Returning to status quo

 Many thousands of pounds later, we are almost back to normal after the car being written off.  I was able to locate a secondhand version of the preferred tow car models we were looking at - an hour's drive away in Cambridge though.  So we hustled over there last weekend to have a look at it and a test drive. It's a 2021 reg and has a bunch of top of the range stuff we don't need, but the price was right and DH liked how it handled.  So we bought it, and it was delivered Thursday - by which time I had sorted out new insurance for it (much more expensive than our old budget car) plus the settlement had been paid out by the insurers for the old car.  I spent a few more hours looking for someone to install a tow hitch, and managed to get that booked in for next week.  And we've given back the insurance replacement car. So it's starting to feel like we are back on track.

Meanwhile we should have been on holiday this week with the caravan so I have a clear weekend. I decided to stage a home sewing retreat instead and spent most of yesterday sewing.  I pulled out one of my stash of kits, this one a thatched cottage doorstop I bought online from Amber Makes on Etsy. It's a digitially printed panel although she encourages you to applique the windows and doors for texture, and to add some hand embroidery to the flowers, which I did.  It was hard to stuff it so that there aren't any empty corners but without it turning into a ball-shape. But the end result is cute. I weighted it down inside with a small bag of decorative flower gravel.  The panel also includes a smaller pincushion version of the same cottage, but I haven't made that up yet.

front (above), rear (below)

Then I did some work on my Edyta Sitar houses blocks.  I've had these up on my design wall for a few weeks, trying to think what to do with them.  I also had pieced the last two pairs of big/small houses (previously cut out at a sewing retreat).  I suddenly had the idea of creating a 'bookcase' with a collection of dollhouses displayed on the shelves.  I ordered some brown tone-on-tone fabric online for the bookcase but when it came, it was a lot darker than the screen image and looked terrible.  I've now found some red batik in my stash which I think will work.  The next issue was trying to size up what the designer calls 'blocks' (partial rows of houses sewn together) so that they were all the same width.  This turned into a can of worms: when I measured, all eight of my 'blocks' were a different length with the variation being as much as four inches.  This is partly due to the quilt design which intersperses spacer strips randomly between the houses and between the two halfs of each house row. And partly due to my sewing of course - I guess piecing the blocks over various hotel sewing retreats did not contribute to accuracy. The instructions do not actually give final block measurements - you could calculate these by subtracting all the seam allowances but I decided life was too short.

So I picked the shortest block and then worked through all the other blocks, shortening them to the same measurement by removing spacers or trimming spacers down. I hope I am progressing the quilt and not ruining it. I now have eight 'shelves' of big houses that are pretty much the same length.  For the little houses, I took off all the spacers and just sewed them together.

It feels like things are moving onwards but another issue is that I am going to have a very tall and narrow quilt unless I add fabric onto the sides.  I'll get the bookcase part sewn together and see how it all looks.

Earlier in the week I pulled another kit out of my stash and put it together.  This was for a circle purse in Japanese fabrics and was a kit I bought from EuroJapan at FOQ last year (I just checked their website and apparently they ceased trading earlier this year).  It's a simple idea: random-cut strips of fabric sewn together and decorated freehand with sashiko stitching.  I didn't like the thread colour in the kit, so I used some of the sashiko thread I bought in Tokyo.  You bind two circle sandwiches of outer/wadding/liner, then hand stitch the zipper in and the remainder of the two sides together.

I've added the purse to the Japan shelf in my new display cabinet.  DH was starting to complain a bit about all my little collections taking up most horizontal surfaces around the house. So I found a vintage display cabinet on Evil-bay and we picked it up on the way back from looking at the new car last weekend.  I have relocated various treasures into the cabinet so DH is happier.

I've been working occasionally on the dollshouse christmas porch, gradually installing the posts and railings, and some decorative brackets I found in my stash; then moving on to battery operated lights and some decorations.  Still a work in progress but looking more like a porch now.

I tried out a U3A (University of the Third Age) coach trip this week, my first one since joining U3A last year. It was easy to find the place where the coach was picking us up - just looked for where all the grey-haired elderly women (two of them on walkers) were standing.  We went to visit Barnsdale, a garden famous from being the home of the television staple Gardeners' World for many years when the late Geoff Hamilton was the presenter. It wasn't a very sociable trip as everyone else apart from one other woman had come with friends. But it was interesting to see the garden. I don't really remember it from television (after 1996 the show moved elsewhere) but it is divided up into 38 mini-gardens on a wide variety of themes: a beginners garden, an Italian garden, a plantsmen's garden, a cottage garden etc.  The gardens were built during the TV shows or for Geoff's books and are still run on his organic principles (he was an early pioneer of organic gardening). Perhaps because of that, most of them have a somewhat scruffy appearance - not many weeds but a lot of plants left to go to seed or that had grown into each other. Certainly not a manicured garden but quite interesting to wander around in, and I like the cottage style of garden.