Korean food, sumo, various crafts and a new interest of bookbinding

 I don't need supper tonight because we drove up to my old stomping ground of Leicester for an enormous lunch at a Korean restaurant I found online.  I've never had Korean food, so I wanted to try some of it before my upcoming trip to South Korea in late April.  I worked in Leicester for three years until we were suddenly sent home for the first COVID lockdown in March 2020.  It's only five years ago but feels like so much longer - the COVID time distortion effect once again I guess.  Today I tried tteokbokki (Korean rice cakes in a spicy sauce) and a big bowl of bibimbap (a bit like a buddha bowl with veg and seafood on top of rice with an egg on top of it all), kimchi (fermented cabbage) and radish pickles.  It was all delicious and not overly spicy (I'm a wimp when it comes to spice) but I asked the manager and she said they have toned it down for the UK palate and that it will be spicier in Korea.  Some of the things I ate are made with soy sauce which contains gluten, which is going to be the case in South Korea where apparently food allergies are still not widely understood.  I haven't reacted too much so hopefully I won't starve while I'm there for two weeks.  Afterwards we walked around Leicester a bit which is a lively city with loads of charming lanes of cafes and boutiques lined with period buildings, and had a look at my former office. It made me a bit nostalgic for work but only in the sense of having skills that I was using to productively resolve casework - I do not miss all the politics and people nonsense in the slightest.

The big excitement this week was that tickets went on sale for the 2025 sumo tournament at London's Royal Albert Hall in October.  I had paid out to become a Friend of the RAH to be eligible for the pre-sale, which turned out to be well worth it as most of the tickets went then, and people trying to buy in the general sale a few days later had very slim to none pickings.  I queued up an hour in advance in the online waiting room, then randomly got allocated position 2146, so had to wait another 30-40 minutes before my turn came up.  Seat availability was literally disappearing off the seating plan before my eyes, but I managed to grab a couple of seats for the final day in the Circle.  Still expensive but not the eye-watering prices of the better located Stalls. Hopefully we will be able to see ok. There are people in the sumo Facebook groups who have paid £600 or more for their seats - you are starting to reach a level where it wouldn't cost much more to fly to Japan.  Who knew there were so many sumo fans prepared to come to London?

This week I finished another cross stitched house in the Buildings of Britain SAL, this is my fourth one.  It's turned out well apart from I completely bodged the 'B' in 'Belfast' - you have to squash an uppercase 'B' into a single square of aida cloth, very difficult to do, I had about six tries then gave up.  I shall have to fix it later.

After finishing that, I returned to working on the French embroidered pouch kit.  I'm belatedly thinking that I should have backed the linen with some iron-on stabiliser before starting to stitch, but it's too late now.  It's starting to look quite cute, with all the little details of each house.

I sewed the binding onto my American embroidered panel Paducah quilt kit and have hung it up in the hall.  Due to the different densities and textures of the quilting around  the different styles (applique, embroidery, piecing), it is not hanging very flat but instead is a bit bulgy.  It might calm down with age as the fabric softens over time.  It was the first time that I have tried to quilt around embroidery, it turned out relatively well I think.  I'm still not incredibly keen on the asymetrical design although I think my modifications (the additional 9-patches with the butterfly block to help square it up) give it more balance.  The embroidery is quite cute, and I have happy memories of stitching the blocks while I was in Japan a couple of years ago for language school.

After sewing on the binding, I went back to the Double Wedding Ring quilt and sewed another block for it.  Try as I might, the blocks are still coming out wonky.  I am just not a precision sewer.  Hopefully it will all quilt out ok.

On the loom, I have started on a scarf in a finer weave than I have previously tried, using the second heddle I purchased which is a 12.5 dent  so suitable for fingering weight yarns.  I've warped with a Yeomans Panama cotton, and I'm weaving with a Denis Brunton Magicolour yarn which changes colour every so often.  The effect is a little more subtle than I was hoping, but it's good practice for me as I am still trying to get better selvedges and avoid the edges narrowing in. It's also a longer warp than I have previously worked with.

This week I pulled out the little laser cut kit for a Maori wharenui or meeting place, that I bought in New Zealand.  The basic tab and slot kit was just white on one side of brown MDF, with the addition of a decorated red front and a window/door.  I should have taken a 'before' picture.  I wanted it to look more like the actual meeting places that I visited, so I consulted the many photos I had taken.  I've painted the roof and interior porch, added painted red pillars and decorated black roof beams, and drawn on the suggestion of board siding, and put it onto a base.  It's still obviously a toy but has much more of the look of what I actually saw.

The real thing:

This week I have been dabbling in a new interest: bookbinding.  I've watched quite a few videos, and I used my new Epson Ecotank printer to print off 80 sheets of doublesided colour journal pages.  I'm using a cherry blossom Japan themed set of graphics purchased from Vectoriadesigns on etsy, with the idea that it can become my travel journal when I get back. Very pleasingly, the printer ink levels for black and cyan barely moved, while the ink levels for magenta and yellow only went down less than 1/4 inch, despite printing 80 doublesided colour sheets.  My old printer would have used up a full set of cartridges, at least. After trimming the white margin off the pages, I folded signatures of 10 sheets each, and then sewed them together using kettle stitch in preparation for case binding.

After sewing the signatures and weighting them down, the spine is treated with PVA glue

Next I will be making a cover out of a 50p thrifted book (the insides are discarded). Fun to try something new, and as is usual when you are a multi-crafter, I already had some of the necessary tools: an awl I use for sewing, bookbinding glue I use for cartonnage, a bone folder I use for dollshousing and card making and so on.

DS has expressed interest in having more quilts for his new house, so I went through my vast collection to see what I am prepared to part with.  It made me realise that my tastes have really changed with the times: I am much more into the modern brighter colours now, and more whimsical designs, whereas before I had a long phase of reproducing antique quilts in darker colours and heavier styles. I also used to rescue vintage tops when I found them at a good price on trips to America and felt sorry for them, and I would fix them and maybe add to them then quilt them onto a modern backing.  I felt very torn about several quilts - while they no longer 'spark joy' for me, I still remember how much time and effort went into them (extreme amounts in some cases over years) and some of them cost a lot to make due to fabric ordered from abroad, or because they were a kit etc.  The rest of my brain was remembering my m-i-l crying in her cluttered room surrounded by things she can no longer use and hasn't used for years, and I know I need to downsize my collection.  I haven't counted for quite a while, I think last time I totalled up there were about 35 bed quilts and a lot of smaller things.  You can't sell them in the UK, I used to try and was lucky to get back 70% of the cost of the materials.  So giving them to my only son seems a worthwhile avenue (he already has several).  I picked out 7 or 8 and spread them out on his old bed to have a look at them, then put one back that I still like.  I'll take the others for consideration, although I expect most of them are not his girlfriend's taste either.