Chocolate for breakfast

Chocolate for breakfast so it must be Easter. It's nice to keep some of our childhood traditions alive  :)  Classic spring weather with high wind conditions keeping the clouds moving fast so bright sunshine alternating with spitty rain showers.  We're enjoying having a four day weekend thanks to the two bank holidays, and for me it's five days thanks to having Thursdays off anyway.

On Thursday I put the first coat of primer paint on  the outside window beading and the first coat of gloss white on my dollshouse porch, which totalled about four hours of painting white onto white.  The porch looks good but needs another coat. It was incredibly fiddly to paint thanks to all the nooks and crannies around the railings.

Friday we headed up to Peterborough in brilliant sunshine, really looking forward to a day at the Peterborough Antiques Festival. Unfortunately it turned out that thousands of other people had the same idea. We were stuck in a stationary traffic jam for 30 minutes before finally escaping at a roundabout. We took ourselves off to do some shopping for an hour then tried again coming at the fairground from a different direction. We got trapped in another traffic jam as all the roads were still choked for miles.  DH was getting extremely grumpy so we gave up and were headed home - I heard later that some people were in the jam for 2.5 hours before they made it into the fair. Luckily I remembered reading about a big antiques centre in Ely, the Waterside centre, so we diverted that way instead and ended up having a very pleasant afternoon in Ely.  After touring around the centre (and picking up a brass toasting fork, an Edwardian cut-glass drinks glass, a Victorian wrought iron lantern frame and a book) we had lunch in a cafe then enjoyed a stroll in the sunshine around Ely cathedral grounds and the attractive town. Lots of lovely old buildings and a few more antique shops and bookstores to poke around in.

In the evening I finished my dollshouse bell pull, adding its sterling silver end (which miraculously hadn't disappeared in all the years I've been working on this project) and a little tassel. It looks good in the dining room of my Vict-war-gency house.

Yesterday I spent six hours at a 'bring your own projects' day at a quilt shop. I took along what is probably my oldest quilting UFO (although I've got older projects that aren't started yet).  This is a Bear's Paw quilt using a white on white batik background and indigo dyed African fabrics, which I think I started about 15 years ago.  I needed to make 20 blocks and a sawtooth border, and I soon discovered that making a kazillion half square triangles and repetitive blocks was not my idea of fun.  In fifteen years I managed a total of three blocks! Pretty disgraceful really, although I did sew up most of the half square triangles using Thangles papers and I had previously made up some block kits. So yesterday I just got on with it and managed to produce five blocks before I got bored, so a huge improvement on the last fifteen years.  It felt good to be tackling this particular guilt burden. I think I will save it to take to future sewing days, but meanwhile I could prepare more block kits.

I showed the ladies there my Let it Snow quilt and the consensus was that it does need a border of the red sashing, and then blue binding. So I need to do a bit more work on it. In the last few hours of the day, I stitched on another older UFO: my Hawaiian applique quilt which I think is about five years old. I hadn't worked on it since we were living in the rental house a couple of years ago and it took me a while when I was getting ready for the sewing day to remember where I had stashed the thread and tools that go with it.


Also on the hand applique front, I finished what I think is Block 19 of my Grandmother's Last Quilt 25 block applique quilt.  Quite sweet this one.  I've chosen fabrics for the next block, having my usual laugh at my ambitious list for 2007 which proposes that I would make two blocks every month and be done in one year.  Just 10 years or so off the count. The next block is a Rose of Sharon variation and I've traced most of the templates but still need to make bias stems.

I have actually done several rows on my Hooked Rug Kit while watching TV (resulting in several battles with the cat on whether the rug is in my lap or she is - she has grudgingly settled for crawling under the rug canvas to curl up to one side of me). There are just over 100 'stitches' in a row so it is pretty slow going and of course it is using up knitting time.  I have done some more rows on the next GAA Afghan square, and I've started a little baby item. I finally sewed the ties onto the Rowan Summer Tweed Cardigan so it is actually wearable now - I will probably give it an inaugural run at work next week.

