The garden is confused

Despite the stormy weather and some frosty mornings, the weather has remained basically mild which seems to have confused the garden.  Although the snowdrops are starting to flower on schedule, other things that shouldn't be growing yet have burst into life:  the mophead hydrangea has produced many new leaves when it should only be just starting to bud, a summer flowering clematis has likewise thrown out a bunch of new leaves, the photinia tree/shrub is dutifully turning red which shouldn't happen until the spring, and various daffodil bulbs seem a lot taller out of the ground than expected at this time of year.  I hope they don't all get a shock if it turns properly cold again. Stupid global warming...  Meanwhile I am sitting here at my desk with a handmade quilt wrapped around my legs and a handknitted shawl bundled around my neck, because our old house takes a while to warm up in the mornings.

This week I finally broke the back of the epic scrap fabric cutting  labour, cutting the last of the scraps into strips.  There remains a number of shorter strips that need to be sub-cut into squares but at least I could clear all the scrap bins off my sewing table.  While I watch TV at night, I am sorting the longer strips by colour, so far I've done the 1.5" bin and this is a picture of the 2" bin.  I've also finished sub-cutting all the 1.5" squares and sorted them by colour and put them into individual baggies. I'll do the same to the other bins once I finish sub-cutting their size squares.

Clearing off my sewing table meant that I could finally start machine quilting the Let's Bake Quilt.  I'm starting off by stitching in the ditch of the border blocks, and stitching a little square around each border block through the middles of the strips. It's not too bad for maneuvering since the quilt is only about 64" square and this machine has an 11" throat.  The new sewing machine is behaving well and the built in dual feed foot seems to work quite well also, keeping the layers well aligned.

I've done some more planning for the Japanese dollshouse fit-out, trawling the other bloggers for ideas and looking at sites online for resources.  There are a few Asian sites that do good-looking bento boxes and oriental cooking accessories, but they are all in 1/12th scale.  As my house is only 1/20th scale, one of their bento boxes is the size of an entire table top in my house. I looked around online for a while but it looks like I will have to make a lot of stuff myself.  I did find some square cereal bowls on A Miniature Marvel here in the UK which I think will be ok for large bento platters in my scale, and also they had a few plain ceramic jars which can be large kitchen storage jars or possibly be decorated as ornamental jars.

I spent a pleasant day at a local lace day yesterday, and managed to get to the end of my Bucks Point Christmas Bauble Wrap.  I just need to join it back to its beginning now to create a tube that will fit over the bauble, and darn in the ends.  I've been regretting my decision to thriftily re-use prewound bobbins left over from a bigger project.  There was a lot of thread left on each bobbin when cut off the previous project, so rather than throw it all out, I knotted the bobbins into pairs then wound the knot off onto one bobbin so that I could re-use the pairs for this small project.  It started out well but then as I came to each knot eventually, I then had to finagle working the knot out of the project and doubling up the thread to secure the loose end.  Easy enough for a single knot but then they started coming thick and fast and became really annoying.  The doubled thread won't really show on a Christmas ornament but it spoiled my enjoyment of the lacemaking. Thread is not that expensive so I think in future I won't bother unless it's for a tiny project where I can can wind off sufficient in one go.  There was a capacious secondhand table loaded down with someone else's collection of craft supplies in multiple hobbies.  I came away with some more doublepoint knitting needles, some lace patterns and a lace booklet, a book on sewing fabric-covered boxes, and a couple of kits (bad picture below) for making handmade sewing boxes that open up with drop down sides.  I made a hexagonal one of these about 20 years ago and found it quite a fiddle to do, plus being too big to be useful, but these kits were virtually free and the birdhouse in particular looks cute.  My plan is to live to be at least 102 years old while retaining sufficient physical capabilities to complete all my hoard of projects...

Speaking of lifespan, DH and I were at the mall on the weekend and I tried on some clothing in an excellently appointed changing room, that even had two opposing mirrors so that you can see in 360 degrees how much weight you put on over Christmas.  That was a big shock.  I weighed myself at home and found that it has become serious, which I had kind of known anyway since I can only wear my loosest trousers these days.  The two of us did a serious weight loss regime back in 2014, and DH has kept his down by going to the gym twice a week.  After losing a stone and a half, I resumed my normal lifestyle but obviously the weight has been creeping back up.  So I'm going to try to eat less and more healthily for the next few months and see if I can't get the weight down a bit. 'Gambarimasu' as the Japanese say: I will try my best.