What DO I do all day now that I am retired?

 From time to time, I get asked what I am doing with my days now that I am retired.  My mind always blanks and I feebly reply something like  "I'm trying to travel more, and I'm doing lots of crafts", and I can tell I have disappointed the listener who is probably expecting to hear that I am now a powerhouse in the Women's Institute while volunteering in the afternoons helping elementary school children learn to read, or something along those lines.  And I have friends like that, who are out putting together meals at the food bank or have been ordained as lay preachers at their church.  It's not for me, or at least not yet. But then I start wondering myself, what am I doing all day?

And yet I feel like I am always busy, almost every day.  DH has many times suggested I could just sit back and relax (which I think is his idea of an ideal retirement) but I don't enjoy doing nothing and I find that really hard.  I remember watching a TED talk on retirement back when I was getting ready to retire, which suggested that there are phases of retirement.  I think I am currently in Stage Three, where you just enjoy doing all the things you never had time to do.  Apparently Stage Four is when you start to get a bit bored and start questioning what is next, I don't think I'm there yet.  And anyway, life goes on even though you are retired, there are still the normal chores to do like laundry and gardening, house maintenance etc. It's not like you can just loll around all day sipping margaritas. Our ceramic hob abruptly died last weekend, so I had to spend several hours this week on researching and ordering a replacement, booking the electrician, getting the electrician in to install it etc.  And a few weeks ago I discovered that one of our garden gates had completely rotted along the bottom, so I've spent some time bodging together a repair using some decking boards, held together with lots of preservative and wood hardener, and then repainting.  Not the most proper job but hopefully enough to hold it all together for our remaining years in this house.

So one of the reasons I try to blog regularly is to create a record of what I am doing each week craft wise.  I can look back and see that I am actually achieving things, learning things, creating things, going places, doing things.  And sometimes I even think "wow! I actually did that!" :)

So what are this week's activities? 

I finally got around to appliqueing my Fat Dresden Plates onto their backgrounds, using a straight stitch.  This was very tedious due to having to go around 24 points on each plate, so I did it in stages of 2 or 3 blocks a day.  All 12 are done now, and I've started to trim the squares down to 20.5".  This is larger than all my rulers, so I had to experiment with ruler combinations trying to determine the easiest yet still accurate method. I have settled on folding the block in half (which is easy as my placement creases are still there) and trimming to 10.25" using my biggest square ruler.

I have a small friend group that exchanges little christmas gifts each year, and this year I decided to make a 'quick and easy' card holder from one of those Asian videos that are all music and just miming the pattern.  The demonstrator makes hers in four minutes, so it seemed like a great choice.  Well, three hours later.... lol.  I think there is something wrong with the measurements given in the video because they didn't work for me. I sewed up a mock case in scrap fabric and discovered that it didn't work, then spent some time with my math challenged brain trying to alter the pattern, then tried again, still didn't work.  In the end, I sewed the altered pattern then manually shortened the flaps until they fit the wallet.  This was my first time trying out Kam Snaps, little plastic button snaps that you squeeze on with a pair of pliers.  I got the kit pretty cheaply on Amazon, and they were so easy to apply!  They have a very satisfying 'snap' on closing, and the back plate is nice and big so not going to pull through the fabric. Will definitely be using them again on things.

I am still pottering away on long arm quilting the digital teapot panel.  I stitched piano key divisions around the outside borders but by the time I got to the bottom (several days after doing the top), I had forgotten that I had managed to get the stitch lines to align with the corners.  So the bottom looks different from the top.  I don't know if that is going to bug me or not until I see it off the frame.  I may have to unpick and re-stitch some of the keys to sort it out.

After hemming the Christmas handtowels, I looked around for my next weaving project and have chosen a checked towel using the same spools of 8/2 cotton.  The spools don't stand up as they are not a cone, and were really awkward to wind from on the first set of towels, when I propped them up in a box.  I have been watching a Brisbane weaving expert and she was using a repurposed ribbon holder for her spools.  So I headed into the basement workroom and managed to bodge together something similar out of some scrap wood and dowels that DH brought back from his parents after emptying out their shed. It's a bit wonky as I can neither handsaw nor drill very straight, but it works and made a big difference warping up the next project. I'm going to weave this towel more densely to make a firmer texture.

