Mild panic ensues

 I'd been sort of vaguely thinking I had four months before I go to Japan, since it's January and I'm going in April.  But I realised today that in fact it is less than 3 months until I go.  Cue mild panicking.  So today I've made a shopping list of bits I want to pick up beforehand, like ordering new socks for when I have to remove my shoes indoors, and I've spent a few hours looking at destinations around Tokyo.  There is just so much that you could see, it's difficult to narrow it down to a short list that isn't going to burn me out by the end of the first week.  Plus Tokyo is so huge, you can potentially spend an awful lot of time on the train.

I've been working on the four Dresden plates for the corners of my Australian BOM quilt.  They are fussy cut from floral fabric so that a secondary pattern (of your choice) will emerge when the petals are sewn together.  After consulting my Australian expert Chooky, I created a couple of see-thru plastic templates with match marks and set to tracing petals onto my fabric.

Then I spent quite a lot of time gluing the fabric onto card plate templates, and assembling those into four plates glued to the fabric background.  I've just started stitching by machine to join the plates to each other and to the background. I also took my courage to the sticking point and trimmed all my embroidered blocks down to size - doublechecking all the measurements. Hopefully I've done it right.

I've spent some time this week getting the dollshouse porch ready for its roof  by fitting more clapboard, sizing up supports etc. But I want to install the lights before the porch is in the way.  When I looked at porch lights, they were ridiculously expensive at over £15 each.  So what I actually ordered was a cheap pack of plastic lamp posts intended for christmas villages which turned up yesterday.  I've already got some lightbulbs, so I'm going to make my own porch lights.

The Bruge Lace flower number 1 is coming along fine apart from a mistake early on, for which I had to compensate by skipping a pin on the first petal.

I've been working a small bit of cross stitch (supposed to resemble sashiko embroidery) to make into a pincushion using a free kit from CrossStitcher magazine. This has proven a challenge to my inability to count, and there has been a fair bit of ripping back. I'm very slow at cross stitch so this little scrap has taken me several hours of TV time.

And I made a book.  This is a result of falling down an internet rabbithole which started with me wondering if there was a journal where you could move the pages, but which wasn't a ring binder.  Which led me to the discovery of the hitherto unknown world of disc binding, which led to various Youtube videos on making your own disc bound journal, which led to me ordering some A5 disc-punched pages and a set of discs.  I spray painted one of the pages black, and scanned it into my Brother Scan N Cut to create a cutting template for a disc-punched page - you can buy your own mushroom punch but they are about £70, so no thank you.  I used the Brother Canvas Workspace design software to design a cover and divider pages, and cut them out on the machine from scrapbook cardstock.  And I invested in a cheap laminator off Amazon to laminate the cover/dividers but avoiding the punched out area.  Then I assembled it with the purchased pages and discs into a little booklet.  I'm experimenting with tracking some of the many things I am trying to get done like decluttering, quilt binding etc. and some of those regular jobs like backing up your PC, hoovering, and so forth. I don't know if the experiment will be a success, but I enjoyed making the little book.

My little laminator

My friend Anita sent me a picture of her Chinese bed with the cushions I made for her - doesn't it look amazing? She's doing a roombox.

Did I mention I had joined the local U3A (University of the Third Age - an international educational organisation for seniors)?  I joined to see if any of the special interest groups would be appealing.  There is a Monday afternoon zoom call for crafters that I am going to try, it alternates between needlework and card crafting.  There are also some walking groups that might be good when the weather gets better.