Saturday 16 March 2024

New Zealand - week 1

 I arrived into Auckland almost a week ago.  I've got about 10 days on my own and then I join a small group tour for three weeks.  So far NZ is really reminding me of the west coast of Canada where I grew up before I emigrated to England - all the greenery and water and the low rise timber buildings.


In Auckland I caught the train to the suburb of Penrose to visit the Ribbon Rose sewing centre that I had seen recommended online. By UK standards this is an enormous three storey craft shop that sells various needlecraft supplies including a wide range of knitting wool, art supplies, and a floor of fabric mostly for quilting.  They have all the big names from the UK and America/Europe like Rowan for yarn, and Kaffe Fassett and Tilda for fabric.  Once I had ascertained that they would be willing to ship to the UK for me, I was looking out for NZ souvenirs.  I got a couple of balls of 70% merino/ 30% possum fur - possum is a pest here that they are trying to eradicate and apparently its fur is really warm and cosy.  I found a couple of NZ themed cross stitch bookmarks as well.  I had mostly come to see their Kiwiana - NZ themed quilt fabric range.  They had just restocked so there was a






shelf full of Maori designs, kiwi symbols like the fruit and the bird, bird designs, ferns etc.   I got a long quarter cut of most of them, with some extra of the fern fabric to use possibly as the border for a scrappy memory quilt of NZ.  Super friendly and helpful staff and so much to choose from, a fun shop. It's all on its way back to the UK now.


The same day I was walking through the pretty shopping street in Parnell and came across another yarn shop on Parnell Road.  This one stocked more hand-dyed yarn, fun to look but I didn't buy anything.



From Auckland, I flew here to Napier which is a smaller town famous for its collection of Art Deco buildings.  Randomly, there is a well stocked Japan goods store in the centre called Raku with all kinds of wonderful Japanese and kawaii goods including many bolts of fabric.  I found some sumo fabric I don't have, and a fabric of Japanese woodcut pictures, and a couple of other pretty ones.  I think I am going to have to try to post a box from Auckland before the tour starts.



The Art Deco Trust maintains an attractive shop selling various vintage and repro goods, and I found a darling handpainted porcelain Nodder doll made by Colleen Crooks in Palmerston North.  It's like a little Frozen Charlotte doll except the head is separate and attached by elastic so it can move.  I took a walking tour run by the Trust to see many of the wonderful Art Deco buildings in the town centre.



Sunday 10 March 2024

Hong Kong

 I've actually just arrived in Auckland today, having left Hong Kong yesterday.  I had an evening, two full days, and 2/3rds of the final day in Hong Kong, so could only get a brief taste of what the city has to offer. I wasn't sure what to expect, between the vloggers rhapsodizing about HK on Youtube, to a couple of acquaintances who hadn't cared for HK at all.  It is certainly a hugely urban, hugely crowded city that goes 24/7 - so if you don't like crowds, constant road noise, and having to continually take evasive action for roadworks, scaffolding, shop goods spilling out on the pavement, trucks parked on the pavement, unsavoury messes etc. then you aren't going to like it. 



Having said that, everybody was very quiet and polite, no shoving or shouting, the underground stations were busy but quite quiet, and most people I interacted with were friendly and spoke at least some English if not fluent English.  Rundown dirty old buildings are right next to stark modern architecture, luxury good stores just around the corner from ragged street markets under tarpaulins stretched across the alley for shade, gorgeous tropical parks are an oasis amongst the relentless urban sprawl. A city of contradictions I guess. I got on fine and enjoyed looking around.


I did do a bit of crafty exploration, although I don't dare buy much because I'm only allowed one suitcase on my NZ tour.  In the Sham Shui Po area on the Kowloon side, there are a cluster of streets known for their gathering of related shops.  On Bead Street, there were several small shops just crammed with beads, jewellery findings, trims, ribbons, embroidered appliques, tassels - like little Aladdins Caves.  I picked up a couple of pieces of Hong Kong related fabric for .80p each.  










Button Street was more of a general street market but I did see one cavernous button emporium with floor to ceiling little drawers lining the walls.  Nearby streets are meant to be Ribbon Street and Leather Street but again mostly filled with general street market stalls but admittedly I wasn't looking too hard, I was just enjoying the atmosphere.

