Heat wave

 We've been experiencing a mini heatwave, I think it went up to 30 degrees C yesterday.  So I have mostly been hiding inside the last few days.  The house doesn't get too warm in the day but my bedroom was about 25 degrees Thursday night which felt too hot (I have a thermometer in the room because it's often hard to tell if it is me or the air temperature that is hot!).    The machine quilting room (formerly known as the dining room) gets blasted with the sun in the mornings so gets quite warm.  I finished the quilting on the first scrappy top. It doesn't look too bad, not great but not awful either.

I have belatedly realised that there is going to be a lot of quilt binding in my future.  I've loaded the next quilt which is the double-sized London quilt I made for DH.  Looking at it now, I wish I had got it out for the Jubilee weekend, it would have been so appropriate.  This one will also be quilted in a meander pattern. I'm using a variegated dark thread in the border, and a light grey thread for the middle part. So I'll turn the quilt after the middle is finished, so that I can quilt the two side borders in a couple of passes. In the meantime I just baste across them every time I start a new pass, to keep the quilt rolling evenly.

After a bit of investigation, I determined that most of the machine noise was coming from my hopping foot going up and down, and its spring.  I guess the foot had just dried out over five years.  So some careful oiling has eliminated virtually all the noise and the machine sounds much smoother now. I feel like I am getting back into the swing of things in terms of the logistics of movement, bobbin replacement, rolling on etc.

I've been sewing together the Aldi boucle t-shirt, I just need to put the sleeves in. A preliminary try-on shows that it fits around me but the armholes seem a bit long, we'll see.  Also very annoyingly, apparently when the pieces were pinned out to dry in my sewing room, I managed to splash some droplets of tea onto the back piece which of course have now permanently dyed the cotton-mix yarn.  The stains are all near seams so I can hide some and I've pulled away some of the yarn fibre to minimise the others. So stupid of me.

I finally finished Month 12 of the Australian BOM, what a slog.  It isn't perfect but doesn't look too bad.  So much work in this one. I corrected the perspective on the darning mushroom and on the shoe, as the original drafting from the designer seemed a bit off to me. So I've still got a couple of faint transfer lines showing on the darning mushroom but they are unobtrusive and will likely fade with time.  There will be buttons sewn onto the 'button card' in the top left after quilting is done.

I've started Month 13 a few weeks late, but it seems much more straightforward so hopefully I can catch up some.

My main Janome machine came back from its warranty work.  Apparently with my bag making where I've been sewing relatively bulky seams and had some fatal stops when crossing zippers, I managed to put out the timing, damage the needleplate and damage the bobbin case.  Go me.  They say they've fixed/replaced all that and so far it definitely seems to be running a lot smoother.  I haven't actually tried out all the situations where it was skipping stitches before, but the piecing seeems to be working fine and I've pieced a few blocks for the next row of the Tannenbaum quilt. The Featherweight meanwhile has moved up to the machine quilting room where I use it to wind bobbins for the Pfaff - the Pfaff itself doesn't seem to like winding Bottom Line thread and winds far too tightly but the Featherweight does a great job.

I had a squishy arrive in the post yesterday:

What's in the bag?????

It's the 2022 hat pattern for the Shetland Wool Week and I bought the Jamieson kit to knit the grey/denim colourway.  I've knit some of these hats before - there is a different free pattern every year - and they are fun to knit. The end result isn't overly warm even with the double stranding of wool as the wool isn't thick, but they look so attractive.

The service engineers have temporarily released the caravan to us. They have made an approved warranty claim to replace the thermocouple in the grill (which is why it keeps going out) and have additionally submitted a pending warranty claim to replace the water pressure switch (which seems to be faulty as our pump randomly runs by itself, sometimes in the middle of the night).  Once the second warranty claim is either approved or rejected, we'll have to take the van back to them to have the warranty work done. If done under warranty then I think it won't cost us anything, which would be good.

The garden is full of flowers, although I think the hot weather has been challenging for it - I've been watering off an on.  The roses have been going strong although some were damaged by all the rain earlier in the month, delphiniums, foxgloves, verbena, salvias are all blooming away, even the sedums are throwing up flower stems.  The borders have descended into more of a cottage jungle as opposed to cottage garden, but at least it mostly stifles the weeds.