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.