Rabbits and quilting

Isn't it wonderful that school has started again! I feel like I am getting back to a normal routine for the first time in about three months. I had some lovely time at home in an empty house in peace and quiet and managed to finish off and assemble my two machine-knitted bunnies. They will have some knitted clothes but I am still making those. I knit these on a Brother 881 and the pattern was from a knitting calendar

I've also done quite a bit of quilting on the frame the last few days. I finished the Civil War quilt - I did continuous curve quilting around the block seams, a little feather in the setting blocks, and a wavy pattern down the sashing strips. There is a noticeable improvement by the end of the quilt from when I started, I am definitely getting better at steering. At the moment I am quilting the Seaside wallhanging, and the frame is perfect for that. I can steer back and forth quilting in the lines of the sky, sea and beach and really see what I am doing. I am really loving it and have to watch I don't get so excited that I start moving too fast and making enormous stitches. I can see that there will be a real temptation now to only make quilts that will be suitable for quilting on my tabletop frame. When I finally get the machine off the frame and the frame dismantled, I am going to have so much binding to do. Here is a pic of the three practice cot quilts I started on. The blocks for these were left over from my Almost Amish quilt, and originally came from a lady in my sewing club. We did a group Row Robin, but she decided to ignore the rules and ask for blocks instead, then was disgusted with them when they came back all different sizes / different seam allowances. She was going to throw them out, so I asked for them, and used quite a few in the Almost Amish quilt, and these cot quilts finish them off. I will be giving the cot quilts to a fundraising coffee morning on the 18th November, so have to have them bound by then. Following a tip from one of the Yahoo groups, I have discovered that there are tons of machine quilting videos on Youtube, so I am trying to watch some of those to pick up tips for using the frame.

I can't believe it is almost October already - and it is definitely Autumn weather here now. Later today if the sky stays clear we are going to empty out the camping trailer for the winter, which is always a rather sad task, like saying goodbye to summer. We bring all the textiles (curtains, bedding, cushions etc.) inside for the winter, and give it a good clean out. I need to give the garden a good tidy up as well, and get rid of the summer hanging basket contents which are now all straggly and sad looking. I usually plant out some winterflowering pansies and ivies for the winter, to give us something nice to look at out the window.

Checking in

I feel guilty that I haven't blogged since last Thursday, but with this quilting frame tying up both my worktable and my sewing machine, I really can't do much else except practice my machine quilting. I have loaded my Civil War shoo-fly lap quilt onto the frame and am very carefully trying out pantograph designs on it. So far so good - it is a bit shaky but still better than I could have done without the frame. I have also spent quite a lot of time googling for tips on how to use frames - although I am still disappointed in my search for a book or dvd. I have joined two Yahoo groups for home frame users so hopefully when I get time to trawl through their messages I will pick up some more tips.

I had a couple of unexpected emails this week. One was from an American gal who had been going through my Flickr album, and she emailed to ask if she could buy my teacup. Now I am not running a home business or anything, but I am happy to pass on the teacup to someone who really wants it. So I suggested a price which she is happy with, and I just need to take it to the post office to see what the postage is going to cost. The other very unexpected email was from my long arm quilter, Dinah, in Indiana, who has finished quilting my Year in the Garden top for me. This was made from a Beth Ferrier free internet block of the month pattern a few years ago. Dinah has finished the quilting and was posting it back to me, and she wrote to tell me that it was coming. But the really unexpected part is that she is strongly encouraging me to enter it for Paducah. Now I would never in a million years think that my work is good enough for Paducah, and on this top in particular I can remember several problems with the invisible machine applique, but Dinah really thinks I should go for it. She is willing to help with the photography and appraisal and entry process. It is going to cost me some money, but I guess maybe these sorts of opportunities don't come up too often. I still can't believe it would get juried in, but who knows. This raises the spectre of quilt police staring over my shoulder as I sew on the binding and sleeve (and try not to get cat hair on the quilt, pretty difficult in this house).

The only other useful thing I have done lately (besides knit on my sock, and boy am I loving the no-cable needle method of cabling) is to organise my knitting needles. I was getting fed up with having them all stuck in a big tin, even though they were rubber-banded together by size, it was still annoying trying to find the size I wanted. I had a brainwave about a new way to use office supplies and have come up with this solution: I stitched pockets into some punched plastic folders, and it works great up to about a size 10mm needle, and I can rank them by size.

