didn't like it enough to order any more.  So the quilt is now up in the 'to be quilted' queue upstairs.  It's turned out alright, I like the pattern although I don't like the colours much - that's what you get when you pick up a 'bargain' jelly roll and can't really tell what you are buying because it's all wrapped up.  It's come out about a double size or perhaps a bit bigger.  I would be tempted to make the block again in colours I like more.

Since that I've been working on the final three Lori Holt Zippy Bag pouches.  I again modified them by adding a vinyl front and got them all to binding stage.  I thought I would use single-stage binding because I had some cute red gingham double fold binding from my m-i-l's stash.  What a mess.  I first tried just winging it, and of course didn't catch the binding on the back.  Then I tried clipping the binding, but it was still moving around as I sewed on my industrial machine.  I've resorted to fabric glue which is doing a better job of holding the binding in place while I stitch, but it is still much messier looking than my normal two-stage binding (where you machine on one side, then take it the back and machine again to catch the back down).  I ran out of bobbin thread after starting the second one, so have given it up as a bad job for now, I will try again tomorrow.

On the loom, I have started a set of four placemats using torn strips of leftover quilt backing from my Lori Holt Let's Bake quilt, which is in a pretty aqua colour with somewhat ugly cooking motifs on it.  Using it as weaving material, you don't see the motifs.  I'm weaving two placemats on the same warp, they are looking nice.  The thing I don't know, is whether they would be machine washable or if a washing machine would just make them fall apart.  Perhaps if I have left over warp, I will weave a bit of a test sample and run it through the machine to see what happens.

  

I finished the knitted wool hat that I started on the Malta trip, it fits well and the double band feels nice over my ears.   Of course, meanwhile the outside temperatures have jumped up to 12 degrees so I may not be wearing this until next winter.

I've been plugging away on my multi-coloured bobbin lace and finally am starting to have somethign to show for it.

This is from a German book that I bought several years ago, with several patterns in multi-colours that I was really attracted to after years of making only white or ecru lace.  This is why I taught myself Bruges lace the last couple of years, so I could try out some of the patterns.  However, now that I'm actually doing it, I can't really say I'm enjoying it.  There is a lot of stopping and starting with the different colour motifs, which you have to do in the right order so that later motifs join to earlier motifs.  And a lot of sewings (joins) which I find tedious.  I'm glad I'm trying it but I think maybe I won't be making so many things out of this book after all.  I liked Bucks lace better, where you just continuously work on one pattern in one colour.

Since I'm now leaving in just over a month, I am starting to think about what craft projects I will take with me to do on the trip.  Probably a cross stitch project, and possibly also the Gail Pan BOM 'Bloom and Sew' quilt that I have signed up to.  Bloom and Sew is a mystery quilt with blocks that are a mixture of the designer's characteristic embroidered motifs featuring flowers and sewing themes, and pieced fabric.  I'm thinking I will take the embroidery with me to do on the trip, because that worked quite well on my last trip to Japan when I was embroidering the blocks for the Paducah quilt kit. And I'll need a knitting project for the plane, but I'm not sure what.  Usually I take either a lace shawl or socks, but I have many multiples of both shawls and socks and really don't need any more. I'm trying to think what else would have the same benefits of a single ball of yarn with lots of knitting time from it.  Suggestions gratefully received!

I have seen my future and now I'm scared

 I may have mentioned here before that my sister-in-law is determined to get her elderly parents moved out of their terrace house and into a retirement flat this year, because they can no longer manage.  So today we drove down there and while DH and his sister tackled clearing out some of the shed tools and clutter, my job was to sort through my m-i-l's fabric and craft stash.  I'm not going to lie, it was awful.  She literally had fabric dating back decades, everything from quilt fabrics of various eras, dressmaking fabrics and linings, old cutup clothing, inherited linens, bits of old bedsheets, boxes of old sewing patterns, drawers of bits of ribbon and string and half-made cards and envelopes of old cardboard templates, half-started projects, abandoned projects....  And everything had a story, mostly full of regret for the things she never made.  And there were tears.  Lots and lots of tears.  I had to go get my sister in law three times and in the end she just stayed with us, to talk her mum down and convince her that she really can't hang on to everything.  She hasn't really made anything for years and yet she still wanted to keep most of it, including obvious rubbish. And she wouldn't let us touch the wool or books yet.  I've brought back three large suitcases of fabric to possibly go to charity shops although I need to go through it all again, we binned a lot of small scraps and rubbish, and there is a mountain of the good stuff which she wants to donate to the quilting group that she hasn't been to in years (I was hoping I might get some of the good fabric but sadly no).  So we finally got back home, exhausted, from our day, and I visited my basement craft room and looked at my own vast hoard and I now feel very depressed.  I really hope that in another 20 years I am not going to feel like my m-i-l is feeling.  Although I do think that I have been working hard the last few years to clear out the obvious rubbish and the stuff I know I will never use.  There is so much more to do though.  

We just got back from a week in Malta and Gozo, which was meant to be winter sun but in fact was pretty stormy apart from our first day and our departure day (of course).  The rest of the time it was overcast, 15-16C, very breezy and frequently raining - with the result that the convenient timesaving ferries were all cancelled and we spent a lot of time on buses instead.  But we still had a nice week, our hotel was lovely, and Malta is such an easy place to visit with everyone speaking English, and a high standard of hospitality.  This time we also travelled to Gozo for two days/one night, which was surprisingly greener and more lush than Malta, and fewer tourists, but still lots of history and lovely old buildings.  On Gozo, I visited two lace shops - one not very good, and the other one in the Citadella which was superb.  The Maltese lace is made on a long sausage pillow leaned against a wall, with all the bobbins hanging down, completely different from English lace.  A lot of the lace sold for tourists is very crude, but the Citadella shop in Victoria had some lovely work, really well made.  I only bought a bookmark because all the mats and doileys were more than I wanted to pay for a souvenir, although priced at well below what they would cost in terms of time to make.  The less-good shop also surprisingly had a lot of well executed tatting, so I don't know who is making that but I bought a doiley.

I took the knitted hat with me that I started on the retreat weekend, and got the double brim turned up and started in on the textured pattern which features a float that you catch up into a subsequent row.

I also worked on my fourth cross stitch house from the Houses of Britain stitchalong from CrossStitcher magazine.

After we got home (and all the laundry was done), I had a second attempt at sewing an inner bag for my tatted drawstring bag.  It is surprisingly difficult to make a neat bag to fit inside a constantly shape-changing mesh, but I got there in the end.  It's not wonderful but it looks ok.

The drawstring isn't very functional because the edging wants to all fold in on itself when you tighten it to close the bag.  I may try a wide ribbon instead to see if that is an improvement.  At the end of the day it isn't a terribly practical bag but it's cute.  Let's just hope that I am not crying buckets over it in 20 years...