And it's autumn again

 Very strange cold snap this week, the high was only 13C today and it's been cold enough at night that I am sleeping under my newly-bound Lone Star quilt.  I've started the quilting on the Di Ford Giggleswick Mill quilt, doing stitch in the ditch around the various frames to start, and now the tedious repetition of the continuous curve quilting on the half-triangle squares.  And I also got the binding onto the Red Houses quilt - shown here on a double bed but it was actually made for a queen-size where the overhang wouldn't be so deep.

I had a big tidy up in the sewing room and made quilt backs for the Tilda tablecloth, Little Kimono wallhanging, and Japanese tea cup wallhanging - so they are all moved upstairs to the to-be-quilted queue.  I've also put all the blocks I made for the Envelope lap quilt onto the design wall to see where I'm at.  I need to sew four more focal blocks then I can start assembly.

We've been over to Milton Keynes to visit DS twice, because they have just bought their first house and got the keys yesterday.  So today we took a bunch of cleaning supplies over and gave it all a good clean although it wasn't too bad. But last weekend when we visited, it was just for lunch and to take them to IKEA to look at stuff for the new house. And I was able to pick up this Vattenkar clamp-on shelf which I saw on FB as the perfect storage accessory for my Jack H2 industrial machine. Only £15 and it holds all my threads and accessories so I won't keep knocking them off the table like I have been.

As well as sewing on lots of quilt binding, I've done a bit of knitting on the second Latvian mitten and also some more work on the bobbin lace border that I started a while ago.  The bobbin lace has been a learning curve because I didn't realise that the pricking pattern differs a fair bit from the worked sample in the photo.  At first I thought it was just me going wrong, but eventually I realised that the pinholes are in different places and in different numbers than what was worked in the sample.  Perhaps I am just supposed to be experienced enough to know that.

In other news, the Barbie dolls that I sent off to the auction house back in November, FINALLY went into a sale and to my surprise, they achieved £900 at auction!  That's the hammer price - after commission and VAT, I think I will get about £650 but it's still a nice reward for hanging on to them all these years.  And they were in 'played with' condition, in no way mint, no boxes or anything.  I guess for the buyers it's nostalgia. And perhaps having come from Canada, those dolls weren't as common here in the UK.

I've spent a fair bit of time working on the Mckinley Dollshouse this week, it's coming along very slowly.  You are literally waiting for paint to dry a lot of the time.  So far it's going ok I think, although as usual I am struggling with decorating decisions.

And some sad news this week as well - our cat Oreo hasn't been very well for several weeks and after various trips to the vets, blood tests and an abdominal scan, it appears she has large cancerous tumours in her abdomen.  She's too old for chemotherapy so they've put her on steroids to see if that will have a positive effect.  I hate this part about owning a cat, we've had three cats in the past that developed various serious illnesses and had to be put down.  It's too soon to know what will happen with Oreo, the vet wants to give it two weeks and see what effect the steroids have. She seems to be getting her appetite back a little.