Today I spent an hour or so painting the inside and outside of the window in the shed which we had repaired back in the Autumn but the weather has never been nice enough since then for painting on a day when I was available to do the painting. I did the first gloss coat on the cellar windows Friday morning but they will need another coat and so will the shed so more painting next weekend I think. We also headed over to Lamport Hall for their antiques show which is always a pleasant venue. We've got some nice things in the past, and came away today with a 1930s oak-framed barometer, a print of a hunting scene, and a 1940s oak gateleg side table. DH also managed to find a plastic Napoleonic model kit which I don't think is technically an antique but he was pleased. The side table is for the lounge and is a cheap placeholder until we find the perfect table.  Although it's pretty sturdy so we will probably own it for years now.

Just waiting for the roast lamb to finish cooking for our Easter Sunday dinner.  Happy Easter everyone!

Remember when

Ah, 1972. The fashions, the flares, the plastic yarn...  I was looking through an old issue of an American magazine, McCall's Needlework and Crafts, and the pictures were so amusing I thought I would share a few.

Crochet was hot.  And in 100% acrylic yarn, think how really hot these poor people would have been in their crocheted outfits. Check out the crocheted pedal pushers.

Or how about these stylish hot pants, and that fringed vest?  Still all acrylic.

You could crochet your own.

And this ad isn't sexist at all.  Check out the crocheted bikini.

Glamorous crocheted evening gowns, complete with white bra flashing through the navy mesh.

There was a minority of knitted patterns in this issue. How about a cabled trouser suit? I feel too hot just looking at this picture.

I wonder if 45 years from now we'll be laughing at the fashions in magazines from 2016?

Resurrecting old UFOs

Delving into my own past, I was clearing up my desk and came across a little petit point project which I started many years ago. It's a Janet Granger Designs bell pull kit for a 1/12th scale dollshouse room, done on silk gauze with one strand of embroidery floss.  I had limped my way to within an inch of the end. I think I stalled out first because two of the greens were so similar that I kept getting confused, secondly because I can't count so have trouble with stitched charts, and thirdly because I kept getting lost on said chart. Roll forward to modern technology and I could convert the chart into a PDF and track my progress using Goodreader on the iPad.  I found that if I did one row at a time then I didn't get lost and didn't get too confused with the colours, although it did mean a lot of threading and unthreading. It still took a year or so but since taking this picture yesterday I have finally reached the last row of the chart.  Of course, when I started this project I could do it with the naked eye in a good light, but I have finished it using my magnifying Optivisor so that I can see what I'm doing.

Another UFO, only a few years old I think, is this knitted telephone box.  I was very disappointed at the time because the finished sample in the book correctly showed a three-pane-wide window like the classic British telephone box, but I didn't notice until well into the project that the chart in the book was for an incorrect four-pane window. Also it is not small and cute like it looked in the photo, but big and unwieldy.  After I finished knitting it, I never stuffed it because I had no source for foam rubber.  But when I was cleaning up the workshop last week I came across some cheap decorating sponges and realised I could use them instead.  I just had to cut them to fit, add some toy stuffing at the top and sew the roof on.  So it's done.  And as DH said, now what do I do with it? I suppose it is a conversation piece. Or a really big pincushion.

I think I'm on a roll because I went up to the attic and rescued my Readicut hooked rug project which I last worked on a couple of years ago when we were renting, in between houses. Going on the rag rug course a few weeks ago made me feel like I want to finish this rug but we'll see how long that impulse lasts against the tedium of hooking.  There is a reason why things become UFOs.

Quilting

Today was Worldwide Quilting Day and I celebrated by excavating some of the cobwebbed corners of my sewing room where I had piles of things waiting to be put away, waiting to be mended, waiting to be completed etc.  After four hours of putting away fabric, ribbon, buttons, cardmaking stuff, rugmaking stuff, framing three pictures, changing the buttons on a waistcoat, returning items to other parts of the house, hanging two mirrors, sorting out a two foot high stack of magazines, clearing the remains of the last several projects I've completed, sticking cuttings into inspiration books and sorting out more storage - it really doesn't look much different.  But I feel better for having done it.

I topped out the Let it Snow quilt on Thursday when I needed to stay in the sewing room within earshot of some workmen replacing windows in the woodshop and dollshouse room.  I proudly hung the top to take some photos, then sat back to admire it. That's when I noticed that I had sewn the bottom panel of snowballs on upside down.

