A papercrafting week

  I ended up spending about two days this week creating the Trifold Journal that I mentioned in last week's post.  One of those projects where I have all the tools, only they are spread across four floors in various craft stashes, so lots of hiking up and down stairs to retrieve paper trimmers, bone folder, bookbinding glue, quilting thread, fabric, applique punches etc.  It was quite fun though, I started out only planning a basic folder around a printed journal, but then kept thinking 'I could add a pocket', 'I could add some embellishments' and printing off various things to add to the creation.  I am quite pleased with how it has turned out, with all the decorative journal pages printed from the Cosy Cottage digital download, an accordion pocket inside the front cover, a flat pocket on the right hand cover, a dangling charm, a fabric spine, I added pen loops, stocked the pockets with cut out artwork etc.  No idea what I am going to do with it now - my handwriting is awful and would instantly desecrate the lovely pages - so currently I am just opening it up and admiring it occasionally.

I finished most of the accessories for the 1:48 scale Betterley quilting shop, and started stocking the shelves which was quite fun.  I am gluing everything in, the scale is too small for me to use movable adhesive like tacky wax, if anything fell out it would be gone forever. Even with all the fabric folding to make over 100 fabric bolts and I don't know how many fat quarters, I still only just had enough to fill the shelves. Fingers in photo for scale.

Having finished the vintage pink doiley quilt and getting it off the frame last week, I loaded on a printed panel that I bought at Crib Quilts in Tokyo, in the distinctive style of the designer Masako Wakayama.  It's a quilter's map of Tokyo, but using western architecture in her typical Primitive style.  It even includes her Crib Quilts shop that I visited.  I took the opportunity to try out my 3" clamshell ruler, the first time I have used it for an all-over texture.  I had a few tension issues for a while but got them sorted, and overall it has turned out ok and I like it.  Not sure if I will turn it into a wallhanging or just use it as a decorative throw, it is in fact crib quilt size.  This is a photo straight off the frame, it needs washing, trimming up and binding still.

I made a start on the bookshelf  in the dollshouse room, going through all the books and pulling out about 12 or 15 general works that can go to the charity shop (and disturbing a few spiders while I did it).

I finished weaving the colourful table runner, it's currently drying after a wet finish.  It's my first really unbalanced weave (unbalanced means the weft is a different thickness than the warp) and I struggled to keep the selvedges tidy but it's turned out ok.  Will snap a photo when it's dry and the fringe is trimmed.  I picked up some cheap macrame cotton cord at Aldi this week, with the idea that I could weave placemats with it, so that may be my next project.

I tried out a free online two-day quilting summit this week, with a programme of free talks and workshops.  The relentless upselling is pretty offputting for this type of event, but some of the talks were good.  I was particularly struck by one speaker who was reflecting on going to a quilter's estate sale  and seeing all the quilter's fabric for sale cheaply.  She spoke to the common issue that I mentioned before, that we save the good fabric because we are afraid of making a mistake with it and wasting it.  So we use the 'OK' fabric, or even buy OK fabric, to use instead. She pointed out that we are therefore producing a body of work which does not truly reflect what we love, because we are hanging onto the fabric we love and only using the OK fabric.  This is so true, and I think applicable to other hobbies besides quilting. I have been guilty of saving the pretty knitting yarn, or the expensive dollshouse wallpaper, for some future perfect project instead of using it up, and then it sits there for years instead.  Other useful talks included tips on photographing quilts with a smartphone, how to use batik fabrics in projects,  and finding out about various apps that people are using for managing their quilting projects.  Good to be exposed to new things though.