I finished up the little kits for cleaning supplies by making  up two wicker carpet beater kits from Model Village Miniatures.  The instructions were a bit skimpy - the kits came with a long length of small diameter cane and a diagram of the knot to weave (but no measurements given).  I managed the one on the right sort of ok, apart from a couple of cracks in the wicker (even though I soaked it) but for some reason I could not repeat the knot on the left hand one to save my life.  After a few goes and the wicker starting to break apart, I gave up and settled on what you see.  Still need to glue and trim the binding threads.

I have also spent more time this week on my new hobby of Junk Journalling, which has turned out to be a vaster world than I had any idea of.  There are all sorts of FB groups for it, hundreds of Youtube videos, all sorts of digital designers selling journal kits and printables.  I gather that the 1980s hobby of scrapbooking evolved into a smaller format of albums and journals, which evolved again into junk journalling about 8 or 10 years ago.  I'd never heard of it as a hobby until Youtube started showing me videos last year.  I've still been working on my current journal but as I keep discovering more free printables, and more ideas to try, my journal identity is getting a bit confused. I had started out with cool greens and vintage browns, but then fell into temptation with vintage pink roses and faded French country blues.  So my journal theme doesn't look very cohesive, but I'm having fun and that's the main thing. I'm kind of regretting how many pages I chose to include at the beginning, it's a lot to go through and decorate, so I'm not finished yet.

I had previously tried tea dying papers to use in the journal, and you can see some of those in the above pictures. But last night I tried onion skin dying.  I had been patiently collecting the brown skins of onions but we don't use that many so it was taking a while.  Then it occurred to me that the supermarket loose onion bins are full of handfuls of shed skins. So when we were at Tescos yesterday, I gathered several handfuls into a spare box and asked at the till, the clerk was quite happy for me to take them.  After simmering in water for an hour, and letting the resultant liquid cool, I added a bunch of paper sheets and let them soak overnight.  The result was a fairly dark colour, very much the reddy brown of onion skins.

 

So this morning, after laying out the first batch of papers, I added some more sheets to the cold liquid and let them soak for just 2.5 hours.  This has resulted in a much lighter batch which I think would be better for writing on.

One morning when I was feeling fairly alert, I undertook the tricky task of cutting a mat to fit my poster from the London sumo event. My starting point was a cheap frame from IKEA but their mat was designed for an A3 poster.  My sumo poster was a weird size, wider and taller than A3. I've had issues cutting mats before, the slightest wobble in the cut, or the smallest overcut at a corner, really shows up.  But this time it went fairly well, so the main challenge was achieving a fluff-free plexiglas sheet before laying down the black "shows everything up" poster.  It took a few tries, removing tiny threads and fuzz.  The end result looks pretty good, although DH says it looks scary.  This is the Yokozuna Onosato, the current top wrestler in the senior division. 

We've been surrounded by fireworks going off for several weeks now, first for Diwali, then for Halloween, and this week for Guy Fawkes night.  Fireworks are pretty freely available in the UK and are popular. It all seems incredibly dangerous to me, and I've never bought any. But it's fun to see them going off around the town.  On Guy Fawkes night there was a big organised display, and by poking my head up through the skylight in our roof, I could watch it off in the distance which was fun.

Back to school

 I've just completed a four-hour free online class which was an introduction to Canva, an online graphics design tool.  The class was spread over two nights, but between taking notes, watching the live demo and simultaneously trying to copy the teacher in my own Canva application, it was pretty demanding.  I'm a bit knackered now, lol.  But it was well worth it, it seems like a really useful application even using the restricted free version.  I have been regretting losing my free Photoshop since being forced to 'upgrade' to Windows 11, so Canva seems like a very useful alternative.  I do use another free package called Paint.net but it's a bit more clunky. The class was aimed at crafters who want to create their own junk journals, and junk journal ephemera, and we learned how to create basic page spreads and some tags and bookmarks.

I got a really nice book this week by one of the Junk Journal vloggers I have been watching. It's called Treasure Bookmaking by Natasa Marinkovic, and she explains the basics of creating your own journals and papercrafts at home, without bookbinding tools.  Quite well written and illustrated, and it makes me want to try several of the projects.