There's also an enormous flower and plant market. One shop had crocheted flower bouquets, very cute.




The next day I was over across the harbour in the Hong Kong central business district, full of modern skyscrapers like Canary Wharf in London, only going up steep hills.  After riding the historic tram up Victoria Peak and hiking down, I did a self guided walk through  the traditional Sheung Wan neighbouhood which finished at the renovated 1906 Western Market.  Here I was delighted to find the first floor full of fabric traders selling all kinds of fabric on the roll.  One of the women assistants said they get a lot of tourists shopping for quilting fabric (which was cheap but they didn't have a lot of selection) and also women buying up fabric to have their tailors back home sew their seasonal wardrobes for them.  I bought a bit of dragon fabric from her, I think it's polycotton but will do for lining, and from an old gentleman across the way, two half metres of rayon brocade that he said is bought for making Chinese dresses and the traditional top and trouser suits .  Gorgeous stuff and only GBP9.50 a metre.






Saturday 2 March 2024

Bon Voyage (to me)

 My last blog post before I head off to Hong Kong on Tuesday, on my way to New Zealand.  I plan to blog occasionally on the road if the technology cooperates.  Hopefully I have packed everything I will need, and fingers crossed my suitcase arrives with me. Wish me luck!


I've been working on the Lori Holt My Happy Place quilt although I'm not going to get it finished before I go.  But the design wall is filling up a lot more.



This is Week Eight

And this is the first half of Week Nine.


I've been making a bit of a push on my Latvian mitten and have crawled my way up past the thumb position (thumb stitches are indicated by the white horizontal line of waste yarn). I still don't really know what I'm doing with four colours in a row, but at least having only three colours in a row now seems easier by comparison. My tension continues to be pretty wobbly but I know that will improve when I wet block the finished mitten.




The kitchen in the Japanese dollshouse is not finished yet but I've put back the items I was accessorising. You can see I've simulated some tiny dishes on the two food trays with a sequin, a metal finding and some tiny hole punches that I cupped with an embossing tool.  The Japanese kettle was I think a present from my friend Anita.  The tiny spoon, oil pot, the two white jars, the little white dishes, and the baskets were purchased at the Tokyo dollshouse shop in 2019.  I have other accessories I want to make but it will have to wait for now.

I finished putting together the Japan travel journal, it feels good to have got that off my 'to do' list.  I also spent a few hours printing off colour photos from the slides I saved from my clear out a few weeks ago.  I had saved the relatively few  colour slides from the early 80s that included pictures of me.  I have an ancient scanner (it may well be older than my adult son) that will scan coloured slides but it took me about an hour to work out how to scan the first slide and then to convince my new Canon printer to print the whole photo at a reasonable resolution (and not cut half the image off etc.).  Once I had a process, the remaining dozen or so were fairly straightforward.    I have so much more decluttering to accomplish but it will have to wait until I'm going to be home for a period of consecutive weeks.







Saturday 24 February 2024

Recording memories

 I have spent a great deal of this week on the long-procrastinated-about job of creating a scrapbook for my trip to Japan almost a year ago. While I took over 4,000 photos, blogged some aspects, and kept a brief diary (I went here, I went there) as I travelled - there was no overall narrative of my itinerary.  What finally got me started was discovering the Japanese stationery company Notebook Therapy (thanks Youtube) and their wonderful sets of journals, stickers and stamps. So I reinvested some of my decluttering profits into a travel journal set. Since that arrived, I've been laboriously going through day by day, matching up my photos with my itinerary with my diary with my blog with my trip planning research, writing a narrative and choosing some photos to illustrate it, then printing out the pages at high quality on my inkjet printer, then cutting and pasting them into the travel journal, and finally adding some decoration with stickers, washi tape and stamps. In some ways, leaving it for so long has given me perspective and the ability to summarise. In other ways, I've had to look up a lot of places to remember why I chose to go there or what the history was, because it's so long ago now.  At least I'm doing it before the New Zealand memories push all the Japan memories out of my ageing brain. It has been incredibly time consuming but I've reached the final travel week. I think it's also taught me some lessons about how better to record the upcoming trip.

