It has thankfully warmed up this week, both inside and out. The engineer came Monday and got all the radiators working - hurrah! Basically all the upstairs rads were full of air, and the boiler didn't have enough umph to push the hot water up through the system which is why nothing was coming out when I bled them. He got the boiler pressure up to where it should be and got all the air out of the system. Ironically,the temperature outside has gone up to 10-13C so we haven't needed the heat as much this week.
I can't believe it is already December on Monday. I've actually had my first Christmas get-together already with some friends I won't see again until the new year - so I've had my first gluten-free mince pies and have exchanged my gifts of the little card wallets I sewed. We also went to two church christmas fairs today. I had low expectations but actually got a few things. Some homemade jam and chutney, plus a couple of cute sewing reel xmas ornaments, a coaster that says 'Tea makes everything better', and a handmade point turner from a woodworker. Tomorrow, if it stops raining, we will put up the outdoor christmas lights on our porch, and I will get out my Christmas sampler quilt which always goes on my bed for December. I've also got a Christmas cross stitch chart that I'm going to start.
I finished fixing the digital tea panel wallhanging and took it off the frame. It looks better now in terms of quilting. After taking this pic, I ran it through a rinse cycle in the washing machine to get rid of the lines from unpicking the incorrect piano key quilting. It has now joined the three other quilts waiting for binding in my sewing room.
I realised that the reason I didn't like the coordinating outer border for the unicorn panel quilt was because it was fighting for attention with the unicorn itself. So I put the rainbow colours away and just pulled a boring blue spot from my stash to use instead. It's a bit darker than I would like, but I didn't have anything lighter, and it still coordinates. And it was easy. Now the unicorn has centre stage. Hopefully the recipient will like it.
So I got the borders on, chose a backing, and took it upstairs to load it onto the quilting frame. I have chosen a fairly open, pretty pantograph called Spring Vine from Urban Elementz. It looks nice with the unicorn, and I am over halfway done with the quilting now.
I finished house six of the
Buildings of Britain cross stitch SAL. But it was only when I was adding the outer border for this page of the stitched book I am making, that I realised my house is a row or two, too high on the fabric. I don't know what happened, I would have matched the centre of the chart to the centre of the fabric when I started. So I am going to have to move the border down a row which will put the house slightly out of sync with the other houses. At least in a book, with one house per page, it won't be obvious.
Another mishap this week was with the Dirty Lace shawl that I am knitting from my sock yarn stash. I got all the way through the third chart (26 rows of 141 stitches, with four lace rows) then realised the current lacey holes were not lined up with the holes in the pink border - and they are supposed to. After a few attempts at counting, it turns out I only had 138 stitches instead of 141, despite the lace repeats having apparently worked out. Also the stitches weren't correctly aligned with the bias shape of the shawl. So I had to pull out 26 rows, do some creative bodging to increase stitches at one side and decrease them on the other side, then knit the chart again, I'm almost finished the second go through.
This week I trimmed up all 36 embroideries from the Gail Pan Bloom and Sew BOM. This turned up a few more number-related boo boos. I had traced two of the embroideries in the wrong orientation in their respective rectangles, then I managed to trim another embroidery too small. So I've had to piece extra onto a couple of blocks, good thing I'm not a perfectionist. Then I went through and sewed solid framing pieces around 12 of the embroideries, because the designer's version is quite busy and I felt like the embroideries looked a bit lost. Of course, adding in additional fabric around each embroidery has meant that I've had to entirely recalculate the cutting measurements for the first block (and all the others eventually) and my blocks will be a bit bigger than the original. Recalculating while trying to factor in seam allowances was a challenge for me, got there in the end. This is an in-progress photo of block one of six, but I still have some applique to do on this one (there are hexies to go on the solid blue block). I am mainly using my collection of Tilda fabrics that I amassed during a year's membership of the Tilda club.
In junk journalling this week, I finished a cute little mini journal that I made out of an empty box of tea. I was putting the box in the recycling and was thinking how pretty the colours were. And I had recently seen a video where they made a little book from empty packaging. So over several days, I turned the box into a journal with two sets of pages and decorated it with a lot of tea-related images from my stash. Fun, and less overwhelming to do a small project with a theme.
Today I glued together a collage of scraps to create what is called a 'master board', which I then cut up into various tags and cards which I decorated with stamping and a few bits of glued on ephemera. Strangely satisfying, a bit like crazy quilting. I will probably make more.
I didn't get much done on the small dollshouse kits this week, because the ancient fluorescent light fixture in that room went on the blink, literally. I ordered a new starter component from a company promising delivery in 2-3 days. When I chased on the 4th day, they hadn't even shipped it yet! In response they sent it by fast delivery, and when it arrived, it didn't even work. Luckily it was a set of two, and the second one did work. Won't be ordering from them again. Before the light gave out, I did finish a Model Village miniatures kit for a filled sewing basket.
Have you started any Christmas preparations yet?
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