Shedding about 45 pounds of burden

 

My big dollshouse has left the building! I'm amazed at how much lighter I feel, it was obviously a bigger burden on my mental guilt/To Do list than I had even realised.  A lady bought the nearly empty house which I had marketed cheaply as a renovation project, but she loves it and isn't planning to change anything.  I finally overcame my procrastination earlier this week and started floor by floor removing things I wanted to keep or sell.  That turned out to be most of the contents.  The more I took out, the more it became obvious that the 35-year-old decor had not aged well.  Back in the 1990s it was harder to get commercial miniature supplies in the UK and also I had no money, so the house was an ode to DIY solutions that we all used to use: like printed National Trust bookmarks as fancy murals, and mixing oil and acrylic paints to marbleize floor tiles. The lights were almost all homemade, and the wiring a creative bodge.  Some of the flooring was starting to lift, there were glue stains, the window acrylic had yellowed...  Even though the structure itself is of high quality plywood, I couldn't in good conscience price it very highly.  So now it has been collected and I got some money back, and it's gone to a new life with someone else who will hopefully love it again.

Of course, having the enormously heavy roadblock removed, I can now fully see the next glory hole that needs tackling: my collection of dollshouse books and magazines.  I haven't been able to get to it for years because there was too much in the way, as I tend to use the raised floor in front of it as a staging area for tools and components when I am building houses, as well as the big dollshouse on its stand.

It's been a fairly creative week, with lots of longer term projects coming along.

I finished weaving my plaid teatowel and wet finished and hemmed it.  The cotton yarn bloomed beautifully in the washer/dryer and is now butter soft.  It also shows evidence of interesting diagonal texture called 'tracking' which is something that can happen spontaneously due to tension in the weaving.  I love it, and it adds additional interest to the weave.  The towel hasn't been properly used yet as DH is terrified of ruining it with a curry stain or something.

I've warped the loom again with a random selection of my hand-knit cotton knitting yarn to make a colourful runner or hand towel, not sure which yet. Using up my knitting stash is one of the reasons I bought the loom, and it's fun to experiment with colour.

I sewed together my Double Wedding Ring blocks into a top.  It looks quite nice from a distance, although the wrong side is a crime against both piecing and pressing.  Luckily that all gets hidden when it is turned into a quilt :)   It's not very big, after all that work, only about 64" square.  I don't have any more blue fabric, but if I can get some more then I might add some plain borders to bring it up to a double size at least. A DWR has been on my bucket list for decades so I feel a sense of achievement to get this far, but it has really emphasised that accurate sewing is not my strong suite.  It's also been a good project to use up more of my old Thirties repro stash, dating from the days when the Thirties repros were more pastel than they are nowadays.

With the DWR blocks off the sewing table, I've pulled out another project which has been waiting for a year or two (and which I came across when making my lists a few weeks ago), the Aida summer top.  I bought some embroidered double gauze and the pattern at last year's Festival of Quilts, or possibly even the year before.  I rarely sew clothing as it almost never fits comfortably, but I liked the style of this and quite coincidentally saw the double gauze almost immediately after seeing the pattern, so went back and bought both of them.  So far I have traced off what I hope is my size, and have cut out a toile in old sheeting to make a test garment.

I also finished quilting the pink doiley quilt which turned out pretty well.  I usually wash quilts after quilting them, to settle the stitching and pucker the quilting. But I don't want to wash this one (yet anyway), as the crochet will then all wrinkle.  I may give it a light steam press to calm down the puffiness.  I love the pretty pink and the soft vintage feel to the quilt.  I was wondering if it might look nice to cut scallops into the side edges as well.

I've been working away on accessories for the 1:48 scale Betterley Quilt Shop.  I finished folding all the fat quarters and glued a lot of them into stacks, and then made two sewing machine kits, and have started on the boxes of thread and wadding rolls. I have to wear a magnifier Optivisor for working on these.

I finished the third Gail Pan set of embroidered blocks, and have started stitching the fourth (of six).

I've been tinkering with another journal-making project, using more of the VectoriaDesigns downloads.  I had trouble printing the pages to the correct size this time, so they aren't very even.  I'm following a video tutorial to make a trifold journal although I am not going to add so many embellishments and pockets as the maker did.  Still loving my Ecotank printer, so liberating to be able to just print things without worrying about expensive cartridge ink getting used up.

