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.

One day is now

 While excavating my dollshouse room bookcase, I found the large box of smaller kits that I have accumulated over the years.  They were all collected with good intentions and carefully preserved so that 'one day' I would have the enjoyment of making them.  For a variety of reasons, 'one day' never came along for most of them.  Some of them are probably 30 years old from when I used to belong to a few dollshouse clubs, others have been collected over the years, or acquired from various sources including passed friends collections.

Having finished the little quilt shop kit (see below), I decided that One Day is now.  I am going to work my way through the box and build as many as I can, or as many as I still want to anyway.  They are not doing any good sitting disassembled in packets. At least if I build them, they might have a chance to get used either by me or by someone else.  So far I have put together an ancient NAME kit for a wooden cup & saucer shelf, a Stewart kit for a lasercut lyre-decorated desk, an old club project for a jewellery case, ditto for a box of soap, a Jane Harrop lasercut cardstock cake stand and a Model Village Miniatures kit for a knitting bag. It's sort of fun, gives me nostalgia for back in the day when I used to belong to a dollshouse club and we would build random projects every month, or when I used to go away for a miniatures weekend.

Currently I'm putting together an Art of Minis kit for a lithographed trunk.  I have to say that the instructions are not great, but the artwork is impressive.

And yes, I finished the Betterley Silver Thimble 1:48 scale quilt shop kit.  It was a big job making all the tiny accessories, but quite fun stocking the shelves and doing the final decorating.  So cute, and so tiny!  The front lifts off, and the ceiling has a see-through pane to let the light into the scene. The colours are a little more muted in real life, for some reason they are looking really vivid in the photos.

I've been weaving my set of four placemats, and have just started the third one.  As the macrame cord is 100% cotton, and the warp is 100% wool, I am anticipating/hoping that the mats will shrink and scootch together a bit when I wash them, to make a firmer mat.  I'm fairly satisfied with how the weaving is going, but not sure yet if I am actually going to like the final result.  It is nice using this gorgeous multi-coloured wool up, which has been sitting in my machine knitting yarn stash for probably at least 15 years if not 20.

Meanwhile I received an adorable picture of my table runner being used as a post-feeding blanket by the gift recipient, a new mother.  She said she knew that wasn't the intended purpose but it was so soft and was handy after she finished feeding.  I was very pleased to see it being used, but had to caution her that it won't likely stand up to machine washing if it gets burped up on.

I sewed a kimono bag this week to coordinate with my hand-sewn yukata and purchased obi.  I saw similar bags online and was able to get the appropriate snap frame from Amazon, then drafted my own pattern.  So I now have all the stuff to wear my kimono (apart from tabi socks and sandals), I just need to actually learn how to wear it.  Not much call for wearing a yukata in the East Midlands :)

I have stalled a bit on the Sew Liberated Aida blouse I started a few weeks ago.  I traced the pattern and cut out a toile (test garment) and sewed it up.  It didn't fit well at all but I was unsure what to do about it.  The armholes were a bit too confining, but the shoulders were sitting off of my natural shoulder line, leading to ugly diagonal wrinkles and too much width.  So I have experimented with taking a half-inch vertical tuck in all the pattern pieces for the body, to bring the shoulders more in line with my actual shoulders while reducing the width, and also I have slashed the armhole and sleeve by half an inch horizontally to make the armhole longer (although I'm not sure if that was the right thing to do, maybe I should have increased the curve of the armhole?).  So really I need to cut another toile and sew and test fit the garment again, and I am procrastinating.

I did sew the thin outer borders onto the Double Wedding ring quilt, sewed a backing from my stash of backing fabric, and moved it upstairs into the 'to be quilted' queue.

On the decluttering front, I have gone through and disposed of most of my old dollshouse magazines; took a big load of general dollshouse books to the charity shop (the ones about dollshouses, not the how-to books which I haven't gone through yet); donated my childhood teddy to Oxfam (they accept vintage teddies whereas a lot of charity shops won't due to them not having a CE safety tag) because nobody tried to buy it when I listed it online; and have re-listed for sale some Barbies, a handbag and some willow pattern china.   I'm getting there, bit by bit.