I fixed the mistake yesterday afternoon after work. I'm going to piece a back out of the leftover snowman fabrics I collected. I decided not to put a border on the quilt, I like it the way it is and it's about five feet wide so big enough to be a throw. I like all the cheerful scrappy colours and the plaid squares dancing with each other.  The snowmen are all made from white wool felt so look realistically 'snowy'.

Real house

Nothing much happened on the dollshouse porch kit this week because I had to spend one evening clearing out the study so an estimator could measure the floor for fitting Amtico over the rough floorboards, and two more evenings clearing out the dollshouse room/putting everything back in the dollshouse room so that the windows could be replaced.  We had a broken window in the workshop (inherited) so needed to replace that one, and while we were at it we had the two windows in the dollshouse room beefed up with laminated glass. It took them about three hours of hammering to get through decades of paint and get the beading off and clear out the channels, then a mere 40 minutes to fit the new windows.

Knitting

On the knitting front, I finished the Salpeker square from the GAA Afghan. After sewing on the cabled border, I disguised the seam by crocheting a chain over it. Then I picked up all around the cable to knit on the garter border.

I've now started what I think is the 20th and final square of the afghan.  In commuter knitting, I am in the middle of turning the heel on the second Basketcheck sock. Progress has been slow because I tend to read on the train in the mornings now instead of knitting. Bad knitter.

Getting my life organised

I have been feeling anxious for a while because my desk was getting more and more covered with things waiting to be sorted out, the box of bills and receipts was overflowing awaiting entry on our financial software, my in tray was full etc etc.  Working four days a week instead of three has made a surprising inroad not just on my available time but on my available energy.

On Thursday I headed off to work as usual on the train, but after a while the train started to slow down in between stations which is always a bad sign.  They announced a total signal failure in the Leicester area which was my destination, no trains going in or coming out.  They had no real suggestion on how one would reach Leicester so I got out at Kettering which was chaos, people milling around, unintelligible announcements, virtually every train cancelled.  I made an executive decision that life was handing me an extra day on a plate so I hopped on the first train coming southwards around the diversion and was back home two hours after I started. I then had the luxury of an entire day to sort out my life in paperwork which felt really great (although I probably worked harder than I would have done at the office!).  The best thing about it was that I already had Friday booked off and had been thinking I would have to devote a day over the long weekend to the paperwork, and then I had three days free with no guilt!  Well worth losing a day of my annual leave allowance.

One of the things I did was sort out a motorhome hire for a week's vacation this summer in Yorkshire. We've never driven a motorhome before but it costs about the same as staying in a hotel and I really like the idea that we can be pretty flexible on where we go. Also that we can relax in the 'living room' in the evenings and knit, read etc. and we won't have to eat out all the time as we can self-cater.  DH developed a passionate loathing for camping in our days of owning a folding camper several years ago but I'm hoping the motorhome will be comfortable enough (and dry inside if it rains) to win him over.

So I've had much more time than usual this weekend for crafts, although we did do three and half hours of gardening yesterday spreading manure and soil improvers which hopefully will yield results as things start to grow.

Dollshouse porch

I've been doing a lot on the dollshouse porch kit. In the week I assembled the railing substructures  using a spacer jig that came with the kit, and then did some preliminary painting on the posts.  As my porch will be removable, I've tried to make it a bit stronger by drilling a hole in the base of each post so that I could insert a cocktail stick 'dowel' to glue into a corresponding hole in the porch.

Of course, trying to get the holes in just the right position that the posts are in the right places to avoid gaps between the rails, while keeping the posts vertical and the rails spaced correctly, was enough to make me wish I had eight arms like an octopus.  The straight sections were bad enough; the octagonal gazebo was a saga.  But eventually after using up most of a roll of masking tape I achieved a result which wasn't too bad.

The next task was to assemble the ceiling, cut it to fit round my house (which is different that the house the kit was designed for), prep it, attach the trim, and then glue it onto the posts. I gingerly weighted it down with paint tins, holding my breath in case the whole thing collapsed like a pack of cards.

Somewhat to my surprise, the structure held up.  After the glue dried I was able to drill through the ceiling and dowel into the tops of the posts for added strength.  Then today I glued on the trim around the floor edge, and glued in the gingerbread trim between the posts - more sanding and tweaking and lots more masking tape.  It's starting to look really nice.