I seem to be turning into a knitter...

Watching me as I obsessively knit little hats in aid of Age Concern the other night (see pic to left of blog), my dh remarked that suddenly I seemed to be a Knitter - not a quilter, or a dollshouser or anything else. I think it might have been the insane chortling and the chanting of 'isn't it cute!' as I waved little pom-pommed mini hats around in front of his face.

I do seem to be on something of a knitting jag at the moment. I finished the first of my cable socks, and I am really pleased with how it looks. The fit is a bit tight, especially to get it on over the foot, so having consulted my 'Sensational Socks' book, I am going to make the heel flap a few rows higher (and thus the gusset a few stitches wider) which hopefully will give me a bit of slack. I am also going to try the no-cable-needle cable method on the second sock, which looks like it may also make a looser cross-over which should loosen the second sock slightly.

I continue to tweak my Freestyle quilting frame arrangement. I gave up on trying to get my own table level because no matter how much propping up I did, the sewing machine was still trying to coast downhill and backwards on its own. So I sent dh to Ikea to pick up two of the height-adjustable trestles like the ones in the instructional video (and he even put them together for me, what a sweetie!) and the frame is now resting on those. This had the added advantage that I could raise it up about 8 inches higher, so I could see the needle more clearly and no longer had to adopt the weird backward stooping posture. However, we quickly discovered that the weight of my machine was making the frame support rails sag by almost a half inch in the middle. It is impossible to see in the tiny pictures in the instructions whether or not the makers have boards between their trestles to support the rails. I have now propped up the centre of my rails with a stack of craft books (the first time many of them have been taken off the bookshelf in a long time). And at last I am level! If I let go of the machine carriage handles, the machine stays where it is! what a difference!

So now I feel like I can concentrate on learning to steer. On my current practice top, I am experimenting with edge-to-edge quilting. I traced off my chosen fairly simple pattern onto Golden Threads paper, and used a big needle to needle-punch six more copies of the pattern. I started out pinning these to the quilt and quickly discovered that I absolutely hated the technique. The paper isn't quite flat no matter how much you pin it, so the fullness gets pushed around by the presser foot and develops wrinkles, and it is sort of crunchy to stitch through. By the time you have stitched through one repeat, the paper sort of wrinkles up to adapt to the quilt contours, which means that when you pin down the next un-stitched sheet, it is now longer than the stitched sheet so that it is hard to line up the interlocking pattern correctly. and if the wrinkle gets high enough, the presser foot hooks into it and tears the paper. Aaarrghghgh!!!


After a few lengths of the GT paper, I felt there had to be a better way. Googling on the internet quickly revealed the pantograph system used on the Hinterburg system and others, where a stylus is attached to the back edge of the carriage to trace along a panto roll laid on the table. I have now temporarily improvised this system by taping a draughtsman's compass to my carriage and laying my panto roll along a board between the two trestles. Even this improvised system is working great, so I will have to adapt it into something more permanent.

I have received my first commission! A friend at work saw my knitting bag, and has asked me to make her one for her mother for Christmas.

On Saturday at my club meeting, we concluded both our brown bag swap and the applique split-picture swap (I was doing both). The mystery recipient of my autumn leaves table runner turned out to be someone unexpected, and I'm not sure she liked it. She said something pretty feeble like 'oh, that's nice', but when another tablerunner in similar colours was unveiled by someone else, she was raving enthusiastically 'OH, that's beautiful!' etc. so I guess she would have rather had that one. oh well. I glimpsed my own table runner which isn't finished yet so I don't have it back yet. I liked it because I like the fabrics I put in the bag. The applique split-picture swap has been really interesting - these are the pics where I made a slice of a black man's head, a slice of a Monet farmscape, and a slice of a Belgian street scene (as blogged previously). My picture is of a Venetian canal, and I haven't got all the three pieces back, but I've seen the third piece and it is quite amazing how much my three pieces look like they go together. I will make the fourth piece when I get the other three pieces and post a pic. The black man's portrait didn't fare so well - one contributor had used a fabric tremendously lighter than the others for the skin, and also made an over-large staring white eye. The Monet farmscape fabrics were all very good, but unfortunately the person who made the slice next to mine was wildly inaccurate and their piece doesn't line up at all with mine (we are talking more than a half inch out). At first when I saw it I had a sick feeling wondering if I had made the mistake, but we compared pattern pieces and it is definitely the next person's. The Belgian street scene is going to look good, apart from the boring low-contrast fabrics for the building and foreground provided by the owner of the picture. Hopefully I will get photographs of the finished scenes and be able to post them.

