Reykjavik

 It's Saturday and I arrived in Reykjavik on Wednesday, so I've had a few days to look around this small but cheerful city.  It is VERY touristy, as there has been an explosion in tourism over the last decade.  A lot of the central businesses are now directed at tourists, and my guidebook (Rick Steves) says that locals do most of their own shopping in malls and edge of town places.  But still, it doesn't feel overly busy or crowded, and the service staff are all quite friendly (many of them are also foreign nationals). The high prices for almost everything have been hard to get used to, especially food, but I've just stopped converting to British pounds to save my sanity.

On the busy shopping streets of Skolavordustigur (I'm not even going to try to reproduce the proper Icelandic spelling) and Laugavegur, almost every block has two or three souvenir shops and they are almost all selling some form of Icelandic knitting either as jumpers, hats, gloves, earwarmer headbands, socks, blankets or ornaments.  Many of these appear to be machine knitted, and I have heard that a lot of them are produced outside of Iceland even though most claim to be made from Icelandic wool. Many of them are in a nasty scratchy wool, knitted at a very loose tension (probably for speed, or to save money?) but I expect many of the potential customers are not knitters. Certainly lots of the tourists on the streets are wearing the jumpers and matching hats, even though the jumpers are priced at c £110 and up, hats about £30.  Some of the tourist stores are also selling balled yarn, although it was Garn brand from NOrway in at least a couple of stores. I havent seen any other forms of craft supplies or craft stores but perhaps these just aren't located in the central tourist area. It is refreshing to see knitting held  in such esteem as a desirable souvenir.  I havent seen as many cardigans on sale, although the Alafoss store (an Icelandic brand) did have some nice ones in terms of colour. I did buy a machine knit earwarmer band in an Icelandic pattern because it is quite windy here even on the days when it was warm enough that I didnt feel I

Cute mini sweaters but priced at c £25!

needed my actual hat. 

The recommended place to buy authentic Iceland jumpers is at one of the Icelandic Handknitting Association stores, and there is a big one on Skolavordustigur.  This is bigger than it looks from outside, and must have had literally hundreds of jumpers and cardigans on sale, presumably all handknit.  These felt a much better quality wool, and were also knit to a tighter better quality tension.  The prices are also higher to reflect the handwork and better quality, c £200 upwards. In the back room, they sell lots of yarn such as balled LettLopi yarn, and the flat wheels of unspun Lopi yarn that is combined and knit together as two or three strands for traditional knitting. They also stock a number of knitting books in both English and Icelandic with patterns and instructions for traditional and more contemporary knits. I was looking in one of these and it said that the diamond yoke sweater that is so iconic was actually only designed in the 1950s I think.

The Handknitting Association also sells some small kits for hats, and I was able to substitute my own choice of LettLopi yarn colours for the kit I chose. It will be a nice souvenir of Iceland.  (coincidentally, my holiday knitting in the evenings is a hat using some of the yarn I bought in New Zealand!).  I find Lopi yarn too scratchy to wear against my skin, and I would get too hot in an actual heavy jumper, but I will be fine with a hat.

Today I visited the Saturday Kolaportid fleamarket held indoors near the Old Harbour.  Several of the traders here were selling secondhand knitwear for less (c £80ish) but there was a real mix of the poor quality jumpers versus nicer jumpers probably knit by an actual person.  So it would be buyer beware. But there were also some stalls selling new, or newish, knits such as hats, socks and mittens which were better quality.

Staffordshire

 We were away in the caravan this week, staying on a site located next to the Cannock Chase ANOB forest park.  Neither of us knew the area, so we had a nice week visiting places such as Lichfield and Stafford, and going for walks in the Chase and along some of the canals.  We visited an old moated half-timbered hall complex called Middleton Hall and Gardens, which unexpectedly also had a beautifully curated knitting shop called 'Entangled' in their converted barn of small shops. It stocked some yarn and many expertly knitted garments, with lots of interesting and pretty knicknacks. 

In the Hall gift shop, they had decorated an old fireplace with a large knitted floral decoration that was pretty impressive.

In Stafford I found a haberdashery called 'Miss Millicent' with a very friendly owner, and some pretty things.  I loved these Tilda buttons, too pretty to use and all mounted on beautiful cards.  I'm going to see if I can glue the caravans back-to-back to create a 3D caravan for my dollshouse, and the little soft leather handmade patch was cute.