Although I did have a conversation with DH about the fact that 15 years ago I would have thought it looked great, whereas nowadays I know that any closeup photo with a digital camera is going to highlight any number of flaws, gaps, lumps and bumps. Sigh.  The next big job will be to finish priming the bare wood then carefully paint the final white paint coats on the entire structure before starting on the roof.

Another rescue operation

Remember the cross-stitch pictures from the 80s that I framed a few weeks ago?  Well I've 'rescued' another cross stitch which turned out to be quite a find.  When I spotted it in a bric-a-brac store, it was sealed in a packet and folded so that only the house portion was showing.  I could see that the house was already stitched  and it was priced at only £4 so I thought it was worth a punt and might be something I could frame or cut up to use to cover a box or something.

So I was very surprised when I got home and opened the packet to find a huge and elaborate reproduction of an antique sampler, 95% finished and exquisitely stitched on evenweave linen.  The back is almost as neat as the front. To give some scale, the letters are about half an inch high.

Presumably the expert stitcher who created this is no longer with us, and somehow it ended up at the bric-a-brac store. The top lines are a quote from Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and the bottom quote is from a poem called Endymion by John Keats (thank you, Google).  I will probably try to finish it but I will be worried my stitching will look crude next to the original work.

Other crafts

I've gotten started on the miniature lace shelf edging but it's slow going: each 'zig' is taking about an hour which shows my inexperience.  But it is looking nice, I'm pleased with it.

I've done a few hours of blanket stitching around the Let it Snow quilt snowmen applique corner blocks. It's quite time consuming as there are a lot of thread changes and also I'm having trouble seeing what I'm doing.  My glasses aren't quite the right focal length and the Optivisor is too short a focal length so I end up hunched over the machine. To complicate matters I've somehow managed to lose one of the lens of my glasses and will have to get a replacement.

I finished knitting the cabled frame for the GAA Afghan square. and have started to sew it onto the central square.

I forgot to mention last week that I finished the Rag Rug Christmas Wreath. The teacher's sample had the edges of the hessian turned in on both the inside and the outside, but I rather like the look of the hessian filling the centre of the wreath. It gives  more of a sense of how the 'rug' was made and I think will help the wreath hold its shape. I could use it as a table centre perhaps under a candle, but I also sewed on a ribbon loop so I can hang it on the wall. Fun to try a new craft.

Parrs-Reel Rulers for guided free motion stitching 

I also meant to talk about a new gadget I saw at the Duxford quilt show, which was a set of rulers which can be used to guide freemotion quilting on a domestic machine.  Rulers have been around for quite a while for long arms but weren't previously suitable for use on a domestic machine because the free motion foot is shaped differently and wouldn't safely follow a ruler without hopping over the edge and breaking needles etc.  The Parrs-Reel Ruler comes as a set with a special deep free motion foot, a slippery table mat and thick acrylic rulers with channels cut out of them in various shapes. Their website has videos I think and I watched the vendor demonstrating. Basically she was holding the ruler down to the quilt's surface and moving the quilt so that the foot travelled along the channel. It looked cumbersome and as the rulers are not that long it required frequent starting and stopping to adjust the ruler. By aligning the ruler in different ways, you could turn a serpentine curve into a chain of circles for example by moving the ruler and stitching back along a previously stitched pattern.  Or you could pivot the ruler after stitching a half-oval to stitch the other half of the oval.They had stitched examples of all their ruler patterns but most of them seemed to be patterns which could be stitched free motion with a little practice.  The basic set costs from £49.95 and each ruler after that is £12 I think so it is not cheap.  And it will not work on a quilting frame as unlike a long-arm, a domestic machine on a frame lacks the supporting 'table' surface underneath the quilt to apply the ruler onto.  So an interesting idea but not something I feel I would invest in.

Hurrah for an empty nest

Although our nest is only sporadically empty while DS is off at university, I do appreciate the relative freedom I have to enjoy myself all weekend compared to some of my younger colleagues who complain about never having any time to themselves. (Although I do believe that you make time for the priorities in your life).