Re-inventing the wheel, and Miss Lydia Pickett

I am continuing to climb the steep learning curve with my Freestyle quilting frame. It is very frustrating because I feel 100% sure that I am reinventing the wheel - yet I can't find any book or dvd/video on using a home frame system. There are trillions of books on quilting designs, how to stipple, that sort of thing, but I can't find anything on the mechanical practicalities of using a frame. It seems ridiculous when these home systems have been sold in the thousands, if not tens of thousands. If anyone knows of a reference, PLEASE let me know, I would be very grateful.

Here are a few more things I have learned:

• I need to smooth the top from the centre out to the edges each time I roll on, to try to fight the tendency of the quilt top to become hourglass-shaped (the quilting draws it in, yet the ends are pinned to full width on the rollers). The sideways tension is on the backing so it doesn't alleviate the tendency of the top to draw inwards.



• where the top has no excess to trim off, I should put the batting onto the backing first, then pin the quilt top through all three layers. The cd that came with the system shows the top being pinned to the backing, then folded back, and the batting being inserted between the two layers. Despite best endeavours, this left me a gap of up to 1/4" with no batting in it along the top edge.



• You can continuous-curve quilt around the seams of a block, by rolling on as needed (which is tedious but do-able). However (and my dh helpfully pointed out that this should be obvious), it is no good rolling forward to go around the whole block if the total distance quilted forward from original starting point exceeds a certain distance (about 10" on my frame) because once the three layers are quilted together, you can't roll back any further than about 10" because the top and bottom can no longer separate to go onto their respective rollers. I found this out by quilting all around one block, moving over to do the next block in the row and discovering I couldn't roll back far enough. Having driven helpful husband out of the room, I had to do part of the block and leave the rest to do later off the frame. I guess I should have done about half the first block, then gone along and done half the next block etc. etc., before rolling forward. But that is going to require some advance planning on how to quilt the seams, I hate advance planning.

On my next practice top, I am going to try some edge-to-edge quilting patterns. As there is no pantograph facility on this frame (and I would think that when someone writes that book I want to read, they will have a chapter on improvising pantograph systems), I will have to draw out the pattern onto Golden Threads paper.

What else have I been doing? I am still knitting on my Widdershins cable sock, I have turned the heel (which is just the most wonderful heel, you increase for the gusset, then knit a proper heel flap and decrease on either side to tie it back into the gusset - so no picking up stitches!) but when I tried to do the cable rib up the leg I found it was too tight. I ripped back and tried with bigger needles and less cross-overs, then it was too loose. So I have ripped back again, and am trying with original needles and less cross-overs. And I finally got my invitation to Ravelry, I was so excited, and spent about a half day setting up an account there. They only take pictures from Flickr, there is no direct upload option, so I had to create a knitting album on Flickr to get my pics into Ravelry. Oh, and it is getting a bit colder here now so I sat down one evening and knit a hat, the 'May' pattern from Rowan Big and Easy leaflet.

I've also finished two Miss Lydia Pickett kits from my monthly club that Judith of 'In Some Small Way' is running. This was the Day Bed and the Ladies' Writing Desk, which I think were the August & September kits. We have now moved onto the living room furniture so I have shifted my base colour from pale yellow to a sort of oatmeal colour (one of my dh's Citadel paints in a shade called 'Bleached Bone') which matches the provided artwork quite well. These kits went together well. The Day Bed was fairly easy. The front legs of the desk are built up of three layers and you need to sand the fronts off to round the leg so it looks more like a cabriole leg and less like a laser-cut structure. I found the artwork slightly puzzling as the interior pieces above and below the shelf do not completely fill up their allotted space, even though in the kit picture they appear to. The little extras with the ladies' desk are two little books and a folded vintage leaflet. I am quite pleased, as usual, with how both kits turned out.

