Fewer posts for the next few months

 Tomorrow afternoon DH is driving me to the airport then Monday morning I am off to Japan.  I will catch the cherry blossom in full bloom - yay! - but the day I arrive will be raining all day and heavily overcast - boo!  The following day is supposed to be a little better.  I'm still looking forward to the experience.  Meanwhile I am working through my 'to do' list to get ready.  Hopefully I won't forget anything crucial.  Due to the late change of departure date, I am now arriving in Tokyo at 7am and not my preferred late afternoon arrival time.  So I will be stumbling around cherry blossom sites suffering from jetlag as well as getting rained on - instead of collapsing gratefully into a hotel room.  Wish me luck, I'm not as young as I once was :)

On previous trips, I have tried to maintain the every-weekend blogging schedule but I don't know if I will this trip.  It's laborious to blog on the road, especially having to resize each photo on my phone prior to upload. Also I find it hard to  balance the topics of crafting and craft shopping versus travel blogging.  So there will likely be fewer posts for the next few months.  I am planning to hit up some of the craft places I've been to previously such as Nippori fabric town and Okadaya, and visit some new ones such as the massive stationery store Otaya, in Ginza.  I don't think I will go to the quilt shops again this time, because I am still working through what I purchased last trip.  I am taking a second empty suitcase for purchases but overall I need to keep things to a manageable weight.

I finished the embroidered houses canister.  It's turned out pretty well apart from the fusible fleece I used isn't very stiff so the canister is a bit floppy.  It's nice to use the embroidered panel for something that isn't a zip pouch.

I sewed the binding onto the Primrose Cottage tablerunner and we've been using it on the dining table for a few days.

And I finished quilting the Lori Holt My Happy Place Quilt - the pics are from straight off the frame, I haven't trimmed it or washed it yet.  There are also a few more embellishments to sew on now that it's quilted, such as buttons onto the button jar. Her designs are so cheerful, they make me smile.  The quilting is a mixture of ruler work and free motion background meanders.  This is intended as a wallhanging although it is a little big big on my hanging rod in the hallway.

See you in Japan!

One week to go

 One week until I fly (assuming Heathrow airport is back to normal operation after the big fire that completely closed it recently) and I am officially now in the 'oh sh*t why did I ever think this was a good idea?' phase of preparation.  I know from experience that once I get there it will be fine. But in the meantime I am full of worries and anxieties about everything from overpacking to feeling burned out once I've been there a while.  In case you are catching up, I'm off on a two month trip to Japan with a side couple of weeks in South Korea.  This is also the week where I need to get through my 'to do before I go' list, finishing up craft projects and not starting any new ones, stop ordering anything online, cancel my online sale postings, sort out paperwork for things that will happen when I'm away.  And I've been printing out all my confirmations and advance research to take with me.

There have been some interesting discussions in the travel groups online about how to take your trip information with you on a longer trip.  For many these days, particularly younger people, it's all digital and all on their phone - cue agonised posts when they lose or break said phone or can't recharge.  Some people use apps in the cloud that they can at least access from a cyber cafe if their phone goes.  But a number of us of all ages still print everything for quick reference and just in case of phone issues.   There are equally interesting discussions about how much research and pre-booking to do before a trip, which is a broad spectrum with people at one end who grab a last-minute flight and arrive eagerly at their destination with just their passport and credit card, to people at the other end like me who want to do as much research as humanly possible and pre-book all the main requirements.  There is no right answer, it's down to your personality and comfort zone.  I'm very risk averse, and would rather enjoy myself when I get there, and not have to spend time all day peering at a phone screen trying to work out where to go and whether it's open. I would also rather avoid the known tourist traps and disappointing sights, and instead visit the best sights and the hidden gems.  And of course these days you often need to prebook well in advance for the big sights. The downside is that my pack of printed documents is over an inch thick and will be heavy on the plane when I have to carry all of it (due to the risk of a checked bag going missing).  But day to day I only take with me what I need that day plus some overall itinerary information.  I also email myself everything important as a back up, in case I somehow lose my hard copies.  Additionally, I find going through my itinerary to assemble my paperwork is a great way to doublecheck I haven't missed anything or mis-booked anything (I have been known to mistakenly book a hotel for a wrong date!) since I do my own bookings.

