Moving inventory out, and a new toy coming in

 I've continued the dollshouse downsizing this week.  I photographed and listed several lots on ebay of unfinished furniture I will never use, and have sold all but one of them.  I've also listed three houses but so far have only had lower offers for them.  Including one lady whose rationale for offering lower than my (to my mind quite reasonable) asking price was to pay for her petrol in coming to fetch the dollshouse.  I managed to politely respond that I didn't think the seller should be expected to pay for the buyer's petrol. She also added that she was on quite a tight budget, but with a further herculean effort I restrained myself from enquiring why on earth she was buying dollshouses in that case.  Grrrr, people.  On the plus side, one of the ebay buyers was thrilled with her purchase and sent me a lovely thank you along with a picture of the project house they will go into.  So that was nice. I am gloomily contemplating having to decide whether to let the houses go for low offers just to get them out of the house, or keep hanging on in case somebody falls in love with them and is prepared to pay the asking price. They haven't been listed for very long so far, but will have been seen by anyone actively looking for a house.

Meanwhile, my new toy arrived this week from Japan, the Clover 40cm Sakiori loom.  It's a beautiful bit of kit, simple but so well made.  I spent a couple of days translating the excellently illustrated Japanese manual (using Google Translate) and then loaded my first warp.  The manual walks you through creating a mini mat as your first project. I threw in a few stripes for interest.  I'm using some Rowan Hand Knit Cotton from my stash, left over from some long ago attempt to knit a Kaffe Fassett design. It's a worsted weight and from memory the sleeveless vest I knitted felt like wearing body armour because it was so stiff and heavy.  The mini mat was a great first project, as right away I encountered common beginner issues like striving for neat selvedge edges and trying to maintain a consistent width and not let the weaving draw in. So I've been watching lots of beginner videos on Youtube and I've sent off for a comprehensive book on weaving which is recommended for beginners.

I've now re-warped the loom and am attempting to weave some mug rugs (coasters) based on one of the Youtube videos, in a weave that gives the effect of vertical stripes.  The tutorial demonstrates the compression of the weft so that the warp threads don't show as much, and the weaver was using a tool made from an old fork.  The tines had been bent over into hooks, allowing her to pull down the weft threads and really pack them down.  I found a set of four cheap forks for £3 at PoundStretcher and managed to achieve a similar tool on my fourth attempt (using a combination of a bench vise, a hammer, and some round-nosed pliers). It is harder than you might expect to bend four metal tines into similar hooks all at the same height.

Before the loom arrived, I enjoyed pulling out another of the little fabric picture kits that I bought in Tokyo, and making that up.  It's a cute little picture of a Japanese tea service with matcha tea, typical Japanese sweets, and some cherry blossom.  Basically you are covering pre-cut foam shapes with fabric and assembling them like a jigsaw to make the picture.  Not that difficult but very satisfying. Plus it reminds me of the matcha tea and sweets that  I enjoyed on my travels. Matcha tea was an acquired taste for me, it's fairly bitter, like very concentrated green tea (which is what it is).  As well as hot tea, you can buy a variety of matcha-flavoured food stuffs: ice cream, kitkats, chocolates etc, some of them nicer than others.

This weekend I have spent all day on both Saturday and Sunday in the UK Quilters Guild online retreat.  This is a ticketed event but the cost is so much more reasonable than actually going away to a hotel and of course much easier to just stay in your own sewing room.  They had over 400 participants this year, the second year they have run the event.  For me personally, I enjoyed last year's event more, as many of the sessions this year weren't of as much interest to me.  But it was still nice to have some company and it kept me working away in the sewing room.  I made another block for the Double Wedding Ring quilt and managed to sew it together wrong twice (too much distraction I guess) so spent a lot of time unpicking which stretched the block a bit - there will have to be some easing in when I sew the blocks together.  I altered a travel skirt, and sewed a little mini drawstring bag for a mini travel power bank I recently bought.  

Then I moved on to the Checkered Dresden Plate jelly roll quilt that I started a year ago at the hotel retreat, based on a Missouri Star tutorial. I had all 9 plates already assembled apart from one plate that needed one more wedge.  So I completed the 9th plate and then cut out nine background 22" squares from my background fabric.  The tutorial recommends appliquing the plates to the background fabric with blanket stitch.  I sewed on two plates that way and decided I hated the effect of the rippled ridged line around each plate.  I tried straight stitch and felt that looked much tidier, so I did the rest of the plates that way, then spent some time unpicking the two blanket stitch plates so that I could re-stitch them.

Having them up on the design wall, I just felt it looked a bit static.  I still had fabric left over from the second jelly roll, so I decided to add some corners to the blocks for a secondary design.  The design is busier now but feels more lively to me.

The Missouri Star quilt has a plain border in a contrast fabric.  I don't think I have anything suitable for a contrast border because these are not colours I would normally use for the most part, but I still have more of the background green.  If I use that, then I will need to continue the side diamonds into the border  so they don't look cut off. But I think it might work better when the design is so busy.

I have finally finished stitching the awful sky of the cross stitch christmas ornament, I have really done a terrible job on this so it's a good thing it's only a christmas ornament.  So I have been able to move on to the backstitching, always my favourite part as it brings the design alive.  The final step will be to sew on the sequins and pearls that came with the kit.  I'm stitching on it as I watch each day's playback of the January sumo tournament in Tokyo - the momentous news being the decision of the reigning Yokozuna (the most senior wrestler) to retire at long last.  So he has dropped out of the tournament and there is no obvious successor.  So he won't be coming to London when the sumo association brings over wrestlers for the exhibition in October 2025 at the Royal Albert Hall, an event I am hoping to get tickets to, when they are released at some unspecified date.