Crazy English summer

 We started this week with 32C last weekend and  are ending it at 18C with blustery showers the last few days.  I havent even put away all my hot weather clothes and now I am reaching for warm long sleeve tops and my raincoat.  Still, I would rather it be cool than hot, and the showers will help the garden although it is too late for our very yellow lawn.

I have continued to plug away on my Gail Pan embroidery quilt blocks with the enjoyment of using my new train case to store the fabrics and hoop in.  There are six sets of blocks to embroider, I am partway through set three now.  Some people have finished their quilts already and they look so pretty, one day I will get there.

My knitted cowl is coming on well in the possum and merino blend I bought in New Zealand last year.  At first I was worried because I wasnt getting much stitch definition but it's looking ok now and the yarn is very fuzzy and warm.

I have continued with the Crossstitcher Houses of Britain SAL, currently working the 1930s house that I started at the retreat in Nottingham.  I have been using the new magnifier I bought on Amazon and I can't believe the difference in the quality of my stitching.  It's like night and day, I obviously should have started using a magnifier a couple of years ago. I keep stopping to admire how much neater my stitches are than on recent projects.  I think because my eyes had become weaker, I was often not quite hitting the exact hole, sometimes having too much slack in a stitch, ending up with a wonky stitch here and there etc - all combining to create a messy result.  The magnifier is working well apart from it tends to slip down and I have to adjust it occasionally, I need to figure out something to clip the part together behind my neck so it doesn't open up.

I have visited a few fabric shops but havent found the raspberry pink fabric I am looking for, to be the background for my Fat Cat Dresden Plate blocks.   But I'm making my annual visit to the Festival of Quilts at the end of the month so will take along my swatch and one of the dresden plates and hopefully find something suitable.  While I didnt find the pink fabric, I did come across a large cot-size unicorn panel that for once looks reasonable and not like it's designed for a toddler.  My son's girlfriend has become a quilt convert and loves cuddling up in the quilts I gave them for their new house and she really likes unicorns.  I will show her the panel and if she likes it, then I could set it with some blocks and make her a quilt out of it.  I will take the precaution of checking with her first though before doing all that work, I have seen too many sad stories online of people who were disappointed with a lukewarm reception by the giftee after putting a lot of effort into making them a 'surprise' quilt gift.

We've pretty much finished digging the brick edging in around the lawn and flower beds, it looks awful at the moment because of all the bare earth around the bricks and where we have recovered lawn territory from overgrown flower beds.  Hopefully the rain will encourage the grass to start reclaiming its rightful area.  I am discouraged that the weeds are reappearing after my big weed removal exercise when I got back from Japan, I don't know how gardeners maintain the popular English style of having shrubs and flowers in beds surrounded by bare dirt, they must be out there weeding every day.  We did try mulching one year to keep down the weeds which helped but was a big job in itself and expensive to buy all the mulch.  I love looking at the garden but do not love working in it. 

Using the 'good' fabric

 I share a problem with many other quilters in that we buy special fabric that we love, then save it because it's too good to use on just any old project.  Meanwhile it gets older and goes out of style and doesn't match newer fabric or newer pattern trends, plus it gets supplanted by newer special fabric, and eventually you have several baskets and shelves of 'good' fabric and the regular fabric is becoming the minority.  

I am trying to break this cycle, and have already used some of the most recent fabric I bought in Japan and Korea on zip pouches and a totebag.  This week I used a bit more of the Japanese fabric (the retro kittens) when I tried out Erica Arndt's free pattern for a retro train case on Youtube.  This wasn't a difficult sew but took a while, but the end result is quite cute and I am now storing my embroidery panels in it. It's stiffened with foam.

It's a great project for showcasing speical fabric, and before I knew it, I was pulling out lots of 'good' fabric to make a few more. I've cut out another in Korean fabric which I will give my son's girlfriend, then fabric for three more from the 'good' baskets.  So much fun to pair up coordinating fabrics.  Do I need three more train cases? Hard to say, lol.

Last week I blocked, starched and pressed all 12 of the Dresden Fat Cat plates and they are now parked waiting for background fabric.  I tried them against multiple fabric colours from the stash, I liked them best against a raspberry pink but of course I don't have enough of that colour so I need to get to a quilt shop to try to find something similar.

We've had another heat wave, so it's been too hot to go into the attic much. I have loaded the pink doiley quilt onto the longarm but haven't decided how I want to quilt it yet. I would like something that looks vintage but with the ease of an allover pattern rather than trying custom quilting. 

I finally finished the Paducah cotton shawl that I bought the pattern and cotton yarn for on my trip to Paducah Kentucky back in I think 2021.  I liked knitting with the cotton yarn but the shawl is knit from the point upwards, so later rows were really long and it got a bit tedious.  Of course it doesn't look like anything as it hasn't been blocked yet.  I'm hoping I've made it wide enough at the top to drape well, I will stretch it when I block it.

The last few weeks I've been working on the Betterley Silver Thimble 1/48th scale quilt shop kit. I've finished the exterior. The kit includes a picture frame to go on the front, but I thought that made it look less like a realistic shop and more like a shadow box, so I don't think I will use it.

And now I am assembling the Betterley furniture kits for the inside.  1/48th is so small!

