Cold snap

 It's been really cold this week (for the Midlands anyway), down to minus 3C one night, and a heavy frost yesterday.  I've been doing my daily walk all bundled up against the 1C and 2C daytime temperatures.  Sadly it hasn't been a lot warmer in parts of our indoors as one-third of our radiators went cold mid-week, and no amount of bleeding or valve checking produced any improvement.  Until suddenly today, two of the bedrooms came back online today which is a relief.  The heating engineer is coming on Monday and hopefully will sort out whatever the blockage is.

The coordinating fabrics I ordered for the unicorn quilt showed up so I have made a start.  I looked online for simple quilts others have made with a rectangular panel, and found one with a simple frame border to model mine upon.  I'm not sure what I'm doing yet with the outer border, I want something quick and easy. I pulled stash fabrics that match the mane and tail and cut out rectangles, but I'm not happy with the current look.  DH has suggested I try to mimic the rainbow order of colours, so I might try that tomorrow.

I pulled the digital teapot panel off the quilting frame and hung it up in the hall to have a proper look at it.  I immediately hated the mismatch in the piano keys so I have unpicked most of those in the bottom half.  There was obviously not enough quilting in the lower part of the quilt either - you can see how it is puffing and wrinkling.  So I re-loaded it onto the frame and have added some more quilting in the lower part, and I am re-doing the piano keys. I purposefully did not want to have to custom quilt around every single plate and pot, which is why I did the keys at 2 inches wide to set an open texture for the panel. I want to get this project done so I can clear the frame ready to load the unicorn quilt once it's done.

I finished weaving the checked handtowel, washed and tumbledryed it to shrink it, and hemmed the ends.  It's a better density and feel than the christmas towels, but I still prefer the first towel I made in the thicker yarn.  It's a very cheerful pattern though.

Mini dollshouse kits: This week I put together a World of Miniatures kit for a tapestry frame, and a Cynthia Howe kit for an antique thread stand.  The tapestry frame came out ok, it's a little wonky as it's a difficult shape to clamp while gluing.  The thread reels and pincushion on the thread stand were really difficult - the pincushion because it has to glue flat onto the top of the stand yet the fabric is gathered to the underneath of the pincushion (and it's tiny, the base is a circle that has been holepunched out of cardstock with a normal hole puncher).  The thread reels because they are made out of two incredibly tiny disks and a middle post that had to be glued together, then I had to wind thread onto each one.  The disks were inadequately laser cut from splintery plywood and did not want to pop out cleanly.  My fingers felt like sausages and it was hard not to get glue all over things. But at least I managed to find the spools both times I dropped one on the floor.  DH says it looks fine.

After having already tried tea-dyeing and onion skin dyeing of papers for journal making, this week I tried avocado dyeing - once DH had managed to eat up 4 avocadoes so I could have their skins and their pits.  Avocados produce an unexpected pink dye, a bit like diluted red wine.  I probably didn't have enough avocadoes as my pink is more of a blush, whereas in the video it was definitely more of a red wine colour. I wanted to include a picture contrasting the brown paper of tea-dyeing, the yellow-orange paper of onion skin dyeing, with the pink of avocado dye.  But as it turned out, I have used up all my initial batch of teadyed paper.  So today I tea-dyed another batch, since we always have loads of used teabags. This is a picture of the avocado batch though.

I've been focusing on the next Houses of Britain cross-stitch house and have unexpectedly zipped through about 3/4s of it already, I think because there are longer colour runs in this one so it's easier.  I've also knit a couple of the sections of the Dirty Lace pattern shawl - I bought the pattern in New Zealand and it's a way to use up some of my sock yarn stash. Nice to be knitting again, I find it much more relaxing than doing embroidery or cross stitch.

Time to hibernate

 It's turning into that miserable period in between autumn and winter now, when everything outside is damp, there's chilly fog in the morning. when you go outside the cold penetrates right through your warm clothing even though it is still 10C or so, and the chilly draughts are starting to lick around our ankles inside our old house. And of course Storm Claudia has just swept through, causing havoc in other places but thankfully not much locally. It just makes me want to hibernate.  I want to snack more, I am more lethargic, and increasingly unmotivated to venture into either the chilly basement (sewing room and dollshouse room) or the chilly attic (scrapbooking station and long arm frame).  I am spending more time reading, drinking more warming cups of tea, and feeling half asleep a lot of the time (despite the caffeine).

So it's been a bit of a pottering week in terms of crafts.  I did a bit more on quilting the digital teapot panel on the frame, and I've started a side project making a small journal out of an old box of tea.  I've woven about half the checked christmas teatowel.  I've realised that if I am actually going to make the unicorn panel into a quilt for my son's girlfriend for Christmas, then I only have about six weeks left to get on with it.  So I've ordered a bit of coordinating fabric to go with the panel, and found a pretty simple pattern for a quick quilt online.  