This week my longarm machine and I went to visit the Handiquilter dealership for a day - DH drove me as a belated Christmas present.  He went off to explore the local area while I had a day of basic training with a bunch of other new owners. My machine meantime was there to have a few issues resolved - it needed the timing adjusted and a couple of the handlebar buttons replaced.  While I don't think I received any huge revelations, there were several useful nuggets of information throughout the day so I took a lot of notes. I also took the opportunity to do some shopping without having to pay postage: picking up thread for the remaining projects in my quilting queue, a couple of straight rulers and a new pantograph.  Hopefully the machine is now all sorted out but I probably won't try it before I leave, there's not much point loading up a quilt onto the frame just to have it sit there for a couple of months.


So that day was an early start, and a few days later we had to get up even earlier at 5:45am to take the car in to the company that installed our tow hitch who are an hour's drive away. We are currently caught in the middle of a blaming war between the dealer we bought our secondhand car from (who claim that the ongoing issues we are experiencing with error messages on the car are caused by our post-purchase installation of a tow hitch), and the tow hitch installers who say they always get blamed for everything and that the tow hitch is working fine and shouldn't be causing any problems.  I had naively thought that with a new car, all the car issues we've experienced while caravanning were in the past.  The ball is currently back with the dealer and I hope I'm not going to have to take it to the ombudsman, especially when I'm going to be away.  Why can't things just work?????


I finished appliquing the Week Seven block for the Lori Holt My Happy Place Quilt.  The design wall is slowly filling up.


I also finished the little magazine kit cross stitch bird that I started in Malta.  It was designed as a bookmark but I turned it into a houseplant decoration instead.



And I did a few hours work on my Japanese dollshouse kitchen, mainly placing the ceramic accessories I bought in 2019 from the Tokyo dollshouse shop, and creating some food platters. Some of my 1:12 fimo fruit and veg that I made 10 years ago now don't look too out of scale for the 1:20 accessories.


DH also very kindly painted up the four metal charms I bought in Tokyo last year, using some painting references I found  online for him. So I have two demon masks and two samurai helmets that look really authentic, to go on display in the dollshouse.  He's a really good painter, very useful.



Saturday 17 February 2024

Short week

 It's only a few days since we got back from Malta, so not much to report.  I have spent several hours working on week seven of the Lori Holt My Happy Place Quilt which is a large 20" applique block with several components to prepare using the turn-through method.  This is a picture of it all glue-basted down, and currently I am hand stitching the applique.  Very cheerful.



I took a little magazine cross stitch kit to stitch a little bird with me to Malta, where I started it. So I've also worked on that a bit since getting back.  And I've done some more rows on the Latvian mitten.


I've booked a week to Iceland in late summer so I've been doing some research and prebooking for that.


And that's it for this week.  Lots of laundry after the trip and just life stuff, like our kitchen tap has started leaking so we've had to get the plumber in.  There's always something with an old house.

Tuesday 13 February 2024

A week in Malta

 We just got back from a winter sun break in Malta, my first visit there. It wasn't entirely sunny- it was warmer than the UK at 16-20C in the daytime but quite chilly at night, and always fairly breezy because it's an island.  But we had a good week and liked Malta a lot better than our previous winter destination of Cyprus.  People were friendlier and it just felt safer and better kept/cleaner, and there is history everywhere you look so really interesting.  The walled fortifications are just stunning. And the world class megalithic temples made us wonder why Stonehenge is so famous. We were staying in Valletta and the views in every direction made us feel like we were walking through a Canaletto painting.








I couldn't find any craft or fabric shops but I was on the lookout for Maltese lace and found one lace store open in Valletta.  In the window were some disappointingly coarse and even crude modern examples in shiny synthetic thread, and I saw a few more of this type in a tourist tat shop in Mdina (another walled city).  The Mdina shopkeeper said only old ladies make the lace now, no young people, and she said I would have to go to the sister island of Gozo to see anyone making it.  But I went into the Valletta shop another day and found he had some vintage pieces which were of much better quality. When I showed my interest, he got out a bunch of vintage pieces from under the counter which he said he had from his grandfather, who kept the shop before him.  I ended up purchasing a little mat from c. 1960s and admired several others.




The mat I purchased

We saw some antique lace in museums and also an example of the upright bolster pillow that was used.