We did our usual dipping into secondhand book stores, and in one I came across this book called 'Knotted Lace' which is all about a needlelace also known as Armenian lace or Smyrna stitch. I think it's the same sort of needlelace I saw in Istanbul. On the face of it, it is incredibly simple because you are literally just making knotted loops of mercerised cotton thread with a needle. But it relies on real precision in eyeballing the size of loops so I think will actually be quite difficult.  Having looked through it, I suspect some of the vintage doileys in my collection that I assumed were netted, are probably actually this type of knotted lace.

In the evenings, I was working on my own knitted cat, I've got the body all done and just need to knit the base flap. I also did a bit on the harbour scene cross stitch.

Before we went away, I finished the Japanese fabric picture although I still need to tidy up the outside edge somehow.  I will probably glue on ribbon to hide the raw edges.

In a few days I am heading to Iceland for a week, I will be based in Reykjavik and taking some day bus tours to see a bit of southern Iceland.  I hope to see some Icelandic knitting although I doubt I will buy any Lopi yarn as it's too scratchy for me.  Straight after I get back, I am heading for Wales the next day to visit the Welsh quilt centre and to take a two day course to learn welsh quilting.  So I'm not sure how much blogging I will get done the next few weeks.

Progress but no photos

 This week has been mainly progressing ongoing projects, so I don't have many photos because it's the same stuff as last week.

- cross-stitch harbour scene - I'm on chart two now and have taken the risk of correcting my mistake in starting position by cutting off the top of the canvas and splicing it back onto the bottom.  I used fusible woven interfacing strengthened with machine stitching. Hopefully the join won't be too obvious.

- Estonian mittens - I'm plugging on with the second mitten, I'm almost to the decreases at the top.

- Longarming the Australian BOM - I've stabilised the quilt now and am trying to decide how to do interesting motifs for decoration that use pantographs.

- the stick and stuff foam picture of birds (kit from Japan) is coming on.  This seems quite straightforward, like painting with fabric by numbers. But it's actually a bit tricky to correctly position the fabric on the odd-shaped pieces and get it stuffed down neatly without gaps or too much fraying.  I like how the picture is gradually revealed.

- I've been thinking about which quilt project to tackle next, and I'm thinking it might be time for a very longstanding bucket list item: a Double Wedding Ring quilt.  This is like my nemesis project because I'm not an accurate sewer, I'm not good at precision sewing or sewing curves, and I don't enjoy repetitive block projects.  But I've always wanted to make a DWR.  I bought John Flynn's book back in the 90s, and also a Quilting from the Heartland book and template set from Houston in 2001.  But the Flynn method you have to sew every arc seam twice (he re-sewed strip pieced segments to create an angled seam) and the Heartland set looks too hard with shaped joining pieces and few registration marks.  I looked at some Youtube videos this week and two other methods look promising: foundation piecing the arcs (I don't enjoy foundation piecing though) or a template set called the Cutrite Slit and Sew Double Wedding Ring by Quilter's Paradise.  I ordered the latter from Amazon this week, it arrived broken in inadequate packing so I had to return it, the replacement also arrived broken so I've given up on Amazon and will have to look elsewhere.

- and I've been spending time on my dollshouse kit, especially because it's nice and cool down in the basement.

Keeping busy

 I mentioned last week that I had finished the knitted cat.  Here are some photos.  DS and girlfriend love it.  I think I will knit a second one for myself because it just looks so cat-like, really amazing pattern.

I also mentioned that I had put together a sliding lid cartonnage box that was a free workshop online several months ago.  I used some small pieces of special Singer sewing machine fabric that a friend gave to me some time ago, which has been waiting for the right project. I'm quite pleased with how it turned out.  It still amazes me that you can take some cardboard, glue and fabric and turn out a decorative functional box.

This week I finished quilting the Di Ford Giggleswick Mill quilt.   I'm so happy that I could quilt this on my Simply Sixteen using rulers, it would have been a complete pain to try to do at a sitdown machine and wouldn't have turned out nearly as well because I'm not much good at free motion quilting. I'm also pleased that this only had to wait about four years for quilting, my backlog is finally going down.  It's a really nice pattern, with the broderie perse and the great reproduction historical print in the border.  My quilting went alright, nothing too embarrassing although the border quilting got a bit haphazard.

With that off the frame, I could load on the Australian Vintage Needlework BOM that saw me through COVID lockdowns.  To begin with, I am floating the top and stabilising it by quilting around the frames.  There are so many embellishments on the blocks that I didn't dare try to load the top onto the rollers the normal way.  Looking at all the detail and embroidery on this quilt, I can't believe I actually did it.  Amazing what can be accomplished when you are locked in your house with most of normal daily life activities suspended.