This weekend we took the cat to Fat Camp for her monthly weigh in, she's slimmed right down and the vet is much happier with her. Then we went to B&Q and picked up a car load of soil improvers for the garden which I will spread next weekend. The afternoon was the gardening society, where I listened to a talk from the keeper of the national Euphorbia collection with lots of pretty pictures of gorgeous plants. He also had some plants for sale so I bought a pretty blue shrub that I can't remember the name of but hopefully it will live to be big enough to plant out.

Then I headed down to the workshop to make a start on my dollshouse porch kit.  It is freezing in the unheated basement (not quite literally, but pretty close) which necessitates bundling up in hat, cowl, and bulky jumpers. I've decided to construct the porch as a stand alone assembly, because it is way too big to try to attach to the dollshouse. I'm also going to try to retain the existing porch of the house so it still looks ok with out the add-on porch, so I had to cut out the kit to fit around the house. I've also had to shorten the side wing as my house isn't as deep as the house it was designed for.  Lots of gluing and nailing and filling, then today some sanding and priming. It feels good to be building something again. I haven't built anything since I 'finished' the Fairfield kit in 2012. And now I have the luxury of building in a workshop which, although very cold,  has electricity after a somewhat grumpy electrician installed some extra powerpoints for me this week.

Today was very crafty.  In the morning we headed up to Peterborough for a model show that DH wanted to go to. I went in for a look around, although plastic models are not really my thing. I was interested to see a couple of vendors marketing custom laser cut products: quite elaborate paint storage systems, brush holders, modellers work trays, special stands to hold work in progress etc. It just shows how laser cutters have come down in price so that niche markets can make use of them. There also seems to be more laser cutting going on in the dollshouse world but I haven't seen any for knitters yet. A missed opportunity perhaps because similar assemblies to what I saw today would work to hold needles, interchangeables, sewing tools etc.  There were also vendors selling tools and I picked up a pack of sanding sponges and a set of razor saw blades for my X-acto knife which may come in useful.

After a nice Mexican lunch at Chiquitos which wasn't too crowded despite being Mothering Sunday here in the UK, we headed to the Imperial War Museum at Duxford where Grosvenor was running its Spring Quilt Show.  I'd never been before but I'd heard it was good for fabric and indeed there seemed to be a lot of well priced fabric available. Several stands were selling at £6m which is pretty good for the UK. I  wasn't really in the market for fabric but I did pick up some blue with white circles on it which may work as a 'snow' border for my Let it Snow quilt.

It was a bit of an unusual venue for a quilt show - to get to the entrance you had to walk through a hangar of enormous planes and at one end of the quilt exhibition floor there was a helicopter just casually parked near the cafe.

It was quite chilly inside which was good because I didn't see a coat check and I certainly didn't get too hot wearing my heavy winter coat around the exhibition. I felt sorry for the stallholders though. I was there in mid afternoon and it wasn't busy at all, but it must have been better on Friday and Saturday because some vendors were sold out of patterns and kits.

I picked up some Aurifil thread to try it again for piecing, podcasters rave about it but I tried it several years ago and didn't like it. I also got a replacement teflon pressing sheet because I have managed to lose both of mine somehow in my sewing room.  Janome were there which reminded me that my quarter inch foot has become quite wobbly and inaccurate. I was going to replace it with the same foot but they showed me a convertible see-through quarter inch foot for the same price so I got that to give it a try.

This wasn't a show with quilts entered for competition but it did have various small displays by artists or groups. It wasn't a big show and not that many quilts on display, but a good selection of vendors.  My impulse buy of the day was a very cute pattern and kit for a pincushion, sewing box and scissors keeper in the shape of toadstools from Endless Threads. I was very tempted by her other patterns for house shaped objects but decided to go with this one as it had a kit. They are made from felt and the detail is a combination of applique and machine embroidery.

In the car to and from the shows, I was knitting on my GAA Afghan Salpekar square. I had finished the cabled centre in the week, and now I am knitting a cabled border to go around the centre.  The written instructions for the mitred corner didn't make any sense to me and after two failed attempts I looked on Ravelry to find that other people had also had problems. Luckily one lovely lady had charted out replacement instructions so I downloaded those and managed to turn the corner at last sitting down with a cup of tea while DH was looking around the model show.

