Recording memories

 I have spent a great deal of this week on the long-procrastinated-about job of creating a scrapbook for my trip to Japan almost a year ago. While I took over 4,000 photos, blogged some aspects, and kept a brief diary (I went here, I went there) as I travelled - there was no overall narrative of my itinerary.  What finally got me started was discovering the Japanese stationery company Notebook Therapy (thanks Youtube) and their wonderful sets of journals, stickers and stamps. So I reinvested some of my decluttering profits into a travel journal set. Since that arrived, I've been laboriously going through day by day, matching up my photos with my itinerary with my diary with my blog with my trip planning research, writing a narrative and choosing some photos to illustrate it, then printing out the pages at high quality on my inkjet printer, then cutting and pasting them into the travel journal, and finally adding some decoration with stickers, washi tape and stamps. In some ways, leaving it for so long has given me perspective and the ability to summarise. In other ways, I've had to look up a lot of places to remember why I chose to go there or what the history was, because it's so long ago now.  At least I'm doing it before the New Zealand memories push all the Japan memories out of my ageing brain. It has been incredibly time consuming but I've reached the final travel week. I think it's also taught me some lessons about how better to record the upcoming trip.

This week my longarm machine and I went to visit the Handiquilter dealership for a day - DH drove me as a belated Christmas present.  He went off to explore the local area while I had a day of basic training with a bunch of other new owners. My machine meantime was there to have a few issues resolved - it needed the timing adjusted and a couple of the handlebar buttons replaced.  While I don't think I received any huge revelations, there were several useful nuggets of information throughout the day so I took a lot of notes. I also took the opportunity to do some shopping without having to pay postage: picking up thread for the remaining projects in my quilting queue, a couple of straight rulers and a new pantograph.  Hopefully the machine is now all sorted out but I probably won't try it before I leave, there's not much point loading up a quilt onto the frame just to have it sit there for a couple of months.

So that day was an early start, and a few days later we had to get up even earlier at 5:45am to take the car in to the company that installed our tow hitch who are an hour's drive away. We are currently caught in the middle of a blaming war between the dealer we bought our secondhand car from (who claim that the ongoing issues we are experiencing with error messages on the car are caused by our post-purchase installation of a tow hitch), and the tow hitch installers who say they always get blamed for everything and that the tow hitch is working fine and shouldn't be causing any problems.  I had naively thought that with a new car, all the car issues we've experienced while caravanning were in the past.  The ball is currently back with the dealer and I hope I'm not going to have to take it to the ombudsman, especially when I'm going to be away.  Why can't things just work?????

I finished appliquing the Week Seven block for the Lori Holt My Happy Place Quilt.  The design wall is slowly filling up.

I also finished the little magazine kit cross stitch bird that I started in Malta.  It was designed as a bookmark but I turned it into a houseplant decoration instead.

And I did a few hours work on my Japanese dollshouse kitchen, mainly placing the ceramic accessories I bought in 2019 from the Tokyo dollshouse shop, and creating some food platters. Some of my 1:12 fimo fruit and veg that I made 10 years ago now don't look too out of scale for the 1:20 accessories.

DH also very kindly painted up the four metal charms I bought in Tokyo last year, using some painting references I found  online for him. So I have two demon masks and two samurai helmets that look really authentic, to go on display in the dollshouse.  He's a really good painter, very useful.