It's suddenly autumn here, and even feeling a bit chilly in the house in the evenings.  My favourite time of year.  I'm off to Prague for a short city break soon, leaving DH to man the fort. I've never been to Czechnia before, so I think it will be my 40th or 41st country.  Although to be fair, I remember almost zero about some of the countries I visited on my whirlwind European backpacking tour in the early 80s so not sure if I should still be counting those :)  Next year I am hoping to go to Norway.  Do you have any travel plans for 2026?

Bashing things with a big hammer is therapeutic

 Today we went over to visit DS to help him and his partner demolish the derelict garden shed that they inherited.  I had the pleasure of taking my turn at bashing the sides of it apart with our massive sledgehammer and prizing apart plank walls with our equally massive crowbar. I also got to jump on rotten wood sheets to snap them in half so they would fit in the car.  It was all quite satisfying - apart from the massive amount of insect life that we disturbed, some of which has now taken up residence in our car after we took a couple of loads of ex-shed to their dump.  

In more genteel pursuits, I am almost finished assembling the final block of my Double Wedding Ring quilt then I can start sewing the blocks together. I highly doubt they are all the same size so the result could be interestingly wonky - but hopefully it will all quilt out.  I don't really want to have to custom quilt every arc so I am thinking maybe a Baptist Fan design using rulers.  The two popular Baptist Fan ruler sets (Michaels and Amanda Murphy) are of course American, Amanda doesn't ship to the UK and Michaels might but then I would get hit for customs duty.  One sole UK shop sells the Amanda rulers at a big mark up of course, but I had a customer service issue with that shop in the past and don't really want to order from them again.  Sigh.

After watching a few videos on 'organising your WIPs', I headed down to make a UFO list in my sewing room.  Things I have actually started wasn't a long list, but I kept getting sidetracked into additional lists like 'Waiting projects I really want to do', 'Kits I have bought but not started', 'Fabric I want to use up', 'Quilt patterns I thought I would make (but haven't), 'Bag patterns ditto', 'Rulers and gadgets I haven't used yet'..... I gave up at that point, as the exercise was starting to feel quite pointless.  And that's only one hobby. 

But I did discover a Corinne Lapierre kit for a wool felt sewing roll that I had completely forgotten I had started at last year's Coventry retreat - cutting out all the pieces ready for embroidery.  So I brought that upstairs and completed the embroidery and assembly this week and was able to cross it off the WIP list.  It's a cute little thing, I'm not sure how useful it actually will be though.  I added a bit of woven interfacing to give the felt a bit more stability.  The pincushion is detachable and held on by velcro.

I finished knitting the Ida doll from Hobbii with two outfits: a nice dress with matching hat over a white t-shirt, and a more casual ensemble of dungarees over a striped t-shirt with brown shoes.  She is fairly cute.  She needs a home and I offered her up to my lace friends but they don't have any suitable grandchildren to take her.

I finished weaving the Log Cabin Table Runner, hemstitched the ends and gave it a wet finish.  It's turned out fairly well - slightly narrower at one end than the other but my edges are definitely getting better.

I've now warped up for my Red & White tea towel using the cotton yarn I bought last week on holiday. I used a free site called Plaidmaker to come up with the checked design for the towel.

Now that the knitted doll is finished, I've gone back to embroidering the Gail Pan quilt blocks.  They are very cute but taking ages to do.  I've got one more block to stitch on panel 3 of 6.  I like how they are turning out but feel impatient to get to the quilt assembly part.

I finished going through File Cabinet Mountain and it is all organised and dispersed now.  It feels like a big achievement and did take days.  I sorted out the 'keep' pile into the various hobbies and put the piles (sometimes subdivided into plastic folders by topic) into bankers boxes.  We now have so much paper recycling piled up that it wouldn't all fit into the recycling bin and has to wait two weeks until the bin gets collected again.  So hopefully going forward, I will be much pickier about what patterns I keep from magazines (and buy) and also will continue to file them in the bankers boxes.

