Some steps forward and some steps back

 After a few weeks where a lot of things seemed to be going wrong, we seem to be coming through the other side now.  The car has come back after being unexpectedly expedited - it's had a new clutch put in and it was done under warranty so no cost to us - whew!.  We took it for a long run down to Waddesdon Manor in Buckinghamshire today, over an hour each way, and it behaved impeccably.  The manor is home to one of the Rothschild collections of art treasures, and it feels like walking around inside a French chateau.  I saw this very strange modern chandelier in one room, kind of cool, like an explosion of crockery:

I also saw this very comfortable-looking reading (or sewing) nook:

And in their Treasure Room, some miniature books (my finger in view for scale). No labels so I don't know if they are actual books or just pill boxes or similar.

DH with much trepidation had his tooth out - and it came out in 20 seconds and he's had no pain or complications. So still very expensive but otherwise a relief for him.

The builder came back to replace the shower tray, then when he unwrapped the new one, he discovered that the replacement is also seriously damaged.  I was fairly annoyed and enquired as calmly as I could why he hadn't unwrapped it and looked at it as soon as he took delivery some weeks ago - given that this is the second damaged tray they've sent us and the installed one had also cracked.  I didn't think the suppliers were going to cough up yet another replacement tray and that they would blame the builder for damaging it - but to everyone's amazement they immediately responded  that they would send another replacement.  It hasn't actually turned up yet though. Meanwhile we are down one shower.

In not so good news, DS's girlfriend that he lives with has tested positive for COVID and DS has started to feel under the weather.  Not good and I feel quite worried for him, but hopefully they will both be okay.  It's not surprising since they both go out to work and DS travels by train, and almost nobody wears a mask now here in the UK.

I was pleased to be able to pick a good-sized bowl of sour cherries from our tree in the garden - enough that I could make a whole cherry pie for the first time.  The first few years there were only a handful of cherries which I mixed into apple pies.  Last year birds ate the lot while we were away in the caravan.  This year, after watching a blackbird scarfing down cherries from the kitchen window, I went out and netted up several branches so that we could get some cherries ourselves (the tree is too big to net completely).  Netting is a pain in the bum because it catches on everything and the branches and cherries poke through the mesh, so it took about 45 minutes to get the netting off again and pick the cherries.  But the pie was worth it!  Totally delicious, tart and sweet and the same time. And I tried a new GF pastry recipe which worked pretty well apart from being too crumbly to roll out very well - so my lattice is pretty crude.

Since I got my Janome back from the warranty service, I've only been using it for light duties like piecing quilts.  But this week I wanted to sew up a zippered pouch (from Season 3 of Sew Sweetness Minikins patterns) to hold and protect the monitor from our tyre pressure monitoring system for our caravan tires.  The monitor rides in the glove compartment of the car once the caravan is parked up, and the factory box was awkwardly big.  This was the end result - I cut some layers of foam to cradle the monitor inside, and the whole case fits easily into the glove compartment.

However, about five minutes into sewing the pouch, my Janome tried to commit suicide. For no apparent reason, the bobbin case suddenly jumped out of its receptacle, jumping over the stop that holds it in place, and twisting about a further inch out of place so that it was totally jammed.  This caused the needle to hit the misplaced bobbin case (further damaging the jammed case) and deflect to take a chunk out of the brand new needleplate, then the whole machine started juddering and protesting before it gave up with alarm beeps sounding.  It happened out of the blue, and I've never had that happen on a machine in 45 years of sewing.  The bobbin case was jammed so hard that I had to lever it out with the screwdriver.  The plastic case was damaged on the sides from being twisted into the metal receptacle, as well as being pierced by the needle in a couple of places.  I've looked it up, and apparently it should only have happened if the thread had caught so badly on a rough place in the bobbin case that the thread yanks the case out of place.  But this was a brand new bobbin case installed by the warranty people.  So I don't know.  I tried smoothing out the damage with fine glasspaper which got the machine sewing again, but the bobbin is juddering in the case so it's obviously not happy.  I've thrown out the bobbin I was using, in case it has somehow become mishapen. I ordered a replacement case which came today, but if that doesn't help then I may need to go back to the warranty people.

I haven't been using my Brother Scan N Cut for a few months, but I downloaded an svg file from MyScrapChick to make a 3D birthday card for my father-in-law. After taking the pic, I added a personalised greeting to the banner.

I finished quilting the London hexie quilt completely, and gave it a rinse and spin in the washing machine. So it just needs binding now.  I loaded on the next project on the list, which is a table centre made from a Japanese panel.  I quilted this one with a curlique meander as I am getting more confident about steering.

I've now loaded the next quilt which is the Tilda cot quilt that had the obviously crooked borders.  I took the borders off and recut them, as suggested by 'Unknown' on the original blog post, and reattached them.  As this quilt has white centres to each block, I'm wondering if I can meander in the pieced areas and skip over the white centre areas.  Then I could do a motif in the white centres either by hand or on the sit-down machine.  This is where having such a limited throat space can be quite frustrating, I can't do a whole block at one time.

On the strength of a good review in a caravan magazine, I have invested in an air fryer. Now that there are only two of us to cook for, and with energy costs skyrocketing, it seems like a good idea because it cooks quite quickly and I don't have to heat up the big oven just to cook a small amount of food.  It's quite a learning curve, it didn't come with many recipes, but I've had some real successes - like meatballs in 8 minutes, and roast veg in about 10-15 minutes.  There are a lot of youtube videos and online recipes, although a lot of those are American and using pre-prepared ingredients we can't get here. It's really easy to clean and you can use it for roasting, reheating and even baking although I haven't tried baking yet.

Hope you are living on the sunny side of the street!