The mountain of shredding I mentioned last week has gradually shrunk down from about 12 inches to only 1 inches, I've been doing two minutes (the maximum run time for the shredder) several times a day all week.   The next big job in the attic is the four-drawer file cabinet full of decades of magazine pattern pull-outs over several hobbies that need to be downsized.  I've never found a good solution to organising magazine patterns although I've tried various methods: keeping all the magazines (too hard to search, too much to store); organising the patterns in ring binders (too many patterns to be practical); scanning and digitising (I did this with my recipe collection and never looked at them again and then that cloud provider disappeared); keeping them in plastic folders by yarn weight (my knitting pattern collection, which is a big mess spilling out of folders); creating card indexes (did this for my machine knitting magazines, it sort of worked but was very time-consuming); and the current method where the patterns are stored in hanging folders by sub-category of each hobby (the patterns sag down inside the folders, the folders break and/or fall off the rails, the filing cabinet drawers are hard to open and if you open them too far the whole cabinet wants to tip forwards).  I don't look at my files that often but sometimes I feel like making something, or making a bag, but I don't know what, then I can just sift through a few folders looking at pretty pictures. It's also where I store patterns I've used and might possibly make again (although this rarely happens). But the filing cabinet needs to go and I need something smaller and better.  Any suggestions gratefully received!

A stitchy day

 DH kindly drove me to Nottingham today (the trains were in disarray due to overhead cable replacement) for a cross stitching day at a central hotel.  It was a relaxing day, just working on what I had brought, and everyone was very friendly.  There were two traders so I came home with a project bag and some stitch minders, and some 'counting pins' which I hadn't seen before.  Like giant hat pins with caps on the points, for when you are trying to count squares on your cloth for stitching and need to mark off a starting or finishing row.  I forgot to take any photos but we were just in a conference room so not wildly photogenic.  I started the next house from the CrossStitcher Houses of Britain SAL (I think this is the 4th, or 5th? out of 13), then when I got tired doing that, I switched to my Gail Pan embroidery and even cast on for a Lace Cowl in the possum/merino blend I bought in New Zealand.  For the cross stitch, I was trying out a new adjustable magnifer that I bought from Amazon.  I like it because I can adjust it away from pressing on my neck, and it's handsfree, and  I will still be able to watch TV over the top of it.  However I was having trouble with the adjustable loop gradually opening up behind my neck, causing the magnifier to slip lower.  I think I need some kind of tie or clip behind my neck. But in general, having magnification really helped to keep my stitches tidier, I probably should have been using one well before now.

I finished quilting the New Zealand Quilt with a feather scroll that looks a bit like ferns, and ran it through the washing machine.  These photos are straight off the drying rack, it hasn't been ironed or trimmed up yet for binding.  It's turned out pretty well, considering the wildly disparate fabrics with New Zealand motifs that I came back with.  I made the back out of all the leftover bits of New Zealand themed fabric since I doubted I would use them for anything else.  And I also included some of the selvedges with the local names on them. 

Also on travel-themed finishes this week, I finished the vanilla socks in the Opal yarn that I bought in Tokyo  and used as my travel knitting project after I finished the shawl.  It's too hot to wear them now so I've put them away for the winter. I will blow my own horn and point out that they are nearly identical, which requires a bit of finessing when you are working with one ball of self-striping yarn.

Just before I went off on my travels at the end of March, I had finished weaving my Colour changing scarf using an ancient cone of Denys Brunton Magicolour colour changing yarn left over from my machine knitting days, and Panama cotton as the warp.  It's the longest thing I've woven, and I was getting better at having tidier edges.  This week I learned how to finish the ends with hemstitching and fringed ends, thanks to Youtube.  I've washed it as well to set the weaving.  I love how the colour subtly changes along the scarf.  The weave is a bit dense, I need to stop thinking like a quilter and aim for more of a looser mesh on the loom, since it tightens up once the weave is not under tension on the loom and when you wash it.  It makes me want to get my loom out again.

Last week I posted about the needlebook I was making out a couple of motifs cut from the fabric I was given in Korea.  I added the felt pages, stitched the book together on my industrial and added a ribbon for decoration.  It's cute.

The amount of DS's stuff that we have taken out of the attic and over to his new house over several trips this year, had finally reached critical mass. So last weekend we were able to finally go through the attic and weed out a tremendous amount of clutter, rubbish and charity donations.  So I've spent a lot of this week going through boxes of old financial records from, like, 2009; records of three prior house moves etc. and assembling vast piles for shredding.  In the spirit of decluttering, I also pulled out the Hawaiian quilt UFO which I started shortly after our trip to Hawaii in 2009 that I blogged about a few posts ago.  This wildly overambitious queen size  quilt was not only my first ever attempt at Hawaiian quilting but I even created my own design.  I had appliqued almost all of the centre (there was going to be a border as well) apart from the flower tips - but over time the flower tips had all frayed and gone wonky so it was impossible to applique symetrical flowers any longer.  And looking at it with a much more experienced eye, the applique itself is not well done - lots of bumps and kinks instead of smooth curves, and definitely not symetrical.

So after realising I didn't even want to finish it anymore, I decided to unpick the blue applique so I could re-use the white as backing.  But after spending 45 minutes unpicking just two  flower sprays from one branch, I decided life was too short and put the whole thing in the bin.  I had done too good a job on the applique so it really didn't want to be unpicked.  Also I found the blue batik fabric had gone slightly rotten and was tearing pretty easily, so I put the rest of it (saved for the border) into the bin as well.  So that has cleared off most of a shelf in my UFO corner as well as removing a little nugget of guilt that I hadn't even realised had been burdening me. I think that was my oldest outstanding quilting UFO although I have some bags of patterns and fabric waiting to be started which are possibly older than that.

What's your oldest stitchy UFO?