I have done a few more pages in my new journal this week but I spent more time printing out a bunch of freebie printables for journals because I discovered that is a thing online and there are even FB groups for sharing free printables - usually to tempt you to actually purchase from the relevant designer.  Loving my new ecotank printer, so freeing to be able to just print whatever I want and not worry about the extortionate cost of ink cartridges.  I've discovered that with coaxing (pre-bending the paper) I can print as thick as 300gsm cardstock (scrapbook card weight) which is useful for more robust constructions.  The printer prints thick paper (160gsm) no trouble at all and that is the weight I am using the most for journal pages, ephemera etc.  My new scrapbooking area in the attic was disappearing under all the tools and paper so we stopped into the YMCA charity shop and I picked up a little four-square shelf unit to store the things I want to have close to hand but not actually on my work surface.   Also this week I printed out a little project for a Christmas paper craft that was a free 30 minute online tutorial on Saturday.  I made that just to practice printing, cutting, inking etc. They are two little pockets full of useless little bits of this and that, in a christmas theme. The designer does the free tutorials regularly so I might do more in future as it's a good way to learn and fairly relaxing.

I finished weaving the two Christmas tea towels.  I think I mentioned that the pattern directed to weave at quite an open density of 11 crosswise threads per inch, so when it came off the loom it was a bit like a wiry cheesecloth that I could see my hand through.  I was trying to have faith in the designer but I had doubts.  But after a 60C wash and a jaunt through the tumbledryer, the cotton fabric has softened up incredibly and also the weave has closed up due to the 10% shrinkage lengthwise.  The resulting fabric is still more drapey than I would like, I would prefer a firmer density.  But it's my first time using this thin weight of 8/2 cotton, and like knitting, I could have woven a swatch first to see how the yarn would behave but I wanted to get straight to the good part, lol.  I have ironed the towels for the photo but haven't sewn the half-inch hems yet. I look forward to using them over the holiday season.  I've still got lots of the yarns left on the cone so I could do another project with them, need to think what I want to weave next.

On the small dollshouse kits this week, I have put together two kits for leather handbags from Model Village Miniatures; another of their kits for a two-part housemaids wooden basket; and am currently working on a set of period housekeeping tools like a duster, broom, mop etc.

I managed to convince my new phone that it could, in fact, take a macro photo if it felt like it.

On Saturday DH kindly drove me over to Earls Barton where some local stitching groups were holding a small quilt exhibition.  It was a mix of new and vintage quilts, attractively spread on the backs of pews.  This was a very striking sight but made it hard to see the details of the quilts.  The most impressive was the large quilt of EPP hexagons made by the community to celebrate the 250th anniversary of locally-written hymn 'Amazing Grace' (hanging vertically at the altar screen).  They also had a de-stash table of quilting books going cheaply, but I was strong and didn't buy any.

I did some more long-arming on the Teapot digital panel this week, it has ended up quite skewed on the frame now that I am getting near the other end.  I'm not sure if it is something I've done by mis-rolling on the frame, or if the panel itself is skewed and I just didn't notice when I was adding borders to it.    Hopefully it's just rolled on funny and will straighten out.

Still stitching away on the Gail Pan blocks, haven't done much on them this week.  I have started another knitting project for a casual lace shawl called Dirty Lace by Libby Jonson, which will use up some of my fairly large stash of sock yarn.  Knitting is just less demanding for when I feel like doing something while watching TV but am not up to the rigours of embroidery.

Being a beginner again

 This week I've been trying out some of the junk journalling techniques that I've been learning from Youtube, and finding out what it is like to be a beginner  again.  Which means making lots of mistakes, and trying experiments, and finding out that what looked so easy in the video - like inking the edges of papers to make them look vintage - is actually much harder in real life (and boy did I make a mess).

After trawling the local charity shops for some old books and music sheets, I tried out the tea-dying technique for giving paper a vintage look.  It worked great on some papers, others came out a bit dark, the envelope lining print bled through so those were a loss, the normal printer paper came out fine. I wasn't sure how well the saturated papers would dry in an English house in the autumn, but they were all dry less than 24 hours later.

So currently I am using some of the tea-dyed papers to make another junk journal following a video tutorial by Treasure Books. I've assembled and partially decorated three signatures, and started to bind them together into a book.  I've set up a scrapbooking station squeezed into the corner of my attic room where I keep my knitting yarn and bobbin lace supplies, so it's very crowded up there currently.

