Shedding about 45 pounds of burden

 

My big dollshouse has left the building! I'm amazed at how much lighter I feel, it was obviously a bigger burden on my mental guilt/To Do list than I had even realised.  A lady bought the nearly empty house which I had marketed cheaply as a renovation project, but she loves it and isn't planning to change anything.  I finally overcame my procrastination earlier this week and started floor by floor removing things I wanted to keep or sell.  That turned out to be most of the contents.  The more I took out, the more it became obvious that the 35-year-old decor had not aged well.  Back in the 1990s it was harder to get commercial miniature supplies in the UK and also I had no money, so the house was an ode to DIY solutions that we all used to use: like printed National Trust bookmarks as fancy murals, and mixing oil and acrylic paints to marbleize floor tiles. The lights were almost all homemade, and the wiring a creative bodge.  Some of the flooring was starting to lift, there were glue stains, the window acrylic had yellowed...  Even though the structure itself is of high quality plywood, I couldn't in good conscience price it very highly.  So now it has been collected and I got some money back, and it's gone to a new life with someone else who will hopefully love it again.

Of course, having the enormously heavy roadblock removed, I can now fully see the next glory hole that needs tackling: my collection of dollshouse books and magazines.  I haven't been able to get to it for years because there was too much in the way, as I tend to use the raised floor in front of it as a staging area for tools and components when I am building houses, as well as the big dollshouse on its stand.

It's been a fairly creative week, with lots of longer term projects coming along.

I finished weaving my plaid teatowel and wet finished and hemmed it.  The cotton yarn bloomed beautifully in the washer/dryer and is now butter soft.  It also shows evidence of interesting diagonal texture called 'tracking' which is something that can happen spontaneously due to tension in the weaving.  I love it, and it adds additional interest to the weave.  The towel hasn't been properly used yet as DH is terrified of ruining it with a curry stain or something.

I've warped the loom again with a random selection of my hand-knit cotton knitting yarn to make a colourful runner or hand towel, not sure which yet. Using up my knitting stash is one of the reasons I bought the loom, and it's fun to experiment with colour.

I sewed together my Double Wedding Ring blocks into a top.  It looks quite nice from a distance, although the wrong side is a crime against both piecing and pressing.  Luckily that all gets hidden when it is turned into a quilt :)   It's not very big, after all that work, only about 64" square.  I don't have any more blue fabric, but if I can get some more then I might add some plain borders to bring it up to a double size at least. A DWR has been on my bucket list for decades so I feel a sense of achievement to get this far, but it has really emphasised that accurate sewing is not my strong suite.  It's also been a good project to use up more of my old Thirties repro stash, dating from the days when the Thirties repros were more pastel than they are nowadays.

With the DWR blocks off the sewing table, I've pulled out another project which has been waiting for a year or two (and which I came across when making my lists a few weeks ago), the Aida summer top.  I bought some embroidered double gauze and the pattern at last year's Festival of Quilts, or possibly even the year before.  I rarely sew clothing as it almost never fits comfortably, but I liked the style of this and quite coincidentally saw the double gauze almost immediately after seeing the pattern, so went back and bought both of them.  So far I have traced off what I hope is my size, and have cut out a toile in old sheeting to make a test garment.

I also finished quilting the pink doiley quilt which turned out pretty well.  I usually wash quilts after quilting them, to settle the stitching and pucker the quilting. But I don't want to wash this one (yet anyway), as the crochet will then all wrinkle.  I may give it a light steam press to calm down the puffiness.  I love the pretty pink and the soft vintage feel to the quilt.  I was wondering if it might look nice to cut scallops into the side edges as well.

I've been working away on accessories for the 1:48 scale Betterley Quilt Shop.  I finished folding all the fat quarters and glued a lot of them into stacks, and then made two sewing machine kits, and have started on the boxes of thread and wadding rolls. I have to wear a magnifier Optivisor for working on these.

I finished the third Gail Pan set of embroidered blocks, and have started stitching the fourth (of six).

I've been tinkering with another journal-making project, using more of the VectoriaDesigns downloads.  I had trouble printing the pages to the correct size this time, so they aren't very even.  I'm following a video tutorial to make a trifold journal although I am not going to add so many embellishments and pockets as the maker did.  Still loving my Ecotank printer, so liberating to be able to just print things without worrying about expensive cartridge ink getting used up.