I've been occasionally folding more tiny fat quarters for my 1:48 scale quilt shop, having finished the 100+ tiny bolts of fabric.  I think I have to make all the accessories first, and then can pick and choose what to use to fill up the shelves and cabinets artistically.  I finally managed to sell my Lego halloween house so that's opened up some room on my dollshouse shelves.  Still haven't tackled my big house that I want to sell but I need to stop procrastinating and get it on the market to hopefully catch someone looking for a christmas present.

Youtube has started showing me 3D printer videos, and I watched a few out of curiosity, then of course it showed me even more.  It is somewhat tempting, I am a gadget girl and 3D printers have come down so much in price and become much simpler to use.  But I'm not sure if I would really use it when I am not doing much dollshousing any more.  DH says if I get one, then he wants to use it for his hobby of painting military miniatures.  Have you got a 3D printer?  what do you use it for?
  

Wet in Wales

 We're just back from another caravan week, this time in mid-Wales near Llandovery.  We've been previously rained out of Wales on, I think, three different holidays over the years but obviously we are suckers for punishment. I had found Wales so pretty when I went to the quilting course at the Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter a year ago, so we decided to head back there with the caravan.  True to form, after a warm and sunny bank holiday weekend, it started raining on Tuesday off and on, and never stopped.  We gave up and came home a day early - and of course the sun came out on the drive home to taunt us.

We still had a nice holiday, with interesting excursions to the Roman Dolaucothi gold mine and to the amazing caves of the National Showcaves Centre for Wales (which amusingly also has about 150 lifesize dinosaurs scattered around the wooded hillside, many of them animatronic).  And I did fairly well for craft shops and visits as historically Wales was a centre for the wool industry.

We had a very interesting visit to the excellent National Wool Museum in Carmarthenshire, in the historic former Cambrian Mills buildings. It was once a large mill in Drefach Felindre, producing shirts and shawls, blankets, bedcovers and woollen socks. It is now a working museum with restored historic machinery which we were able to see running.  They process cleaned fleece through willowing and carding machines, then spin it on an enormously long spinning machine that spins dozens of bobbins at once. There are multiple power looms for various purposes, and a finishing shed where they can full blankets and shawls, and press woven goods with both hot and cold presses.  They send woven goods off to a mill in Scotland for the fringing to be done but have recently invested in a blanket stitch machine which they are learning to use so they can finish side edges themselves.  Due to their limited production, they didn't have any of their own blankets for sale but they did have a gorgeous blanket by Tweed Mill in North Wales that came home with me.  I also picked up a rigid heddle loom weaving book that I had been looking at on Amazon, all about pattern on these small looms - I can't do all of it on my open heddle loom but at least half of the patterns are applicable. 

This is my weaving book.  We also stopped into a local village fair and in the secondhand tent, I picked up some bargain ribbons and this English translation of a Japanese quilting book - love the Japanese cute aesthetic and there are some nice projects in this one.

We made a return visit (for me) to the Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter to see this year's exhibition 'As Time Goes By'.  Not quite as visually exciting as last year's circus themed display, but still some wonderful quilts on display with amazing traditional Welsh quilting motifs.

And of course it would have been rude not to pop into the wonderful Calico Kate fabric store right next door to peruse all the latest fabric lines.  But I only bought some off white solid fabric that I may use as the base for the embroidery in the BOM pack I bought a few weeks ago.

We spent one morning in Llandovery, the nearest town to our campsite, which had lots of nice shops and cafes including the lovely 'Bumblebees of Llandovery' which stocks natural fibre wool and haberdashery and lots of great stuff.  I picked up some colours of narrow ric-rac, some embroidered ribbon, some buttons, needle threaders and a keyring of wooden laser-engraved ruler tools.

Surprisingly, they also had a weaving shop called Wonky Weaver, which is only open two days a week and we were lucky enough to catch them open.  After a bit of confusion over what size of heddle I have (because mine is metric and they were working in imperial I think), I was able to buy two cones of unmercerised 100% cotton to use to weave more absorbent towels.  So I might have a go at weaving tea towels although DH protests that they will be too good to get dirty.