Anyway, on the craft front, I finished my little Japanese redwork zipper pouch.  This apparently simple pouch turned out to be a bit difficult.  The patches on the front, which I had assumed were all the same width, are in fact all tapered, in addition to having curved top and bottom seams.  So I had to dust off my very rusty hand-piecing skills and trace individual templates for every piece then hand stitch the two panels together.

I could do some of the main assembly by machine including adding the narrow piping, then the bias binding finishes and the zip had to be done by hand.  But I'm fairly pleased with how it's turned out, it's cute and looks like the picture.

 

While working on the redwork pouch, I came across a video tutorial, possibly Korean, for a canister-shaped pouch with similar assembly methods. I realised that I could adapt it to feature my embroidered houses panel that I had just finished.  So I've been working on that the last few days.  This is the side piece of the canister with the zip installed.  Again, there is a lot of hand work to do the finishing work, which is enjoyable to do in front of the telly.

I've quilted my Primrose Cottage tablerunner in a crosshatch pattern, so I just need to bind it now.  And I'm almost finished quilting on the longarm frame my Lori Holt My Happy Place quilt - I just need to stitch the borders. I'd like to get it done and off the frame before I go.

We went to visit DS and his girlfriend yesterday, and at their request I took along 7 or 8 quilts for them to look at in case they wanted any of them.  They surprised me by asking for four of them: two smaller ones including my Spoondrift BOM by Janet Clare, and a Stack'n'whack kaleidoscope design by Beth Reynolds, and two bedsize quilts including the supposedly 'Easy Stars' quilt and the big William Morris gridded squares quilt I made several years ago.  His girlfriend doesn't come from a quilting or crafting family, but has embraced the idea of wrapping in quilts for warmth while working at the desk, watching TV, on the bed etc.  DS of course was brought up right :)  It felt good to pass them on to a good home and see them right away being enjoyed and used.

Stash-diving

 This week I've been deep diving in the various stashes, pulling out things to work on.

I had this Time for Tea digital panel that I picked up a few years ago after seeing it online.  I love pretty china in real life.  I pinned it up on the design wall and tried out various coordinating fabrics which matched colours from the panel.  But I found that most of them 'shouted' too loudly and overshadowed the delicate colours of the print.  So in the end I've gone with pastels for two borders, and an inner border of a coordinating digital print, that let the print shine as the star.  It's a wallhanging size.

I have a small collection of Dutch repro fabrics that I bought about 20 years ago when they were quite expensive (for me).  I made one small wallhanging then have been sitting on them ever since because they seemed too good to use.  I've been feeling for a while that I need to use them for something, then this free pattern for a Home Sweet Home tablerunner from Primrose Cottage came along.   So today I have sewed up my own version with a slightly modified border.  This will look cheerful on the table.

I've started a Japanese redwork zip pouch embroidery kit that I won in a raffle a few years ago.  I had to translate the directions.  The kit includes all the fabric and even the zipper.

The reason I could start a new embroidery is because I finished the stitching for the French kit for the embroidered houses zip pouch.  After I finished the houses, I tea-dyed some woven stabiliser to knock the white back, then fused it onto the back  of the linen as a stabiliser, before stitching the border.  I'm pleased with the overall effect, quite whimsical.  It's supposed to be sewn onto the front of a zipped pouch - no fabric provided in the kit but there are instructions for how to sew it.  I'm wondering if the stitching might look better though on a tote bag or a pincushion drum.

After tidying up my dollshouse room, I found the little resin food kit that I bought in Tokyo in 2023.  I bought it thinking that the supplied plates looked 1/12th scale, which turned out to be correct.  What I didn't realise was that the resin is UV resin, and needs a UV lamp or a sunny day to harden it. Our sunny weather promptly turned to days of overcast grey but eventually this week there was an afternoon with some intermittent sunny spells.  So I translated the Japanese instructions using Google Translate and sat down to have a go.  It turned out to be exceptionally fiddly, trying to mix resin colours and get them into the tiny silicon molds - and all over my hands and everywhere else. And trying to cut out tiny printed plastic embellishments to add to the resin, without pinging them into space, and having them stick to my resin-y hands.  Every time you added something, it had to go back outside to sit in the sun for 10 minutes or so.  But eventually I achieved three plates of French desserts which I think look fairly impressive.  The macarons were supplied so really you were just sticking them together on the plate with resin.  The hardest one (and the messiest) was the strawberry pudding which required multiple stages of hardening.  The waffle things with the sauce also were fairly elaborate.  But I'm quite pleased with them, I will look out when I'm back in Tokyo in case I can find other variations.