It's suddenly autumn here, and even feeling a bit chilly in the house in the evenings.  My favourite time of year.  I'm off to Prague for a short city break soon, leaving DH to man the fort. I've never been to Czechnia before, so I think it will be my 40th or 41st country.  Although to be fair, I remember almost zero about some of the countries I visited on my whirlwind European backpacking tour in the early 80s so not sure if I should still be counting those :)  Next year I am hoping to go to Norway.  Do you have any travel plans for 2026?

Bashing things with a big hammer is therapeutic

 Today we went over to visit DS to help him and his partner demolish the derelict garden shed that they inherited.  I had the pleasure of taking my turn at bashing the sides of it apart with our massive sledgehammer and prizing apart plank walls with our equally massive crowbar. I also got to jump on rotten wood sheets to snap them in half so they would fit in the car.  It was all quite satisfying - apart from the massive amount of insect life that we disturbed, some of which has now taken up residence in our car after we took a couple of loads of ex-shed to their dump.  

In more genteel pursuits, I am almost finished assembling the final block of my Double Wedding Ring quilt then I can start sewing the blocks together. I highly doubt they are all the same size so the result could be interestingly wonky - but hopefully it will all quilt out.  I don't really want to have to custom quilt every arc so I am thinking maybe a Baptist Fan design using rulers.  The two popular Baptist Fan ruler sets (Michaels and Amanda Murphy) are of course American, Amanda doesn't ship to the UK and Michaels might but then I would get hit for customs duty.  One sole UK shop sells the Amanda rulers at a big mark up of course, but I had a customer service issue with that shop in the past and don't really want to order from them again.  Sigh.

After watching a few videos on 'organising your WIPs', I headed down to make a UFO list in my sewing room.  Things I have actually started wasn't a long list, but I kept getting sidetracked into additional lists like 'Waiting projects I really want to do', 'Kits I have bought but not started', 'Fabric I want to use up', 'Quilt patterns I thought I would make (but haven't), 'Bag patterns ditto', 'Rulers and gadgets I haven't used yet'..... I gave up at that point, as the exercise was starting to feel quite pointless.  And that's only one hobby. 

But I did discover a Corinne Lapierre kit for a wool felt sewing roll that I had completely forgotten I had started at last year's Coventry retreat - cutting out all the pieces ready for embroidery.  So I brought that upstairs and completed the embroidery and assembly this week and was able to cross it off the WIP list.  It's a cute little thing, I'm not sure how useful it actually will be though.  I added a bit of woven interfacing to give the felt a bit more stability.  The pincushion is detachable and held on by velcro.

I finished knitting the Ida doll from Hobbii with two outfits: a nice dress with matching hat over a white t-shirt, and a more casual ensemble of dungarees over a striped t-shirt with brown shoes.  She is fairly cute.  She needs a home and I offered her up to my lace friends but they don't have any suitable grandchildren to take her.

I finished weaving the Log Cabin Table Runner, hemstitched the ends and gave it a wet finish.  It's turned out fairly well - slightly narrower at one end than the other but my edges are definitely getting better.

I've now warped up for my Red & White tea towel using the cotton yarn I bought last week on holiday. I used a free site called Plaidmaker to come up with the checked design for the towel.

Now that the knitted doll is finished, I've gone back to embroidering the Gail Pan quilt blocks.  They are very cute but taking ages to do.  I've got one more block to stitch on panel 3 of 6.  I like how they are turning out but feel impatient to get to the quilt assembly part.

I finished going through File Cabinet Mountain and it is all organised and dispersed now.  It feels like a big achievement and did take days.  I sorted out the 'keep' pile into the various hobbies and put the piles (sometimes subdivided into plastic folders by topic) into bankers boxes.  We now have so much paper recycling piled up that it wouldn't all fit into the recycling bin and has to wait two weeks until the bin gets collected again.  So hopefully going forward, I will be much pickier about what patterns I keep from magazines (and buy) and also will continue to file them in the bankers boxes.

I've been occasionally folding more tiny fat quarters for my 1:48 scale quilt shop, having finished the 100+ tiny bolts of fabric.  I think I have to make all the accessories first, and then can pick and choose what to use to fill up the shelves and cabinets artistically.  I finally managed to sell my Lego halloween house so that's opened up some room on my dollshouse shelves.  Still haven't tackled my big house that I want to sell but I need to stop procrastinating and get it on the market to hopefully catch someone looking for a christmas present.