As a reward for tidying up my sewing room last week, I have pulled out one of the Japanese kits I bought at Sakura Horiki in Tokyo for making a fabric picture of colourful birds (by pushing fabrics into slits in foam). I'll be working on that this week.

And I've been doing some cross stitching, working on my dollshouse, gardening etc.  I also hauled my largish collection of vintage and antique needlework magazines downstairs and typed out an index in preparation for trying to downsize them.  The oldest are some 19th Godey Lady books and it goes right up to  a stack of McCalls' Needlework & Crafts from the 70s and 80s. In fact I'm a little surprised by how much I have, yet another collection that held my interest for several years. I just loved looking at black and white ads from the war years, or reading Victorian knitting instructions for obscure knitted items.  And I used to pour over McCall's issues from the library when I was a pre-teen, bedazzled by all the craft projects and wanting to make all the things.

Festival of Quilts 2024

 Thursday morning I headed up to Birmingham for my now annual trip to the Festival of Quilts at the NEC. It seemed a little smaller this year but I had a good time and saw lots of eye candy.  I went to the lecture by Jenny Doan of Missouri Star Quilts - there was a bit of repetition from her previous talk on half-square triangle quilts, but this talk was mostly about blocks made from 'disappearing 9-patch/4-patch / pinwheel blocks' with a full quilt to illustrate each technique, some really nice patterns. 

I did a one-hour workshop to make a Dorset Button brooch which was fun.

And I attended the Quilters Guild lecture on Friday about their very interesting exhibition 'Patchwork: Pattern and Print: 1780-1840' featuring the Billings Coverlet and the Gooch coverlet amongst other early quilt treasures - I enjoyed the lecture and visiting the exhibition.

Here are some photos of things that caught my eye, plus some loot at the end.

This dollshouse wall quilt was meticulously crafted - most of the scenes appeared to be done on an embroidery machine so I don't know if it was self-designed or if it is a designer file that you can purchase.  Lots of really fun details, and I think the dolls could be removed and repositioned into pockets in different rooms.

 Miniature quilts (my hand for scale)

These next two were from an artist's exhibition, a young American? woman who was showing exclusively quilts based on these tiny log cabins and pineapple blocks that she handsews on foundation blocks. Unbelievably tiny, and she had about 15 or 20 quilts on display. I don't know how she isn't blind.

3D Creations

Belladrum Gazebo by Katie Spence

Quilts

I quite liked the faded vibe of this art quilt, and immediately thought of my own collection of vintage doileys and mats.  So I bought some  similar pink fabric to have a go at creating my own quilt re-purposing my vintage linens.

my fabric

My loot

I spent some time this week folding and putting away probably around 100 fabrics that I had pulled from my stash to make the Envelope quilt and the Lori Holt My Happy Place quilt.  It reminded me that I had really been  pushed to come up with the modern low contrast aquas, blues, greys and pinks that I needed for the Lori Holt quilt- because most of my stash is so old. Colourways do go out of fashion.  So at Festival, I was looking out for 'cheap' fabrics in those colours - the cheapest seemed to be £6-£8 a metre, which I suppose is cheap when regular fabrics are £16-£25 a metre and special fabrics like Japanese or African imports are as much as £40/metre. I miss the good old days when I could go to America and buy cotton at $3 a yard.

Julia Gahagan of Small & Miniature Quilts was selling these bookmarks made from vintage recycled fabrics, I got one for me and one for the m-i-l.

I'm really enjoying using rulers on my Handiquilter (since I'm pants at free motion) so after perusing the selection on the Handiquilter stand, I chose this one as it looked quite useful.

I'm a member of the Cross Stitch Guild so checked in at their stand to say hi to Andrea and to Jane Greenoff, and found myself buying this little needlebook kit, so many goodies to tempt.

This stall had some really cute kits in wool felt, I quite liked this thatched cottage large needlebook.  I think I want to change the window surround colour so bought an additional roll of felt in a pretty aqua colour.

I finished the knitted cat this week, and also a cartonnage box but I think I'll save them for next week because that's really enough photos for one post.

We spent today helping DS and his girlfriend with prepping and painting ceilings and walls in their new house. It already looks hugely fresher and brighter - I painted white undercoat over a dark navy wall next to the stairs which immediately made the living room look five feet wider. It felt good to help them out but it was tiring, it's been a while since we did much painting and prep.  I gave them the knitted cat and they absolutely loved it which was really nice. They took it to the new house and put it on display on the kitchen windowsill (one of the few safe areas amidst the DIY armageddon).