Retirement is making me fat (ter)

 It's been ridiculously hot lately in the UK, in the low 30s some days, so obviously comfortable loose clothing is a must. Only I've been noticing that not many of my clothes are loose any more.  I weighed myself and I've gained six pounds since retiring - that's a pound a month. Not good.  Obviously doing Aquafit twice a week and otherwise trying to walk daily, is in no way combatting the snacking and attempts to learn how to bake.  Sigh.

Despite the warm temperatures in the dining room/frame quilting room, I have been putting in a daily stint on the machine quilting.  I finished the meandering on the Tilda Cot Quilt.  I left the whole white centres empty - I was able to quilt around them for the most part - and I plan to fill in a mandala design from a stencil using my sitdown machine.  This is the quilt where I recut the borders but only the innermost side, I'll trim up the outer edges after it's all quilted and had a wash.

Now I've loaded on the One Block Wonder beach scene that I made a few years ago.  It's quite large, about a Queen I think. Normally I would load a bigger quilt sideways, to minimise the thickness of the quilt getting rolled onto the take up roll.  But on this quilt I want to change thread colours partway: the sky and sea are in white thread, then I'll switch to beige thread for the sand dunes.  I'm massaging the take up roll as I wind on, trying to keep the size down. Hopefully I won't run out of room and have to turn the quilt around. I'm doing a big meander on the sky and foliage, and horizontal ripple lines on the sea and probably on the path.

The new bobbin case arrived for the Janome and I replaced the damaged one. I'm relieved that the machine seems to be back to sewing normally.  I hope that never happens again.

While listening to the Chooky Zoom call from Australia, I pieced more blocks for the Tannenbaum quilt which went together much better than the previous row.  Afterwards I finished the row up and sewed it on.  Just one more row to go which is the base of the tree.  If I get it done then I can add it to the queue waiting to go the frame if an all-over design would work on it.  Don't know, perhaps I should just baste it on the frame and do more custom quilting at the sit down.

I've been using my son's steam-powered laptop (that he bought for uni in 2014) in my sewing room for zoom calls and watching videos.  He didn't mind me borrowing it because it was on its last legs, constantly overheating and crashing.  I nursed it back to convalescence with much updating and cleaning out junk, defragging etc.  It was okay for a while but the last several months I always have to allow at least 20 minutes before joining a call, to give it time to indulge in up to three hissy fits and blue screens and "we're sending a report to Microsoft" and restarts before it will grudgingly let me use the internet. I decided to call time and stop procrastinating and buy a new laptop for myself.  I don't know that much about computers so the alphabet soup of processors and storage types is all quite intimidating, and so many reviews seem obviously paid for.  I found one useful Youtube video which listed some recommended stats but the whole process still seemed very much like throwing a dart at a dartboard and hoping it lands on a reasonable laptop. It became quickly apparent that a) my imagined budget barely reached into the 'budget laptop' range - technology seems to have gone up in price over the last several years, who knew; and b) the budget laptop range didn't hit hardly any of the recommended alphabet soup and would therefore not be futureproofed. Also, frustratingly, the functions that were most important to me (good webcam, good screen, good speakers, good microphone) were often poor even in expensive laptops and also often not considered important enough to get much discussion in feature reviews which focus largely on performance and battery life.  Long story short, after several hours of floundering, I have ended up with a Microsoft Surface 4 with a Core i5 11th gen process and 512GB SSD drive (look at me quoting the alphabet :)  ).  Largely on the strength of good reviews for the screen and keyboard, with the webcam being rated average.  It came by courier and I flung open the door with what I belatedly realised were very out-of-date expectations that they would be handing me an enormous brown box.  Instead I received a little padded envelope that was so lightweight that I wondered for a moment if they hadn't actually sent the laptop.  But no - inside is a perfect little miniature laptop.  Compared with my son's 17 inch screen and  1.5" thick brick, the Surface with its 13.5" screen and thin profile feels almost dollshouse sized.  Everything installed quite easily, including my one-time purchase of Office (no subscriptions for me) so let's hope it gets a good wi-fi signal in the sewing room.  DH suggested I could take it caravanning as well, but I'm still feeling rather horrified at how much money is tied up in such a tiny package so it feels way too valuable/fragile to take camping at the moment.  Maybe in a few years.

I finished up the Australian BOM block from the month before. It turned out fairly well I think.  The 'lace' on the top right and top left is all embroidery, which took a while.  The bit of lace underneath the blue ribbon card is a sewn-on motif.

I have hurried on to start the next month's block which is a picture of a thread stand, because I know there is already another block in the post on its way to me.

As a bit of a palate cleanser from embroidery, I've also been doing a bit of stitching on the cross stitch bookmark and more knitting on the Aldi Boucle T-shirt part deux.  I'm just about to decrease for the armholes on the first piece (front) on the latter.  

After watching some more Youtube decluttering videos, I took a big box of stuff to the charity shop and also gave away some sewing decorations to my bobbin friends when they came over.  It's a drop in the ocean compared to the houseful of stuff that I own, but baby steps.