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.