I did finally finish stitching house number five (of 14) from the CrossStitcher Houses of Britain monthly project.  These take me so long even though they are quite small, there are a lot of small colour runs so lots of changing thread, and then hours of backstitching to bring all the details to life.  I am glumly contemplating the prospect of stitching nine more house charts, even though they will look so nice when they are done. I will be taking a break during December because I will be stitching a little Christmas sampler instead.  I don't think I want to give up, I would still like to stitch them.

I also made a push and finally finished the multi-coloured Bruges lace trim that I started about two years ago.  The quality is pretty mixed, because over such an extended period of time with lots of periods where I wasn't working on it, I kept forgetting how to do things.  So there are some real bodgy bits in it, but the overall impression is good.  Now I need to figure out what to do with it.  I don't think I will make anything more from the book, even though there are other attractive colourful trims.  It's just too much starting and stopping with the various colour elements that have to connect to each other, too many sewings etc.  If I continue making bobbin lace, I think I will return to making Bucks or even Torchon, where you can just start and keep going.  It's nice to have the lace pillow and tool bag etc. out of the study at long last.

On the little miniature kits, I made up two ancient kits from the old club days, for dolly beds made from toothpicks and tongue depressors. They came out fairly well considering the materials. I decorated them with some cutouts from my clipart files, and added some 'quilts' from some fabric in my stash.

Also, I pulled out an old Phoenix metal miniature kit for a dollshouse's dollshouse.  We used to think these metal kits were amazing, back in the day before 3D printing came along.  Now it looks a bit clunky, I think I got it in a sale a long time ago.  I handed it over to DH as painting metal miniatures is his area of expertise.  He cleaned up the molding a bit, primed it, and painted a colourful base layer over everything which was very nice of him.  So all that I had to do was finesse the details a little bit, which was much easier as his painting delineated all the elements.  I need to glue the porch on and probably spray the house with some sealer then it's done.

We re-hung the mended gate, it looks great but now the gateposts more obviously need a coat of paint as well - perhaps we will get another sunny day when I can tackle that. I decluttered some of my chintz china to the charity shop - I had picked odd pieces up here and there at antique shows and bricabrac shops.  It used to be very collectible but I looked up all the current prices and none of it is worth much now.  The whole research exercise was highly dangerous as I kept seeing other chintz pieces which I absolutely loved but I stayed strong and didn't buy any more. I am hanging on to some of my favourite pieces although we rarely use them.  The next thing to declutter will be a small stack of quilting patterns left over from decluttering the file cabinet, I need to photograph them and get them listed for sale.

What DO I do all day now that I am retired?

 From time to time, I get asked what I am doing with my days now that I am retired.  My mind always blanks and I feebly reply something like  "I'm trying to travel more, and I'm doing lots of crafts", and I can tell I have disappointed the listener who is probably expecting to hear that I am now a powerhouse in the Women's Institute while volunteering in the afternoons helping elementary school children learn to read, or something along those lines.  And I have friends like that, who are out putting together meals at the food bank or have been ordained as lay preachers at their church.  It's not for me, or at least not yet. But then I start wondering myself, what am I doing all day?

And yet I feel like I am always busy, almost every day.  DH has many times suggested I could just sit back and relax (which I think is his idea of an ideal retirement) but I don't enjoy doing nothing and I find that really hard.  I remember watching a TED talk on retirement back when I was getting ready to retire, which suggested that there are phases of retirement.  I think I am currently in Stage Three, where you just enjoy doing all the things you never had time to do.  Apparently Stage Four is when you start to get a bit bored and start questioning what is next, I don't think I'm there yet.  And anyway, life goes on even though you are retired, there are still the normal chores to do like laundry and gardening, house maintenance etc. It's not like you can just loll around all day sipping margaritas. Our ceramic hob abruptly died last weekend, so I had to spend several hours this week on researching and ordering a replacement, booking the electrician, getting the electrician in to install it etc.  And a few weeks ago I discovered that one of our garden gates had completely rotted along the bottom, so I've spent some time bodging together a repair using some decking boards, held together with lots of preservative and wood hardener, and then repainting.  Not the most proper job but hopefully enough to hold it all together for our remaining years in this house.

So one of the reasons I try to blog regularly is to create a record of what I am doing each week craft wise.  I can look back and see that I am actually achieving things, learning things, creating things, going places, doing things.  And sometimes I even think "wow! I actually did that!" :)

So what are this week's activities? 

I finally got around to appliqueing my Fat Dresden Plates onto their backgrounds, using a straight stitch.  This was very tedious due to having to go around 24 points on each plate, so I did it in stages of 2 or 3 blocks a day.  All 12 are done now, and I've started to trim the squares down to 20.5".  This is larger than all my rulers, so I had to experiment with ruler combinations trying to determine the easiest yet still accurate method. I have settled on folding the block in half (which is easy as my placement creases are still there) and trimming to 10.25" using my biggest square ruler.