While Mr Grumpy Electrician was working on the workshop this week, I stayed within earshot in my sewing room and got on with my final four blocks from the Let it Snow Quilt. They are now all fused down and I just need to do all the blanket stitching and detail stitching. One of them is a snow cat, which is my own version of the original pattern which was more of a snow man with cat whiskers and cat ears. I didn't think it looked very realistic so I re-drew the shape to look more like a cat. There's also a snow angel, a snow boy, and a snow skater.

Otherwise this week I've done some more commuter knitting on the second Basket Check Sock, done some more cross-stitch on my big project, and ordered (and received) some lacemaking DVDs borrowed from the Lace Guild's library. The DVDs are by Christine Springett on Torchon Lace, and Bridget Cook on Bucks Point, and I'm sure I will learn by seeing lace done rather than just reading about it out of books. I did do a few more inches on my miniature bobbin lace shelf edging and so far have not broken the thread, so I'm pleased. I managed to re-draw the working diagram in the book with some Tippex and black Sharpie to correct the errors, and it's going alright now.

Hope you've had a crafty weekend as well!

Apparently I really am Sheldon

My family have suggested before that I have tendencies in common with the character of Sheldon from the Big Bang Theory. Even I've felt the similarities this week because our new sofas came and I just can't find 'my spot'.  I spent many happy evenings curled up in the corner of our knackered old IKEA corner sofa, knitting and sewing on projects while I watched TV.  So far I've tried four different positions on the two new sofas and I just can't get comfortable. They are very nice sofas and look much better in our front room than the dilapidated cat-shredded washing-machine-shrunk grubby covers and rock hard lumpy cushions of the old one. But they don't have my spot. I shall keep trying.

While shifting around uncomfortably, I did finish sewing in the sleeves of my Rowan Summer Tweed Cardigan. I was afraid it would be too small but it actually fits rather nicely at the moment. From prior experience I am expecting the yarn to droop a little over time but I think it will be a nice cardigan to wear to work. I just need to attach two ties to tie the fronts together. I do like this yarn, a mixture of silk and cotton that has a rustic dry handle and is very comfortable to wear. The pattern is a Kim Hargreaves design for Rowan, and I adapted it to eliminate the side and sleeve seams.

I also finished the Hewitt square of the GAA Afghan. Originally I wasn't going to knit this as the pattern shows it with multiple bobbles which I didn't like. But then I saw a square by another Raveler who had omitted the bobbles and it looked ok.  I didn't enjoy knitting it though due to the bizarre cable crosses across as many as 12 stitches which were quite fiddly.

I've now started my 19th of 20 squares which is the Salpekar square, which uses some clever tricks to create the appearance of a central cable panel with no obvious start or finish.

I've had a crafty weekend. Yesterday I went to a rag rug workshop to learn how to make a wreath. The tutor Lynda Kinnard was demonstrating various techniques to make a variety of flowers against hooked or prodded backgrounds.  I went with a prodded wreath and a Christmas theme and got on fairly well, I just have two more panels of background to fill in. The greens are a variety of cut up jumpers and the red is a cut-up wool coat from a charity shop.

The instructions say to stabilise the finished edges with glue, then cut out the wreath shape and add a backing.  You could use the same technique to make a rug but I'm not sure this is a hobby I would like to pursue.  For one thing a whole day of it made my hand quite sore because of the repetitive motion. But I enjoyed the day and I'm pleased with my wreath.

Today I had some lacemaking friends over and showed off my completed second miniature dollshouse lace mat.  It's turned out better than the first one although still far from perfect.  I've now started on some miniature shelf edging but there seems to be an error with the working diagram in the book so I need to figure out what to do.

I've finished touching up the paint on my Canadian dollshouse and it looks a lot fresher now, to me at least.  I've also toned down the Day-Glo red Disney effect on the 'brick' chimney by overpainting with various colours of acrylic, and cleaned off several years of accumulated grime from the plexiglass dust covers. I should probably sort out some issues on the inside before I turn my attention to the porch kit.