The Freestyle Quilting Frame

After taking delivery of my UK-made Freestyle quilting frame at the end of June, I have finally got around to putting it together. The following is an initial review - obviously I haven't begun to use it in any significant way yet, but I have assembled it, completed one practice cot quilt size top, and started meandering on a 'real' cot quilt.


These are the pieces as delivered. The frame is strongly constructed from quality materials. In fact the metal runners are so strong that in the accompanying instruction video you can see the frame in use and only supported at either end by trestles. The wooden pieces are of high quality wood, all well finished and completely smooth, and a large amount of pre-assembly has been done prior to delivery.



Now that the frame is together, I can say that it is not complex and I should not have any trouble putting it together a second time in the future. However, I had extreme difficulty putting it together the first time, largely because of inadequate instructions. Assembly instructions are supplied in two forms: a work-in-progress video (your choice of cd or dvd) which has chapter captions but no sound, and shows the frame being assembled and then loaded with a quilt top; and a one-sheet printed set of assembly instructions with small photographs. I had three main problems: firstly, the frame as supplied to me is obviously a later evolution and is not the same as the prototype pictured on either the printed instructions or in the video. Secondly, there appears to be no way to pause or stop the video on cd, forcing me to let it run full length repeatedly as I tried to figure out the finer details of assembly. I don't know what format it is in, but there are no controls provided for pausing or navigation, no key on the keyboard would pause it or make controls pop up, and Windows Media Player would not recognise the video format. Thirdly, the assembly instructions suffer greatly from 'must get it all onto one page' syndrome - the photographs are tiny and cropped so severely as to be almost useless. There is no sheet identifying the various components, which makes some of the references on the assembly sheet cryptic. Consequently the assembly, which on the video takes about 10 minutes, actually took me about five hours to get right. (At least, I think I've got it right)


It is a lot of little things, all of which could be solved with some close-up photographs. For example, when adding on the pivoting end pieces, it was not clear on which side of the wood the large washer should be placed. I put it on the inside - and it became clear later that this put the end piece slightly out of parallel with the base frame (because the spiral arm does have the large washer on the outside). So when I tried to adjust the height, my end piece was binding on the spiral arm's large washer, and actually chipped a bit of the wood off the bottom of the end piece. Another example would be that the rods have a specific right way up, which is to have the black handle down and the white plastic nub upwards in the support grooves. But you can't tell this from any of the instructions - it was my dh who pointed out that one end of the rods was lower than the other end. I'm still not sure where the side tensioning clips should be fastened on the frame - in the tiny photo in the instructions it looks like they may be hooked over a piece of wood which I don't have on my frame. I have hooked them instead over the white plastic rod, but that puts them off centre which seems strange. There are two more single sheets of instructions: one on loading the quilt onto the frame, which strangely is in a different order from how it is done on the video; and one showing how to adjust the height of the frame for your machine bed. I puzzled over the last one for some time and I am still not sure that I have it right, but the machine seems to be quilting alright.



When loading my machine onto the carriage (a Janome 6500) it became clear that I had another problem. The platform is not big enough to take my machine square on - the motor hits up against the handle and one foot is half off the platform. If I put the machine right over to one side, I can get it on at a slight angle but then the spool rest is preventing the machine from coming fully to the front of its platform (thus reducing the possible throat area on the machine since the platform steering handle support is in front of the actual machine throat).






The biggest problem has been the most unexpected - there is no allowance made, or mention of, where to put your foot pedal. When I tried out the frame at the Malvern quilt show, they were using the frame on two trestles, so of course the foot pedal cord could fall down behind the frame and the pedal come to the front. This obviously doesn't work on a table, unless you were on a very narrow table or have a very long foot cord. I have had to resort to improvising by tying my pedal onto the handle, which quickly tired out my left hand. Thinking of some of the other home frames I have seen at shows, some of which have a wooden trigger on the handle to push down on the pedal, I have now come up with this wooden stick arrangement to put leverage on the pedal, but it is still pretty unsatisfactory and prone to slipping off. I might try to suspend the cord on the stick to see if the pedal will reach down to the floor at the front. I have also had trouble a couple of times with the power cord at the back of the machine flipping up on the back runner and obstructing the machine carriage.