I have a small friend group that exchanges little christmas gifts each year, and this year I decided to make a 'quick and easy' card holder from one of those Asian videos that are all music and just miming the pattern.  The demonstrator makes hers in four minutes, so it seemed like a great choice.  Well, three hours later.... lol.  I think there is something wrong with the measurements given in the video because they didn't work for me. I sewed up a mock case in scrap fabric and discovered that it didn't work, then spent some time with my math challenged brain trying to alter the pattern, then tried again, still didn't work.  In the end, I sewed the altered pattern then manually shortened the flaps until they fit the wallet.  This was my first time trying out Kam Snaps, little plastic button snaps that you squeeze on with a pair of pliers.  I got the kit pretty cheaply on Amazon, and they were so easy to apply!  They have a very satisfying 'snap' on closing, and the back plate is nice and big so not going to pull through the fabric. Will definitely be using them again on things.

I am still pottering away on long arm quilting the digital teapot panel.  I stitched piano key divisions around the outside borders but by the time I got to the bottom (several days after doing the top), I had forgotten that I had managed to get the stitch lines to align with the corners.  So the bottom looks different from the top.  I don't know if that is going to bug me or not until I see it off the frame.  I may have to unpick and re-stitch some of the keys to sort it out.

After hemming the Christmas handtowels, I looked around for my next weaving project and have chosen a checked towel using the same spools of 8/2 cotton.  The spools don't stand up as they are not a cone, and were really awkward to wind from on the first set of towels, when I propped them up in a box.  I have been watching a Brisbane weaving expert and she was using a repurposed ribbon holder for her spools.  So I headed into the basement workroom and managed to bodge together something similar out of some scrap wood and dowels that DH brought back from his parents after emptying out their shed. It's a bit wonky as I can neither handsaw nor drill very straight, but it works and made a big difference warping up the next project. I'm going to weave this towel more densely to make a firmer texture.

I finished up the little kits for cleaning supplies by making  up two wicker carpet beater kits from Model Village Miniatures.  The instructions were a bit skimpy - the kits came with a long length of small diameter cane and a diagram of the knot to weave (but no measurements given).  I managed the one on the right sort of ok, apart from a couple of cracks in the wicker (even though I soaked it) but for some reason I could not repeat the knot on the left hand one to save my life.  After a few goes and the wicker starting to break apart, I gave up and settled on what you see.  Still need to glue and trim the binding threads.

I have also spent more time this week on my new hobby of Junk Journalling, which has turned out to be a vaster world than I had any idea of.  There are all sorts of FB groups for it, hundreds of Youtube videos, all sorts of digital designers selling journal kits and printables.  I gather that the 1980s hobby of scrapbooking evolved into a smaller format of albums and journals, which evolved again into junk journalling about 8 or 10 years ago.  I'd never heard of it as a hobby until Youtube started showing me videos last year.  I've still been working on my current journal but as I keep discovering more free printables, and more ideas to try, my journal identity is getting a bit confused. I had started out with cool greens and vintage browns, but then fell into temptation with vintage pink roses and faded French country blues.  So my journal theme doesn't look very cohesive, but I'm having fun and that's the main thing. I'm kind of regretting how many pages I chose to include at the beginning, it's a lot to go through and decorate, so I'm not finished yet.

I had previously tried tea dying papers to use in the journal, and you can see some of those in the above pictures. But last night I tried onion skin dying.  I had been patiently collecting the brown skins of onions but we don't use that many so it was taking a while.  Then it occurred to me that the supermarket loose onion bins are full of handfuls of shed skins. So when we were at Tescos yesterday, I gathered several handfuls into a spare box and asked at the till, the clerk was quite happy for me to take them.  After simmering in water for an hour, and letting the resultant liquid cool, I added a bunch of paper sheets and let them soak overnight.  The result was a fairly dark colour, very much the reddy brown of onion skins.

 

So this morning, after laying out the first batch of papers, I added some more sheets to the cold liquid and let them soak for just 2.5 hours.  This has resulted in a much lighter batch which I think would be better for writing on.

One morning when I was feeling fairly alert, I undertook the tricky task of cutting a mat to fit my poster from the London sumo event. My starting point was a cheap frame from IKEA but their mat was designed for an A3 poster.  My sumo poster was a weird size, wider and taller than A3. I've had issues cutting mats before, the slightest wobble in the cut, or the smallest overcut at a corner, really shows up.  But this time it went fairly well, so the main challenge was achieving a fluff-free plexiglas sheet before laying down the black "shows everything up" poster.  It took a few tries, removing tiny threads and fuzz.  The end result looks pretty good, although DH says it looks scary.  This is the Yokozuna Onosato, the current top wrestler in the senior division. 