We went to see a local garden open for charity today full of spring flowers like narcissi, hellebores and swathes of snowdrops.  Very pretty and inspirational. Also they were selling plants quite cheaply so I picked up a couple more hellebores for my garden and three little pots of blooming narcissi for the dining room for now and I will plant them out when the flowers fade. It's turned quite cold again so I think I will be bundling up for my walk to the station tomorrow.

More of the same

Nothing really new this week because I've only been working on existing projects that you've already seen.   I did go to a bobbin lace day yesterday down in Bletchley which was quite pleasant. It was well attended with perhaps 100 ladies (and two gentlemen) working away on various crafts, four traders, a raffle table, tombola, sales table, and refreshments. I took my second dollshouse lace mat project and managed to finish it including the sewings, so I just need to trim the ends and hide them. This second attempt went much better than the first time, I only broke one thread and managed to make the joinings at the end without breaking any of the starting loops. I've chosen my next project from the same book which is a 1/12th scale lace edging for shelves on a Victorian kitchen dresser, and I wound 10 pairs of bobbins for it. From the suppliers I picked up a tiny .5mm crochet hook, and on the sales table I got some back issues of Lace magazine, a little booklet on Bucks Point lace, and some lace pattern books.  We also received a goodie bag which has a few little projects and patterns in it which was fun.

On the knitting front I wound some yarn from a skein to start some toe up Lallybroch socks from a pattern I bought at FibreEast but I've only knit about an inch.  TV knitting has mainly been a square from my GAA Afghan, the same square I've been working on for several months which I'm not really enjoying. A few more inches and it will be done then I have two more to knit.

I also finished the second sleeve for my Rowan Summer Tweed cardigan and have blocked the sleeves and the cardigan body. I'm not sure if I've been too clever knitting the smaller size to combat the way this yarn tends to droop, it's looking a bit small overall and I'm not sure it's going to fit but we'll see once it's dry..

I haven't done any dollshousing this week but I've been procrastinating with purpose as I've continued to fix up and tidy up our real workshop.  It's not looking too bad now, and I've called the electrician to get onto his queue of work so he will come and fit some more sockets around the room.  You can see I've unpacked the table saw but still haven't read the instruction booklet. It's really cold in this room, it's got damp brick walls and a damp brick floor and the wind whistles in through gaps around the window. We will have to look out for some second yoga mats at boot sales to put down underfoot and look into expanding foam to fill the gaps.

I didn't do any sewing all week so today I made myself do a couple of hours and sew the borders together for my Let it Snow quilt which is becoming increasingly unseasonal as the spring bulbs start to come up outside in the garden.  I haven't sewn on the top and bottom borders because I need to make the final four corner snowman applique blocks.

It's turned a bit warmer today, 10 degrees although still quite windy.  We went out and gave the garden a good tidy up, collecting up the dead leaves and trimming off dead stalks and dead sedum heads etc. It was such a warm winter that the plants got very confused, some things were blooming in December that should have been starting to bud now so I don't know if that was it or if we will get another flush of bloom on things like the cherry tree.  I seem to have had my usual bad luck with the c 450 bulbs I planted - there are a lot coming up but probably less than 100. And the slugs are doing their usual number on my primroses which are just chewed husks dotted here and there around the garden. But we've got some lovely clumps of snowdrops and several crocuses opening in the intermittent sunshine, and some of the miniature narcissi are blooming. The magnolia tree has lovely fat buds on it so I'm looking forward to its gorgeous flowers, and the forsythia has lots of flower buds growing. The photinia tree we planted last summer hasn't grown any taller yet but it does have attractive new growth glowing red against the main greenery all over the tree, so hopefully it will shoot up a bit this year.

A moment's inattention and bye-bye to most of a day's salary

My commute home by train is by a London train which stops in Kettering.  It is one of a trio of trains that come in a cluster within a few minutes of each other:  a non-stop train to London, a train to Birmingham, then the London stopping train.  I suppose it was only a matter of time before I got on the wrong one.  At least I didn't end up in Birmingham.  The trains must have come out of order yesterday due to some delay, because I got on the one after the Birmingham train only to realise after 40 minutes that Kettering was just not going to happen.  So my half hour commute home turned into a two and a quarter hour round trip to London and back, with the added punishment of having to buy an expensive London train ticket to avoid a penalty fare.  Grrrr.  Let's hope I don't do that more than once a year. At least it was a Friday so I didn't have to go to work today.