So what is it like to actually use? I found the action to be slightly heavy at first but I am getting used to it now. The system allows free movement of the machine in all directions, as it should. The handles are quite comfortable - or they would be if I didn't have the problem with the foot pedal level to squeeze. On my machine, I feel like I do not have good visibility of the needle unless I stand well back from the frame, because of the bulk of the machine head, so I find I am adopting a strange posture of standing well back and hunching my neck down to be able to see the needle, which grows uncomfortable over time. I guess if I had the frame on adjustable trestles like in the video, I could raise it to a more comfortable height.

I am having a bit of trouble because my table is not entirely level, and if I let go of the machine it wants to roll to the back and to the left. I am trying to prop the frame up with magazines and things but haven't got it right so far. That is just a problem with my table, and not the fault of the frame.

I ordered the six-foot rollers, and for some reason the leaders (the fabric 'tails' on the rollers) are different widths - the one on the back roller is 64 and 3/8th and the other two are near to 66 inches. So I guess 64 and 3/8th will be my maximum working width. It doesn't say this in the instructions, but it seems clear that the quilt back needs to be longer and wider than the top. Longer so that the top can be pinned onto the back below where the back pins onto the leader (so that you don't have two rows of pins on top of each other) and wider because otherwise the machine bed bumps into the side tensioning clip and disrupts the quilting. I have had several accidents with the needle hitting the back roller which is another reason for there to be a good gap between where the backing pins onto the leader and where the top starts. Once you have hit the back roller a few times, the needle clamp gets loosened and then the needle waggles and breaks (ask me how I know...).

Now that I have got going and am starting to learn all the quirks as above, the meandering is going well. I can see that it would save a lot of time, if you know what you are doing, compared to conventionally safety-pinning the quilt and free-motioning the normal way. I am pleased with the quality of the machine, and with the fact that I will be able to disassemble and store it easily (unlike some of the other dedicated home frame systems). I just need to do lots and lots more practice.

Why I don't machine knit much... (or one of the reasons)

So on Saturday afternoon, dh took ds to another town 30 miles away so ds could buy a model he had been saving up for. And as I was feeling virtuously ahead on the housework/chores front, I decided to go out and brave the spiders in my machine knitting shed. I hadn't actually done any knitting since before Christmas, although I have been out there to put stuff in / take it out. I have a cone of yarn perfect for knitting some Easter bunnies that were patterned in a knitting calendar I am using, and I sit down and get set up and am happy as a clam for about 90 minutes. I feel relaxed, I'm in the zone, I'm feeling good about being back at the machine.

Then ds and dh arrive back home. First at the shed door is dh, wanting to tell me about the trip (and get some praise for his big drive I think). Then ds shows up "Look what I've got!". Then about 5 minutes later "Mom, come and look at this!". And each time I am wrenched out of my blissful concentration it is harder to get back into it - I start making mistakes. Dh shows back up to chat a bit more about how he is going to help ds make the models - I remind him that he promised to rake the lawn. We have an argument about whether or not he is going to do that, then I have to rip back a few rows because I went wrong on the knitting. Then it is "Mom, come and look at this one!". Get back to the shed and notice that it is now time to make supper. I give up completely and go into the house. Sum achievement: three body pieces and a spare leg.

I got into machine knitting in 2001, just as it was dying its long slow death here in the UK. The positive side was that I picked up several good machines for a pittance, the down side is that the supplies and magazines and shows were drying up. I joined a club for a few years but it was mostly older women who used to knit but weren't any more, and the speakers got harder and harder to find, so the club closed. I was really into the knitting for about two or three years, and once it started threatening to take over the house, I bought a 12 foot garden shed and moved all the machines and supplies out there. Then we put our house on the market and the shed had to be disassembled and all the machines put into storage for a year. By the time they finally came back out, and got put back into the re-erected shed at our new house (in 2003) I had pretty much forgotten everything I'd learned. I have kept them all though - partly because you can't give them away in the UK at the moment, and partly because I remember how much I enjoyed it and hope to get back into it one day. I did make a summer cardigan last year, and a christmas waistcoat last autumn. The trouble with it all being out in the shed is that it is hard to find a good time to go out there (and dh and ds won't leave me alone - I don't know how many times I've nearly jumped through the roof when one of them suddenly bangs on the door and scares me). And I feel guilty about 'abandoning' my responsibilities to go out and do something frivolous like enjoying myself. I hate feeling like that - why can't we just stand our ground and say 'make your own dinner, please, I'm busy' without feeling like the worst mother / wife in the world?