This week I finished assembling the family of knitted seals that I started in the caravan.  They've turned out alright I think, I hope my son's partner likes them.  This was a paid pattern from Sachiyo Ishii.

From the stash of small dollshouse miniature kits, I put together a Model Village Miniatures kit for a carpet bag, and another kit for some open medieval books.  I've discovered that my new Samsung S25 phone doesn't have a macro mode, and really doesn't like taking close-up photos, which is annoying.  It keeps wanting to distort the shape of the carpet bag, and won't focus well. That's supposed to be a pen in the photo for scale, and it's distorted as well. I've just watched a video on how you can trick the phone into doing better, so I'll try to remember to test that next time.

I warped up my loom to weave two Christmas handtowels, from a pattern published in Little Looms magazine.  It uses 8/2 unmercerised cotton, a popular yarn for towels.  The cotton is thinner than anything I've used so far.  The pattern calls for it to be warped double.  I had a single cone in each colour so my knitter brain immediately thought of winding off a second ball on my yarn winder.  That appeared to work well, until I started to warp the loom.  Then all the balls just started to collapse and snarl up, because I hadn't thought of putting any kind of insert into the ball (like a toilet roll) to help it hold its shape.  I don't generally need to do that with actual wool, which has more stability.  So I ended up having to stop warping, and rewind by hand all the yarn vomit into normal balls.  That took quite a while, especially as some of the tangles turned into outright knots so I had to actually cut and join some of it.  Then I had to make sure none of the knots ended up in the warp.

Eventually I got the sequence all warped.  I thought I had done it correctly but found out later that I had a triple thread in one slot, a double thread in another, and one empty slot.  Luckily on this loom with its open reed, that is fairly easy to sort out and you don't need to start again.  So now I am weaving and since taking the next photo, I am about 2/3rds of the way through my first towel.  The other thing about weaving with 8/2 cotton is that the pattern calls for it to be woven at only 11 picks (cross-wise threads) per inch.  That is a much more open weave than anything I've done so far.  I feel like I am weaving cheesecloth but I have to trust the pattern and assume that once laundered, the cotton is going to shrink up into a nice fabric. I'm loving the christmas colours.

I haven't really felt like sewing anything for a while now, maybe all my sewing mojo is being temporarily diverted into journal-making.  We finished emptying out the caravan today, so that is now in hibernation for the winter.  We check it every 4 weeks to make sure it's ok, and rotate the tires to a different pressure point.  Tomorrow we are going to get the garden ready for winter (weather permitting) and wrap up the fountain, bring in all the furniture, earth up the fuschias etc.  I need to plant out my tulip bulbs as well.  Our ceramic hob has suddenly gone dead, it's 11 years old - I google'd and apparently expected lifespan is 10-15 years.  We're giving it some time to reconsider overnight, but I may be having to order a new one and set up an installation by an electrician.  It's always something.  Hopefully this is not the start of an appliance death cascade - that happened to us a few houses ago when all our appliances reached maturity and started dying like lemmings because we had bought them all at the same time.  Hopefully the hob is just having a moment but I'm not optimistic.

Caravan season is over again

 We were away in the van last weekend, for a long weekend until Tuesday, camping on a site on the edge of the city of Norwich.  It stayed fairly dry, but it was chilly, so we were grateful for the efficiency of the electric heater in our little caravan.  We enjoyed a lovely autumn walk around the lake at Whitlingham Country Park, and saw lots of birds at the RSPB Strumpshall Fen nature reserve.  Monday we went into the city to explore the historic quarters of Norwich. We wanted particularly to see Norwich Castle, after watching a TV programme about its extensive restoration to how it may have looked in the Middle Ages. The programme showed some of the artisans working on the metalwork, handmade furniture, and volunteer stitching groups creating the extensive embroideries.  The most impressive is a Bayeux-tapestry-like wallhanging featuring the story of the former castle chatelaine Emma.  Sadly it is hung so high up on the wall that you can't really see the details.  Interesting to see how colourful the interiors once were.  In the evenings in the van, I was knitting a family of three stuffed seals which will be a gift for my son's partner who really likes seals.

On Sunday morning, we went to a car boot sale (outdoor flea market) near the campsite, and I came across a woman who was selling off all her scrapbooking supplies following an unfortunate fall which had sadly left her with a damaged hand and muscle issues.  So I was able to pick up some paper pads, reels of ribbon, packs of embellishments etc. all for the very reasonable price of £12.

