It's cold

 It's been dropping to freezing temperatures at night again, and our old house has felt pretty chilly a lot of the time. I am living almost permanently in shapeless layers of fleeces, scarves and even occasionally a hat.  We do have central heating but it is controlled from a single location on the main floor.  When the thermostat thinks it is 18 degrees on the main floor, it may only be 15 or 16 in the attic.  To get the dollhouse room to a reasonable temperature in the basement, would require the main floor to heat up to about 20 degrees C.  It's easier and cheaper to wear more clothes.

I've been spending a lot more time in the attic than usual, working on the long arm quilting machine.  I washed the Ode to the 1930s quilt, trimmed it, and sewed the binding on, so it is done now.

After practicing with pantographs last weekend, I loaded up the pumpkin placemats I bought in Italy at the unexpected quilt shop on the Cinque Terre. I quilted them with a leaf motif panto which turned out fine.

Then I loaded up the Sewing panel wallhanging I finished a little while ago. I stitched this one in a hearts motif (for my love of sewing).

The next one onto the frame will be the Red Houses quilt. I dithered for a while about whether to quilt it with an edge-2-edge pantograph, or try to get fancy with ruler work on each house.  But it is a really big quilt (queen size) and ruler work is really slow. So I think it's going to be a panto.  I ordered some pink thread for the quilting which turned up today.

The little suitcase from the Japanese panel is finished now, I like it, it's cute. I don't know what I'm going to put in it. I have a growing collection of cute bags and sewing organisers - I had to buy a new plastic crate to store them. In my imagination, I will one day be like the designers in social media, surrounded by cute sewing things and with all my sewing tools in cute containers.  The reality is a lot more cluttered, and if I can't see things then I forget I own them. But I still like making cute containers and organisers.

I haven't done a lot in the dollhouse room, due to the aforementioned chilly temperatures.  I did make a round low table for the Japanese house kitchen, kitbashed from a regular table kit I had in my stash, for the staff to work at.

The magazines that came with each partwork issue for the Japanese house kit occasionally had tutorials in them. There was one for a low individual tray-table which is what meals used to be served on historically.  Lots of the traditional houses I visited in Japan had stacks of these little tables piled in the corner of a room.  However the tutorial requires one to accurately cut out stupidly small bits of card so I didn't try making it at the time.  Now I have a Brother Scan'N-Cut which in theory should cut it for me.  That required scanning in the pattern for the table leg, designing the other components according to the instructions, generating a cutting .svg file, and then a protracted multi-hour argument with the machine (including a big cleaning session and a new blade) before I succeeded.  It eventually cut out the components for 12 tray tables from kraft card.

They are very fiddly to assemble but look pretty good.  I'm going to try spray painting them black which may just result in them being blown to kingdom come - DH has suggested sticking them down onto double-sided tape.

I spent 3 or 4 hours this week pulling fabric from stash for the next quilt in my queue: Lori Holt's 'My Happy Place'.  I really like her design style - I made her 'Let's Bake' quilt a few years ago which is still one of my favourites.

The designer generously posts very detailed instructions online which are based on someone spending hundreds of pounds on her fabrics, templates and tools. Obviously I don't want to do that - the plastic template pack alone is £36 and the fabric is £16 a metre I think, here in the UK.  So I tried to pull from my stash instead, with reference to the values and patterns of her fabrics and what job they are doing in the quilt.  This proved very difficult - I have a relatively big stash but most of it is old, some of it very old.  I just don't have a lot of the modern clear bright colours that are currently popular.  By the time I had pulled out various caches of fabric in my struggle to find adequate substitutes, my sewing room looked like a bomb had gone off.

I eventually arrived at a defined set of fabrics, which differ somewhat from hers - in particular, I have very little aqua so I have substituted an amount of denim blue.

My reference key

Then I could start in on prepping some blocks for applique.  Lori Holt uses what I think of as the 'Eleanor Burns' method of interfaced and turned through applique shapes, stuck down with basting glue then hand-appliqued. These are the blocks I've glue-basted so far.  I will prep them all downstairs then do the applique in front of the telly. I enjoy hand applique.

Hope you are staying warm.