Youtube has started showing me 3D printer videos, and I watched a few out of curiosity, then of course it showed me even more.  It is somewhat tempting, I am a gadget girl and 3D printers have come down so much in price and become much simpler to use.  But I'm not sure if I would really use it when I am not doing much dollshousing any more.  DH says if I get one, then he wants to use it for his hobby of painting military miniatures.  Have you got a 3D printer?  what do you use it for?
  

Wet in Wales

 We're just back from another caravan week, this time in mid-Wales near Llandovery.  We've been previously rained out of Wales on, I think, three different holidays over the years but obviously we are suckers for punishment. I had found Wales so pretty when I went to the quilting course at the Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter a year ago, so we decided to head back there with the caravan.  True to form, after a warm and sunny bank holiday weekend, it started raining on Tuesday off and on, and never stopped.  We gave up and came home a day early - and of course the sun came out on the drive home to taunt us.

We still had a nice holiday, with interesting excursions to the Roman Dolaucothi gold mine and to the amazing caves of the National Showcaves Centre for Wales (which amusingly also has about 150 lifesize dinosaurs scattered around the wooded hillside, many of them animatronic).  And I did fairly well for craft shops and visits as historically Wales was a centre for the wool industry.

We had a very interesting visit to the excellent National Wool Museum in Carmarthenshire, in the historic former Cambrian Mills buildings. It was once a large mill in Drefach Felindre, producing shirts and shawls, blankets, bedcovers and woollen socks. It is now a working museum with restored historic machinery which we were able to see running.  They process cleaned fleece through willowing and carding machines, then spin it on an enormously long spinning machine that spins dozens of bobbins at once. There are multiple power looms for various purposes, and a finishing shed where they can full blankets and shawls, and press woven goods with both hot and cold presses.  They send woven goods off to a mill in Scotland for the fringing to be done but have recently invested in a blanket stitch machine which they are learning to use so they can finish side edges themselves.  Due to their limited production, they didn't have any of their own blankets for sale but they did have a gorgeous blanket by Tweed Mill in North Wales that came home with me.  I also picked up a rigid heddle loom weaving book that I had been looking at on Amazon, all about pattern on these small looms - I can't do all of it on my open heddle loom but at least half of the patterns are applicable. 

This is my weaving book.  We also stopped into a local village fair and in the secondhand tent, I picked up some bargain ribbons and this English translation of a Japanese quilting book - love the Japanese cute aesthetic and there are some nice projects in this one.

We made a return visit (for me) to the Welsh Quilt Centre in Lampeter to see this year's exhibition 'As Time Goes By'.  Not quite as visually exciting as last year's circus themed display, but still some wonderful quilts on display with amazing traditional Welsh quilting motifs.

And of course it would have been rude not to pop into the wonderful Calico Kate fabric store right next door to peruse all the latest fabric lines.  But I only bought some off white solid fabric that I may use as the base for the embroidery in the BOM pack I bought a few weeks ago.

We spent one morning in Llandovery, the nearest town to our campsite, which had lots of nice shops and cafes including the lovely 'Bumblebees of Llandovery' which stocks natural fibre wool and haberdashery and lots of great stuff.  I picked up some colours of narrow ric-rac, some embroidered ribbon, some buttons, needle threaders and a keyring of wooden laser-engraved ruler tools.

Surprisingly, they also had a weaving shop called Wonky Weaver, which is only open two days a week and we were lucky enough to catch them open.  After a bit of confusion over what size of heddle I have (because mine is metric and they were working in imperial I think), I was able to buy two cones of unmercerised 100% cotton to use to weave more absorbent towels.  So I might have a go at weaving tea towels although DH protests that they will be too good to get dirty.

While I did take my embroidery and cross stitch projects with me, in general the light isn't good enough inside the van (particularly when it's overcast outside) so I was mainly knitting another outfit for my knitted doll: another t-shirt, a second pair of shoes, a hat, and the start of some dungarees.  I finished the pink dress just before we left, but it's come out a bit big so I need to sew some elastic into the waist.

That's the end of the caravan hols for this year due to DH's limited paid leave. We do like our little 'home away from home' although it is an expensive indulgence due to only using it a few weeks each year.  Much nicer than staying in a hotel though.

A clueless weaver

 Having painstakingly warped up for what weavers call a Log Cabin pattern (but it looks more like Rail Fence to me as a quilter), I am over halfway through weaving my new table runner.  My husband has been fascinated and has asked a couple of times 'but how does it work?' as the pattern develops seemingly by itself.  To which my answer is: "I have no idea!".  I'm just following the diagram for the warping colours and the two weft colours.  It's something to do with the ups and downs of the two colours interacting, but I have no clue, lol. The difference between a dabbler like me, and an actual weaver. Anyway, I'm very pleased with how it's looking.