That was our final holiday in the van for the year, we don't camp in the winter.  So today we were out at the storage yard all afternoon, cleaning out the van and prepping it for the winter months where it will sit vacant.  We brought home a carload of contents but there is more to fetch back.

Wednesday night I was lucky enough to have bagged a ticket for the Grand Sumo exhibition tournament at the Royal Albert Hall down in London, the first time sumo has returned to London in over 30 years.  So I travelled down to London for that, it didn't finish until after 10pm so it was after midnight by the time my train got back to my home town.  Due to being an older person, that meant I was suffering for the next two days from the late night, and didn't get much done! But the sumo was great fun, they were absolutely doing everything in the exact same way that they would in Japan so it was just like being back at a tournament in Tokyo.  The prices for seats were extortionate so I was high up in the top balcony, looking down at the wrestlers' heads, but I was still happy to be there.

zoom photo

While I was attempting to recover from the late night, I spent a lot of time just watching journal-making videos on Youtube to learn about this new hobby. That resulted in me creating a junk journal from scrap paper, cardboard, and some fabric scraps from my quilting stash.  I am using the pages to try out some of the ideas that I am learning from the videos.  I really like the idea of creating books, and I like learning about the various paper engineering techniques, but still not really decided how I would use a junk journal.  I mostly type on a PC keyboard and keep digital records of everything, I only really handwrite disposable lists such as To Do lists.

I did finish the miniature dollshouse kits this week.  The larger house is 1/12th scale and the smaller house is 1/24th scale.  I added some wallpaper and a couple of paper rugs to the larger house.

I'm still embroidering the Gail Pan quilt blocks, almost finished the 5th out of 6 panels, it's a long job.  I've been feeling a bit frustrated this week, there are so many projects I would like to be getting on with in various hobbies, but I can't do them all at the same time plus I've been half asleep for much of the week.  DH is saying there are no retirement police who are going to come along and tell me that I am doing retirement wrong.  I've got a couple of friends who have purposefully chosen just 2 or 3 hobbies for their retirement and won't do anything else, but my brain is still like a craft-mad squirrel on a hamster wheel trying to do all the things.  Unfortunately I just don't have the energy (mental and physical) that I had 20 years ago.  But I am trying to stay strong about not ripping projects out of craft magazines any more, unless I realistically think that I will make it soon.  I don't want another paper mountain building up again.

Cheating on my hobbies

 I went down another enjoyable papercrafting rabbithole this week to create a Writing Folder - following a video tutorial by VectoriaDesigns.  Quite fun to do.  This time I re-covered some lined notebooks I got cheap at The Works, rather than print out beautifully decorated pages, so perhaps I will even write in the notebooks one day.

 I feel like I am cheating on my 'real hobbies', by having fun with a new craft.  Because I am a beginner, it is quite time consuming to do a project like this one, so it took a lot of time away from my usual pastimes.

So no sewing this week apart from hand embroidery, and a bit of long-arming on the Teapot china panel.  I did receive the additional yard of background fabric for the Dresden plate quilt so I will be able to go ahead with that.  I had a play around with different block layouts but because the plates are so big, there wasn't a good way to do anything other than a grid.  I could omit some blocks and do an alternate block grid, but it seems a waste of blocks plus I won't be doing fancy quilting so don't need a lot of negative space.

I finished the Art of Mini Lithographed Trunk kit. The instructions weren't great and some of the wood pieces for the exterior raised boards were cut a bit short, but overall it looks very striking.

Now I am building two 144th laser-cut building kits from M&E Miniatures.  The pink house has an open back and I've added some wallpaper inside.  The blue house will be a closed structure.  The laser-cut fretwork is incredibly fragile and I've already broken one piece of trim just by painting it, but I can fix it.

I finished my four woven placemats using the Aldi macrame cord and a variegated wool warp.  They've turned out pretty well and I'm pleased with them as  a technical accomplishment.  They came off the loom at the intended size and the same size as each other, and have shrunk up in a hot water wash to be fairly sturdy and functional. It is quite satisfying to take what is essentially string and turn it into an actual usable item.

My next weaving project will be two christmas towels using a pattern from Little Looms magazine.