Here are a couple of pics of my two finishes: the quilted autumn leaf tablerunner, and the Robert's Baltimore Album duvet cover (which I slept under for the first time last night - very nice). I had a little trouble wrestling with the large pieces of fabric for the duvet cover, 84 x 88 inches - it was a case of measure twice, cut once, find out when seaming them together that one was shorter or longer than the other for some reason, bodge it a bit etc. etc. Hard to measure something that long when none of my rulers or tape measures go that far and my house is too small to lay something that big down flat on the floor. Thankfully I do not believe that there are duvet-cover police so I think I am safe.

Just a postscript to say that I got my September issue of Quilter's Newsletter Magazine which has had an amazing makeover. I had gotten quite bored with it for the last few years, it had turned into just another pattern magazine apart from they still printed news from the quilting world which was the main reason I bought it (that, and nostalgia for when it used to be good). Magazines revamp themselves every few years, and it usually just seems to be cosmetic, but QNM (now QN) have really pulled out all the stops and it is a great read now. In fact, I still haven't finished reading it because there is just so much in it - whereas it used to take me about 20 minutes. Perhaps they have taken a leaf out of the Quilter's Home Magazine, and are trying to present a publication that you don't just read and toss in 20 or 30 minutes. There are several new columns, for example one by a long-arm quilter, one by John Flynn, the first of a three-part quilter's fiction by Jennifer Chiaverini (sp?), several workshops and technical tips, fabric previews, as well as the usual news and patterns. I am impressed.

Magazines

How many magazines are too many? I've been doing some major house cleaning the last few days, as due to the school holidays and several camping trips, the house had fallen far below even my low standards. Before I could even clean I had to deal with all the stuff which had been put to one side to be dealt with later for whatever reason. One of the results is a huge pile of my magazines - I tend to skim through them quickly when they arrive, feasting on the photographs, then put them to one side to go through in more detail at leisure. Or sometimes there is something in the magazine that I want to follow up on the internet, so I put it in a pile. Too many piles of stuff - sometimes I am tempted to just go through the house with a big laundry basket and just arbitrarily fill it with all the clutter and donate it to the charity shop.

Anyway, I am a bit of a magazine slut, and the past year the exchange rate with America (where all my favourite mags come from) has been so good for us that I have been tempted into more subscriptions because they are actually the same price or cheaper than here in the UK. And in my humble opinion, the American quilting magazines are far better than the UK ones, but perhaps it is just that they are more to my taste. But I think the magazine subscription thing has gotten slightly out of hand, judging by the stack of about 12 magazines waiting to be read properly from the last six weeks - not to mention the knitting books I have been buying secondhand on Amazon, and the three books on painted ladies in San Francisco (bought as a souvenir of my holiday) and a book on why being messy is actually better than being tidy (as recommended by Mark Lipinski in Quilter's Home magazine). I don't actually have time to read all these things. I think my New Year's resolution this year has to be no more magazine subscriptions. My problem is that I am interested in too many hobbies (hence the title of this blog) so I am getting magazines on quilting, dollshouse miniatures, knitting, and a few assorted others to do with memberships of English Heritage, using the internet, that sort of thing. I even get a woman's magazine because I like it and it is really cheap. I'm just sad obviously.

And it is not just the reading - what do you do with them after you have read them? I have tried many things over the years: clipping and filing, hand-written indexes, computer spreadsheet indexes, post-it notes to highlight patterns I like. But then there are whole series that I just want to keep because I love the pictures so much (Miniature Quilt magazine, sigh, oh how you are missed..., Nutshell News ditto) In our current house, the only place to keep the quilting and dollshouse magazines is in the attic (the knitting mags are out in my knitting shed) and the builder who floored the attic space for us did warn against putting too much weight up there. I have visions of my entire magazine collection dropping down into the bedroom one fine day... Lately I've been trying to be more ruthless, and just rip out the articles I might use in future and put the rest of the mag in the recycling - but of course there are always two articles back to back that you want to file in two different files so your filing gets screwed up. Perhaps I should just open a magazine museum and be done with it. Or buy a photocopier...