Today we continued to work on fixing up our cellar room, starting with a massive clear out of junk which went to the recycling depot/dump. Leftover moving cartons, leftover bits of flatpack furniture, warped shelves with rusty fittings that came off the walls, all sorts of clutter, broken bits, fittings from furniture long since gone, rusty paint cans etc etc etc.  One huge car load later and it all looked much clearer.  Off to B&Q to buy a second lot of lumber to build a second workbench. We didn't get it all built, but it's mostly done. It went a lot easier the second time because we knew what we were doing and already had the measurements worked out.  We still need to give the walls a good brushdown: all the paint is horribly flaking and many of the bricks are spalling due to the damp in this unfinished Victorian cellar.  Then we can start making toolracks for the walls and figuring out where things will go. We need more electrics fitted - I showed the electrician when he came to do my sewing room and asked him if he would be able to run more powerpoints in such a damp room but he didn't seem to feel it would be a problem.

Then I will finally be able to set up the Proxxon tablesaw I bought secondhand last year.  I have a childhood phobia about tablesaws brought on by having to hold the other end of a huge wobbling sheet of plywood while my Dad fed the front end into his roaring monster cutting machine. The noise and violence of it terrified me at the time and I still feel pretty nervous around electric saws. However the Proxxon is just a baby blade so hopefully I will get on with it ok - which is not to say that it wouldn't cut my fingers off in a second so I will still need to be careful.  I also have a vertical belt sander and an electric scroll saw - neither of them very good quality, but I will set them up for the first time since we moved in 2003 to a smaller house. The power tools will either go on the workbench in the foregound or on the adapted table against the far wall.

Crafts

This week my second ball of white yarn turned up from Blacker Yarns and I was able to finish my Baa-ble mittens to match the hat.  Meanwhile I've ripped off the brim from the hat and am re-knitting it to be snugger and hopefully more windproof, and a bit deeper.

I've been wearing my Jaeger Fleece windproof hat a lot the last few weeks as we are having another cold snap. It's hovering around 5 degrees C and windy in the daytime, and sinking down near to freezing at night. The hat is pleasingly warm and covers my ears nicely.

I've done a bit of sewing this week. I cut the rest of the plaid squares for the border blocks of my Let it Snow quilt and pieced 8 panels of 12 three-inch squares which are pleasantly scrappy - I think the plaids add to the cosy winter feel.  The cat kept me company and chose the basket of plaid fabrics as the most comfortable spot in the room in which to perform her ablutions. No doubt the remaining fabrics are now covered in cat hair which was probably her aim all along.

I cut more 6.5" squares from the new blue mottled background fabric and re-pieced the border strips with the original snowball blocks.  My design wall isn't tall enough to display a vertical quilt so everything looks a bit higgledy-piggledy at the moment until it all gets seamed together. Then I need to make four corner blocks which each have a different appliqued snowman in them.

I put together another dollshouse swap item using some of the Fimo food that I created when we were in the rental house two years ago. I had an unpainted crate which I aged and then added some printed labels, I was pleased with the end result.  This is 1/12th scale and hopefully my swap partner will like it. I didn't make the marrow, it was in my stash.

I've started the next dollshouse renovation project. This is my oldest house which I built in Canada in the early 80s and brought over to the UK when I emigrated. Over the years it has taken many knocks so I spent some time filling in dents and gouges, and gave the woodwork a clean.  The 'clear' glue that I used 30 years ago has now turned toffee brown where it is exposed to the air so I have to decide whether to try to get it off or just repaint the entire exterior of the house which is looking very tired.

The sad micro-porch is all that is left of a Federal-style porch with columns and a porch railing, which had to be cut off in our first real house because it projected too much to allow the house to sit on the available shelf.  You may remember I impulse-bought a heavily-discounted kit for a wraparound porch at Maple Street dollshouse shop a few years ago, thinking it might go onto this house and improve the external appearance.

Today I opened the kit for the first time and discovered there is considerably more DIY involved than I was hoping for.  I think this will have to wait until the new workshop is up and running.  It's going to make the dollshouse quite large and therefore harder to pivot it around to see inside, unless perhaps I can keep the porch detachable.