We've been surrounded by fireworks going off for several weeks now, first for Diwali, then for Halloween, and this week for Guy Fawkes night.  Fireworks are pretty freely available in the UK and are popular. It all seems incredibly dangerous to me, and I've never bought any. But it's fun to see them going off around the town.  On Guy Fawkes night there was a big organised display, and by poking my head up through the skylight in our roof, I could watch it off in the distance which was fun.

Back to school

 I've just completed a four-hour free online class which was an introduction to Canva, an online graphics design tool.  The class was spread over two nights, but between taking notes, watching the live demo and simultaneously trying to copy the teacher in my own Canva application, it was pretty demanding.  I'm a bit knackered now, lol.  But it was well worth it, it seems like a really useful application even using the restricted free version.  I have been regretting losing my free Photoshop since being forced to 'upgrade' to Windows 11, so Canva seems like a very useful alternative.  I do use another free package called Paint.net but it's a bit more clunky. The class was aimed at crafters who want to create their own junk journals, and junk journal ephemera, and we learned how to create basic page spreads and some tags and bookmarks.

I got a really nice book this week by one of the Junk Journal vloggers I have been watching. It's called Treasure Bookmaking by Natasa Marinkovic, and she explains the basics of creating your own journals and papercrafts at home, without bookbinding tools.  Quite well written and illustrated, and it makes me want to try several of the projects.

I have done a few more pages in my new journal this week but I spent more time printing out a bunch of freebie printables for journals because I discovered that is a thing online and there are even FB groups for sharing free printables - usually to tempt you to actually purchase from the relevant designer.  Loving my new ecotank printer, so freeing to be able to just print whatever I want and not worry about the extortionate cost of ink cartridges.  I've discovered that with coaxing (pre-bending the paper) I can print as thick as 300gsm cardstock (scrapbook card weight) which is useful for more robust constructions.  The printer prints thick paper (160gsm) no trouble at all and that is the weight I am using the most for journal pages, ephemera etc.  My new scrapbooking area in the attic was disappearing under all the tools and paper so we stopped into the YMCA charity shop and I picked up a little four-square shelf unit to store the things I want to have close to hand but not actually on my work surface.   Also this week I printed out a little project for a Christmas paper craft that was a free 30 minute online tutorial on Saturday.  I made that just to practice printing, cutting, inking etc. They are two little pockets full of useless little bits of this and that, in a christmas theme. The designer does the free tutorials regularly so I might do more in future as it's a good way to learn and fairly relaxing.

I finished weaving the two Christmas tea towels.  I think I mentioned that the pattern directed to weave at quite an open density of 11 crosswise threads per inch, so when it came off the loom it was a bit like a wiry cheesecloth that I could see my hand through.  I was trying to have faith in the designer but I had doubts.  But after a 60C wash and a jaunt through the tumbledryer, the cotton fabric has softened up incredibly and also the weave has closed up due to the 10% shrinkage lengthwise.  The resulting fabric is still more drapey than I would like, I would prefer a firmer density.  But it's my first time using this thin weight of 8/2 cotton, and like knitting, I could have woven a swatch first to see how the yarn would behave but I wanted to get straight to the good part, lol.  I have ironed the towels for the photo but haven't sewn the half-inch hems yet. I look forward to using them over the holiday season.  I've still got lots of the yarns left on the cone so I could do another project with them, need to think what I want to weave next.

On the small dollshouse kits this week, I have put together two kits for leather handbags from Model Village Miniatures; another of their kits for a two-part housemaids wooden basket; and am currently working on a set of period housekeeping tools like a duster, broom, mop etc.

I managed to convince my new phone that it could, in fact, take a macro photo if it felt like it.

On Saturday DH kindly drove me over to Earls Barton where some local stitching groups were holding a small quilt exhibition.  It was a mix of new and vintage quilts, attractively spread on the backs of pews.  This was a very striking sight but made it hard to see the details of the quilts.  The most impressive was the large quilt of EPP hexagons made by the community to celebrate the 250th anniversary of locally-written hymn 'Amazing Grace' (hanging vertically at the altar screen).  They also had a de-stash table of quilting books going cheaply, but I was strong and didn't buy any.

I did some more long-arming on the Teapot digital panel this week, it has ended up quite skewed on the frame now that I am getting near the other end.  I'm not sure if it is something I've done by mis-rolling on the frame, or if the panel itself is skewed and I just didn't notice when I was adding borders to it.    Hopefully it's just rolled on funny and will straighten out.

Still stitching away on the Gail Pan blocks, haven't done much on them this week.  I have started another knitting project for a casual lace shawl called Dirty Lace by Libby Jonson, which will use up some of my fairly large stash of sock yarn.  Knitting is just less demanding for when I feel like doing something while watching TV but am not up to the rigours of embroidery.