Ok, enough ranting about my unfortunate magazine habit. What else have I done since we got back from camping on Sunday? Three days of work up in London, ds went back to school on Wednesday (hurray!), about 8 loads of washing, major housework, some more knitting on my cabled sock, catching up on the taped television shows (could Meredith Grey have taken any longer to come back to life from her almost-drowning, yawn). Today I quilted my autumn table runner. I was going to free-motion veins on each leaf, so I tried it out on a couple of leaves in one corner. It looked awful - like a drunken spider had been running around on them. So I had to unpick (isn't unpicking invisible thread fun...NOT!!) and now I have just done walking foot straight lines diagonally through each leaf which seems to suit the pattern much better - it emphasises the diagonal quality of the leaves. I will post a pic once I get the binding on. I've got to have it done for next Saturday when I will hand it back to the owner.

Back from camping

We're back from our last camping trip of the school holidays and for once it didn't rain on us. We had several pleasant days down near Axminster on the Dorset / Devon borders, and unusually for us we really chilled out - usually we are tearing all over the place sightseeing. This time we spent a few days fossil hunting on the beach at Lyme Regis (I found a tiny ammonite about the size of a rice grain to put in my dollshouse). Another day we went to see an ancient valley garden at Mapperton House, and took the picnic rug out of the car to just lie in the sun and read and knit and chill out. The house is Elizabethan and gorgeous, but not open on the day that we went, so we explored the spectacular gardens which had a slightly mysterious 'seen better days' air about them that was quite enchanting. Here is a picture, a la Knitting Harlot, of my new sock that I started while on holiday and you can see part of Mapperton Gardens in the background. It is a cabled sock pattern from Knitty.com and I am knitting it in the Water colourway of sock wool from Cherry Tree Hill. So far it is going pretty well. Before I started it, I did finish the pair of socks in Regia Bamboo yarn. I am a bit disappointed in them as they feel really floppy, it makes me realise that I prefer a snug fit to my socks. The trouble with socks is that you don't really know how they are going to fit until they are finished and you can try them on properly. After a few hours of chilling out, and a long walk around the gardens, we felt a bit hungry so went back out to the Tea Rooms situated in one of the old Tudor barns. We had a lovely Dorset cream tea, and I happened to go back into the barn, when I chanced to look up at the ceiling. WOW!!! The whole ceiling of this immense barn is covered in a four piece massive applique tent, in spectacular colours and designs. Apparently it is an Indian wedding tent, commissioned from artisans in Rajasthan, India, and they had a photo book of pictures showing the hanging being created by 40 sari-clad ladies. Absolutely not the kind of thing you expect to come across in a Tudor tea room in the middle of nowhere.

eH
What other crafty things did I do on holiday? I took my handquilting along, the vintage crossed canoes top that I am 'rescuing' by quilting down all the fullness added by the inexpert creator. I am on the last row of blocks now so I should keep at it and not let it rest for several months like I have been. I visited Axminster Tools in Axminster and bought some locking clamps for when I pin up my quilt sandwich, and some more sponge paintbrushes (very useful for dollshousing). I went to a needlework shop in Exeter in the Central Station on Queen Street which was a standard cross-stitch sort of shop but with a surprisingly good selection of yarn - and I bought some more sock wool. This time it is Regia Jacquard which knits up into self-patterning designs which should be fun. We went antiquing and I picked up a few craft books in secondhand book stores. I had a lovely visit to the museum in Honiton, which has two whole rooms devoted to the craft of Honiton lace, and two lovely volunteers from the local Lace society were doing demonstrations and were happy to chat to me about lace and crafts. And on the way home we stopped at Fibre Fest in Ulfculme which was a large marquee within a country fair. The marquee was full of lots of small wool producers (sheep, angora, and more exotic fibres), spinners, weavers, artisans etc. Quite fun to go around, and I emerged with a cone of multicoloured wool to machine knit with. Then we had a big hog roast sandwich with apple sauce and stuffing, from a pig which had grown up just 20 miles away. And in case you are wondering, I gained three pounds while on holiday - but it was worth it!

Ds is back to school on Wednesday so I hope to get back more into a sewing routine in September, I have really done very little the last several weeks.