Treasures from the attic

 Decluttering continues. With the christmas decoration boxes and suitcases all temporarily out of the way, I took the opportunity to sort through the immense collection of boxes and bags tucked inconveniently under the slanting ceiling of the attic storage room.  Having a lot of DS's possessions up there isn't helping, but it will probably be some years until he gets his own house and has room to take his stuff away.  But I re-stacked it all more tidily (only banging my head a few times on the ceiling), jettisoned a bunch of un-needed empty boxes from purchases (I tend to hang on to them 'just in case' then forget about them), threw out some old rubbish, and transferred some items to be decluttered downstairs to be dealt with.

First of these was my own wedding dress from back in the early 90s - a full on Princess Diana confection in fake silk (polyester) with multiple ruffles and skirt tiers all filled out by an actual hooped petticoat.  What can I say, I was at an impressionable age when she got married. I did look very nice in it on my big day.

So I've kept the dress for decades even though I haven't fit into it for almost as long.  It still had actual wedding dirt on the hem from the day because I had never cleaned it afterwards.  Despite being stored in acid free tissue paper inside an old suitcase, it had acquired a couple of brown marks where it was accidentally touching the suitcase.  I googled what to do with old wedding dresses. Apparently you can sell more recent ones, and really old dresses made from silk etc. you can re-make into christening gowns or cushions  or memory bears.  But polyester late 20thC dresses? the only suggestion was to donate them to a charity store to see if they can raise funds with it.  So I washed the petticoat, and very carefully spot washed the brown marks on the dress away (all gone, hurrah) and dipped the hem into the water to wash away wedding-day dirt.  Once it was all dry and clean, I packed it up in an old clear duvet bag with a label 'size 14 wedding dress' etc. [omg, size 14 I miss you] and took it in to the Red Cross shop to enquire if they would like it.  They were pleased to have it although they said that it can take a while to sell wedding dresses, but she was keen to try.  I just hope it doesn't end up getting thrown out.  Meanwhile the wedding shoes, which I had also kept, had self-destructed over the decades, with one heel disintegrating and various brown stains appearing, so they went to the dump.

Next was a plastic tupperware containing two china headed reproduction dolls that I bought in the 1970s in my early teens, together with a fitted trunk I had made for them, and a collection of hand-sewn clothes.  I was mad for antique dolls in my youth, and particularly lusted after the antique Parisian dolls who had  been sold with their own trunks full of exquisite miniature clothes.  So I had a go at making my own. I used to mail order my doll kits from America, they came with just the ceramic parts and a pattern for the body.  The trunk I made when I was about 14 I think, from scraps of wood in my dad's workshop, and painted with house paint. It's not finished very well, I don't think I had discovered sandpaper, but it's quite clever really considering I didn't have a pattern.  The clothes are clumsy and it doesn't help that they are made mostly in poly-cotton, but the handsewing is quite neat and I obviously put a lot of time into them.  There are the undergarments including a corset, some night dresses and a silk pegnoir, and I had sewn the skirt for a walking dress but hadn't finished the bodice. I kept the collection all these years, probably initially with the vague idea that I would finish it one day and later just for sentimental reasons.  But it's time to clear it out.

The third box is full of old Barbies and cothes, which is a whole can of worms I don't feel up to dealing with yet.

This week I finished the final two little embroidered blocks of the Australian BOM. I've been working on this for so long that it feels weird to think that this part, the embroidery, is over, I don't have to hoard every scrap of embroidery floss any more in case I run out (the supplied threads were Olympus and Cosmo brands which aren't common in the UK).  Months 19 and 20 are the fabrics for the sashing and background so I've started to look at those instructions now.  The big buttock-clenching event will be carefully trimming all the heavily embroidered blocks to their correct sizes, let's hope I don't mess that part up.  It's a bit of a puzzle assembly so there are a lot of different sized blocks.  They all have different coloured sashing, so I've been going through and pinning a note on each block as to what size it should be cut, and what sashing it gets, and doublechecking those against the instructions and picture.

I've been working on the dollshouse porch kit.  The porch posts only showed up yesterday so until then I could only paint things and start the siding.  At that point I hadn't noticed the glaring error I had made.  It wasn't until I started cutting the porch support posts and railings to size that I began to realise something wasn't quite right.

Although the instructions do not mention it, the wider area on one side of the window cut-outs should be positioned to the left.  Basically I have assembled the kit with the window wall flipped around the wrong way. I didn't realise there was a right and a wrong way, although now that I have found the mistake, I can see that in the illustrations it is just clear that the wall is assembled with the narrower bit into the corner.  The result is that when I put in the side railing and post, they are hard up against the lefthand window and the windows are not centred over the porch.  It's too late to do anything about it now, everything is glued and screwed together.  I am just going to tell myself that the porch was added on later in a remodel.

nothing is glued in yet, just propped up to give an idea of what it will look like.

painting 3D objects is hard, every time you turn them to a different angle, you 

spot the bit you missed.

I sewed the binding onto the Tannenbaum quilt - a bit late for Christmas but I'm going to hang it in the hall for a few weeks anyway.

I've spent several hours this week taking down christmas decorations and putting them away in the various containers, and tonight we de-decorated the tree apart from the lights.  It's lasted quite well, it's been up since the beginning of December.

I'm not normally into journalling or keeping anything other than a basic planner (I have appallingly bad handwriting so anything I write in just looks like a mess) but I started thinking that I need some kind of travel journal for Japan.  Because it's going to be 7 weeks long and I'll have forgotten what I've done by the end of it.  So I was looking around online at travel journals and diaries and stumbled across a European company called PersonalPlanner, who let you customise your own journal from a huge number of cover designs and page templates, pick your own format and number of months etc. I was intrigued so designed a 3-month diary for Japan and it turned up this week, and I'm so pleased with it.  No commercial affiliation - but the quality is excellent, the colours I chose are just beautiful, and I ordered a bunch of different templates so I'll be able to keep a record of what I do in the days as well as record a whole bunch of other stuff from my language progress through to addresses of classmates. My only criticism would be that the minimum number of pages is rather thick so the book is a bit heavy, but I could always remove some pages.

I have made a start on the first Bruges lace flower from the Edna Sutton book I'm using.  With no embroidery required during TV time, I've gone back to the cross-stitch bookmark I started back on my summer caravan holidays. And I've booked a quick trip to Paris on the Eurostar in March to attend Aiguille en fete (which I think translates as 'needle party'?), a big needlework show at the Paris Expo centre.  It covers a number of my hobbies such as knitting, lacemaking, quilting, cross stitch, etc. so I anticipate much fondling, drooling and likely some acquisition.   I've never been before but I've watched a few Youtube videos and it looks good. I wonder if I will remember any of my ancient French language skills or if it has all been displaced by Japanese. I'm also going to do a day trip to Versailles because I haven't been there since 1982 and it wasn't in great shape back then, I think they've done a huge amount of restoration over the years plus there is more to see in the surrounding park.