By coincidence not design, we were in Valletta during the Carnival weekend which was a lot of fun. Total chaos - there was a parade route but the parade and floats was completely mixed up with the audience and performers in the narrow streets, turning it all into a huge street party that spilled into multiple streets with lots of the audience also dressed up.  And the carnival costumes weren't just DIY attempts - these were hugely elaborate themed creations encrusted with trims and embellishments and even electric lights.  The floats were a miracle of engineering - at first glance they are huge gaudy mobile platforms being towed along the streets by tractors, all lit up and blaring earsplitting music.  But when they got to a more open space, they would park up and unfold like a child's Transformer toy in every direction, with arms coming out and towers going up, and everything moving and rotating, with the added excitement of dry ice jets and confetti cannons.






It was also a good opportunity to test out some of the clothing I plan to take on my longer New Zealand trip, and to expose some flaws such as not having all the right charging cables with me. As usual I am obsessing over what to take with me, I went through this all last year with Japan. I think I have a bit of a anxiety issue about not having the right kit, I am definitely not a laidback traveller.  If I ever wrote a travel book, it would have to be called 'The Apprehensive Traveller'. Anyway, Malta was great and we may return another year because there is still lots to see.




Saturday 3 February 2024

A lack of memories

 More downsizing this week: going through various photo albums mostly of old holidays - including several hundred colour slides from trips in 1982 and 1985.  Obviously it was difficult to see the slides clearly without a projector - I put them on my light table so I could make out the subject of most of them, and I have a little magnifier to look at individual slides.  I pulled out the few slides and photos that depict me or a family member. But the vast majority of the photos were of scenery, architecture, antiquities etc.  which I don't even remember seeing, apart from a vague 'I was there' memory. At least I have learned over the years to take more pictures with people in them, particularly myself.  There were also photos of roommates, chance-met travelling companions of a few days etc, and I don't remember hardly any of them either.  In the end, I threw almost everything out.  It seems a bit pointless to save photos of, say, what the Acropolis looked like in 1985. If I want a picture of the Acropolis, I can look on the internet. It was a bit depressing though - not just the waste of money and time, and dragging all these photos/slides around from house to house over the years - but also the fact that I can't remember much of what I saw 40 years ago.  Makes you wonder what is the point of travel, but I know it shaped me as a person and ultimately resulted in me emigrating to the UK. Anyhow, the photo cupboard is a lot emptier now.


I finished the quilting on the Red House quilt.  It mostly went fairly well - there were a few errors in rolling on which resulted in the occasional overlap, but these aren't too noticeable.  This is a photo on a double bed but really it's a queen size quilt (but I couldn't be bothered to tidy my own room). I chose a modern pantograph of stylised feathers in a fairly close texture so as to quilt down all the seams from windows and doors.


I've been working on week six of the Lori Holt My Happy Place quilt, which includes three pieced blocks and this appliqued block featuring an actual cross stitch design. Luckily I had a dot grid fabric to use as the  embroidery background (since I haven't bought her specified fabric).


I've been knitting a bit on the Latvian mitten that I started a while ago, and have done a bit on the Little Houses cross stitch.  


Just a month until my New Zealand trip now, so as part of my preparations I have kitted up some craft projects to take along: a small cross stitch design, the sumo design sashiko I bought in Japan, and an embroidered panel for a French quilted zippered pouch kit.  I may not have room to take all three.


DS and his girlfriend have decided it's time to stop renting and buy their first house. After viewing only a handful, they have gone ahead and offered on one.  We did tell them that there will be a lot more selection on the market in the spring, but I think they just want to get it over with and get settled.  They are both busy professionals, and their tastes are quite different than ours anyway, so fair enough. Also there was some pressure from the other in-laws to get on the housing ladder sooner rather than later. So now they are furiously adulting as the buying process picks up steam. I hope it all turns out for them.  Mortgage rate trends into the future are anyone's guess. And I think they will have a lot to learn about being responsible for keeping up a home, but I guess we all went through that ourselves and we survived.  As someone who used to hide the dirty dishes in the oven in my twenties, up until that time I put the oven onto preheat, thereby transforming the lid of my food processor into modern art, I remember the learning curve. In my defense, I was living alone in a rented small flat.