While I did take my embroidery and cross stitch projects with me, in general the light isn't good enough inside the van (particularly when it's overcast outside) so I was mainly knitting another outfit for my knitted doll: another t-shirt, a second pair of shoes, a hat, and the start of some dungarees.  I finished the pink dress just before we left, but it's come out a bit big so I need to sew some elastic into the waist.

That's the end of the caravan hols for this year due to DH's limited paid leave. We do like our little 'home away from home' although it is an expensive indulgence due to only using it a few weeks each year.  Much nicer than staying in a hotel though.

A clueless weaver

 Having painstakingly warped up for what weavers call a Log Cabin pattern (but it looks more like Rail Fence to me as a quilter), I am over halfway through weaving my new table runner.  My husband has been fascinated and has asked a couple of times 'but how does it work?' as the pattern develops seemingly by itself.  To which my answer is: "I have no idea!".  I'm just following the diagram for the warping colours and the two weft colours.  It's something to do with the ups and downs of the two colours interacting, but I have no clue, lol. The difference between a dabbler like me, and an actual weaver. Anyway, I'm very pleased with how it's looking.

Thankfully the weather has turned cooler this week, so I've been up in the attic a few times quilting on my Pink Doiley Quilt.  I decided to go with the same panto design 'Finer' that I used on the New Zealand quilt, as I couldn't find anything I liked better online.  The bowl-shaped Glide foot on my Handiquilter is skating beautifully over the applied doileys, and I've only had a couple of thread breakages as the power needle punches fairly easily through the crocheted doileys.

Down in the sewing room, I made another version of the Sunhat pattern and this time avoided any tucks or pleats.   The fit isn't bad, I wore it out yesterday and it stayed on my head in a light breeze.  I'm not going to win any fashion contests but the broad brim shades my face well.

I also couldn't resist cutting up more Japanese fabric to sew another Soft storage box.

Having completed the small projects and cleared the decks, I pulled out my Double Wedding Ring quilt which I haven't worked on since before going to Japan in April, and sewed another block.  I also pulled out all the previous blocks to see where I am at.  The one I am currently sewing is Block 13 out of 16.

My basket of pre-sewn arcs appeared to be getting rather low, so I did an audit.  I need 3 more blocks which will requires24 pieced arcs.  I only have 14 pieced arcs left, so I need to assemble another 10.  I have leftover cut wedges in various colours but probably not enough, so I may need to pull out my scraps and cut some more.  I think I have enough background and accent pieces already.

Another project I hadn't worked on for a few weeks is the 1:48 scale Betterley quilt shop kit.  This week I added the patterns and tomato pincushions to the stand I had already assembled, with only one pincushion pinging off into the void never to be seen again which is a better result than I feared.

I have also started the repetitive task of assembling over 100 tiny fabric bolts. After cutting out the fabric and bolt inners, each one requires winding the fabric around the inner then gluing the tiny flap down.  It's sort of meditative.

File Cabinet Mountain has now dwindled to more of a hillock.  It has become easier to discard things, especially quilt patterns that I know I will never make because they have hundreds of tiny pieces in them.  I think I had this delusion when I was younger that I could make anything if I tried hard enough.  In my declining years, I now realise that I really don't enjoy making repetitive blocks and that I am not a very accurate quilter - particularly with triangles.  So the huge folder of star quilt ripped out patterns and framed medallion quilts pretty much all went in the bin.  Life is too short :)

I've been enjoying a new video game the last few weeks, it's another souls-like called 'Lies of P' and feels very similar to the Dark Souls franchise only probably a bit easier (apart from some fiendishly long runs between bonfires which I had to break down into saved chunks to get through).

And suddenly it is getting dark by 8pm, where did the summer go?  Time flashes by when you are hunkering indoors to avoid the heat waves.