Thankfully the weather has turned cooler this week, so I've been up in the attic a few times quilting on my Pink Doiley Quilt.  I decided to go with the same panto design 'Finer' that I used on the New Zealand quilt, as I couldn't find anything I liked better online.  The bowl-shaped Glide foot on my Handiquilter is skating beautifully over the applied doileys, and I've only had a couple of thread breakages as the power needle punches fairly easily through the crocheted doileys.

Down in the sewing room, I made another version of the Sunhat pattern and this time avoided any tucks or pleats.   The fit isn't bad, I wore it out yesterday and it stayed on my head in a light breeze.  I'm not going to win any fashion contests but the broad brim shades my face well.

I also couldn't resist cutting up more Japanese fabric to sew another Soft storage box.

Having completed the small projects and cleared the decks, I pulled out my Double Wedding Ring quilt which I haven't worked on since before going to Japan in April, and sewed another block.  I also pulled out all the previous blocks to see where I am at.  The one I am currently sewing is Block 13 out of 16.

My basket of pre-sewn arcs appeared to be getting rather low, so I did an audit.  I need 3 more blocks which will requires24 pieced arcs.  I only have 14 pieced arcs left, so I need to assemble another 10.  I have leftover cut wedges in various colours but probably not enough, so I may need to pull out my scraps and cut some more.  I think I have enough background and accent pieces already.

Another project I hadn't worked on for a few weeks is the 1:48 scale Betterley quilt shop kit.  This week I added the patterns and tomato pincushions to the stand I had already assembled, with only one pincushion pinging off into the void never to be seen again which is a better result than I feared.

I have also started the repetitive task of assembling over 100 tiny fabric bolts. After cutting out the fabric and bolt inners, each one requires winding the fabric around the inner then gluing the tiny flap down.  It's sort of meditative.

File Cabinet Mountain has now dwindled to more of a hillock.  It has become easier to discard things, especially quilt patterns that I know I will never make because they have hundreds of tiny pieces in them.  I think I had this delusion when I was younger that I could make anything if I tried hard enough.  In my declining years, I now realise that I really don't enjoy making repetitive blocks and that I am not a very accurate quilter - particularly with triangles.  So the huge folder of star quilt ripped out patterns and framed medallion quilts pretty much all went in the bin.  Life is too short :)

I've been enjoying a new video game the last few weeks, it's another souls-like called 'Lies of P' and feels very similar to the Dark Souls franchise only probably a bit easier (apart from some fiendishly long runs between bonfires which I had to break down into saved chunks to get through).

And suddenly it is getting dark by 8pm, where did the summer go?  Time flashes by when you are hunkering indoors to avoid the heat waves.  

The 2025 instalment of Why Can't Things Just Work?

 Caution - boring computer rant in first paragraph, skip as desired.

Yes, that perennial topic of Why Can't Things Just Work arose again this week, when my fairly new Dell PC decided that the latest Windows Update was too much trouble and that it would rather just suspend all operating system user access.  I could use third party apps like Chrome or Word alright, but no access to system settings, not able to print, not even able to access the update history to see what was going on.  I wasted several hours trying a variety of diagnostic tools from the simple (CCleaner, Scan disk, check disk etc) through to the Dell diagonistic Support Assist tools available through the Boot menu.  In the end, the Dell tool said I had no option but to remove and replace the entire OS with a fresh download.  It backed up a few basic User files like Documents and Pictures but deleted other huge folders of stuff.  Luckily I had done my own manual backup (Windows 11 has no actual backup tool, only a File History option which is not configurable and not much good) last weekend.  So I was able to restore the missing folders apart from one big one.  I've lost any work I did since the weekend, including 4 or 5 hours on a new photo book I was making, grrr.  I need to power up my old PC to retrieve an older copy of the missing folder.  Then there are all the user settings and preferences that have to be set up again, and then downloading all the third party apps from Discord to Norton security.  All in all, a colossal waste of time.  Maybe I should have just contacted Dell support to see if they could help, but I think they would have used all the same diagnostics anyway.  I've now put all my big folders into Documents, which makes it 209Gb which makes DH's eyes bug out, but I don't know what other option I have.  I was keeping for example my photo archives in separate folders so that my Pictures and Documents folders could just be active working stuff, but then the photo archives don't get backed up by File History nor rescued in a case like this one.  I suppose I could buy some more portable hard drives and offload the older photos onto those.  Readers - back up your files!  DS says when it comes to computers I am cursed (he is remembering the great hard drive death of 2023) but I don't think that's true. I hope not anyway.

In happier news, I've had some finishes this week.  I finished embellishing the 'Tiny Textile Tin of Happiness' that I started in the Quick workshop at Festival of Quilts.  I had fun adding some random embroidery and embellishments and it makes a very cute little hanging ornament.

I had a go at the Bramble Patch Sun Hat pattern that I bought at Festival.  I have an enormous head so even the larger pattern size didn't fit me when I cut and sewed a mockup in scrap fabric.  So I had to tinker with making the crown deeper and wider, and altering the brim to fit the new circumference.  Circles are tricky to match, so the resulting prototype in quilting cotton still has some tucks and pleats in it.  I'm going to use it for gardening in, as my old gardening hat is pretty worn out.  But it fits pretty well.  I will try again to make a nicer version that I could actually wear out to the shops.

 

I finished my Houndstooth woven handtowel and am now using it with pride. It turned out pretty well, I have gotten much better at keeping my edges even.  After wet finishing, I sewed hems at each end with my machine.  I'm currently warping up the loom to try a similar pattern which weaves up a bit like a rail fence quilt pattern, I'm going to make a table runner.

I've been having fun this week knitting up the Ida doll from the Hobbii yarns free pattern.  The doll itself is finished, I've knit the removable sock/shoes, and I am currently knitting a t-shirt.  I had trouble with the hairpiece not fitting very well, maybe because I knit in moss stitch instead of reverse stockinette, but it turned out alright in the end with a bit of bodging.

I copied a soft storage holder that I acquired somewhere, and used it to draft a pattern for a larger version that I sewed up in some of my Japanese shibori fabric. This is now on my nightstand to hold small stuff.  Love the colours.

In the wake of trying on my kimono last week, I spent some time sewing up some needed accessories: I lengthened all three kimono ties to fit my larger Western body shape, sewed two datejima sashes that help with holding everything in place underneath, and made a 'obi ita' or plastic stiffener belt that sits behind the obi to keep it neat.  The only thing I need now is to sew an appropriate handbag to use if I were to wear the kimono - don't think my daypack is going to add to the look.

Do you remember the handmade journal book that I made before I went to Japan?  Ever since I got back, I have been spending a few hours here and there printing out journal pages with photos, to paste into my handmade book to create a travel journal about my trip.  It took quite a while but it is now finished.  Of course, pasting in lots of extra bulk means that the book doesn't close flat any more. But it's a lovely record of the trip, enhanced by the cherry blossom theme of the journal pages from Vectoria Designs.  I added extra decoration with stickers from Japan and washi tapes.

I have been slowly tackling Filing Cabinet Mountain and have managed to discard a significant amount.  It's been a rather sad exercise in some ways: finding old collections of notes and photos for something I had planned to make one day, or patterns that I optimistically purchased, inspiration photos that never inspired an actual creation, plus a healthy amount of stuff I had just plain forgot about in the years when the filing cabinet was pretty inaccessible behind all the junk in the attic.  I've sifted out lots of  saleable patterns and books to give to charity, and I have a growing pile of stuff that is still of interest to me to make.

I went to a de-stash sale this week, where some quilters had hired tables to sell off unwanted fabric and notions.  I did acquire a few pieces of yardage for cheap quilt backs but most of the rest of it I managed to resist, including back issues of magazines that I would have snapped up in the past. I just couldn't face having to declutter yet more stuff. But I wasn't completely virtuous: I fell for a pack of patterns for a very cute embroidered quilt called 'Down in the Garden' by Leanne Beasley that was originally £105 and I got it for £20.    I have to finish the Gail Pan embroidered quilt before I could start this one so I am feeling a bit guilty.

I watched a Youtube video this week by an American organisational 'expert'.  She was calling out retired women who are 'wasting' their retirement by spending their time cleaning out the basement and decluttering old stuff from their past - instead of enjoying their retirement and doing what they really want.  Which sounds tragic - but somebody has to get rid of all the junk.  We will be moving somewhere easier to manage  in another 7-10 years and we can't take all this cr*p with us.  I am trying to keep a healthy balance between spending time on the decluttering and selling stuff, versus fun stuff like my hobbies.  Eventually most of the obvious clutter will be gone, and then it will be more of a maintenance issue to stay on top of.