In my quilt shop for scale

And I finished my handmade book.  It has a decorated cover, a ribbon bookmark, and a proper spine that holds the 160 pages.  My page trimming was a bit rough although after taking this photo, I found out from a Youtube video that you can sand the page edges  to smooth them, so I tried that which improved them somewhat.  It was quite fun making an actual real book, I'm quite pleased with it.

More decluttering this week - we took some big bags of books and clothes to the charity shop and also a handmade crochet granny square afghan which I have been feeling guilty about for over 30 years.  It was a wedding present from a cousin-by-marriage and I really appreciated all the work she put into it and she hauled it all the way from Canada to the UK for the wedding.  But it was scratchy and due to the holey nature, never as warm as a nice soft patchwork quilt.  In some houses we displayed it as a throw, but we've never really used it.  So that's gone off to the charity shop and hopefully someone will love it and take it home.

Korean food, sumo, various crafts and a new interest of bookbinding

 I don't need supper tonight because we drove up to my old stomping ground of Leicester for an enormous lunch at a Korean restaurant I found online.  I've never had Korean food, so I wanted to try some of it before my upcoming trip to South Korea in late April.  I worked in Leicester for three years until we were suddenly sent home for the first COVID lockdown in March 2020.  It's only five years ago but feels like so much longer - the COVID time distortion effect once again I guess.  Today I tried tteokbokki (Korean rice cakes in a spicy sauce) and a big bowl of bibimbap (a bit like a buddha bowl with veg and seafood on top of rice with an egg on top of it all), kimchi (fermented cabbage) and radish pickles.  It was all delicious and not overly spicy (I'm a wimp when it comes to spice) but I asked the manager and she said they have toned it down for the UK palate and that it will be spicier in Korea.  Some of the things I ate are made with soy sauce which contains gluten, which is going to be the case in South Korea where apparently food allergies are still not widely understood.  I haven't reacted too much so hopefully I won't starve while I'm there for two weeks.  Afterwards we walked around Leicester a bit which is a lively city with loads of charming lanes of cafes and boutiques lined with period buildings, and had a look at my former office. It made me a bit nostalgic for work but only in the sense of having skills that I was using to productively resolve casework - I do not miss all the politics and people nonsense in the slightest.

The big excitement this week was that tickets went on sale for the 2025 sumo tournament at London's Royal Albert Hall in October.  I had paid out to become a Friend of the RAH to be eligible for the pre-sale, which turned out to be well worth it as most of the tickets went then, and people trying to buy in the general sale a few days later had very slim to none pickings.  I queued up an hour in advance in the online waiting room, then randomly got allocated position 2146, so had to wait another 30-40 minutes before my turn came up.  Seat availability was literally disappearing off the seating plan before my eyes, but I managed to grab a couple of seats for the final day in the Circle.  Still expensive but not the eye-watering prices of the better located Stalls. Hopefully we will be able to see ok. There are people in the sumo Facebook groups who have paid £600 or more for their seats - you are starting to reach a level where it wouldn't cost much more to fly to Japan.  Who knew there were so many sumo fans prepared to come to London?

This week I finished another cross stitched house in the Buildings of Britain SAL, this is my fourth one.  It's turned out well apart from I completely bodged the 'B' in 'Belfast' - you have to squash an uppercase 'B' into a single square of aida cloth, very difficult to do, I had about six tries then gave up.  I shall have to fix it later.

After finishing that, I returned to working on the French embroidered pouch kit.  I'm belatedly thinking that I should have backed the linen with some iron-on stabiliser before starting to stitch, but it's too late now.  It's starting to look quite cute, with all the little details of each house.

I sewed the binding onto my American embroidered panel Paducah quilt kit and have hung it up in the hall.  Due to the different densities and textures of the quilting around  the different styles (applique, embroidery, piecing), it is not hanging very flat but instead is a bit bulgy.  It might calm down with age as the fabric softens over time.  It was the first time that I have tried to quilt around embroidery, it turned out relatively well I think.  I'm still not incredibly keen on the asymetrical design although I think my modifications (the additional 9-patches with the butterfly block to help square it up) give it more balance.  The embroidery is quite cute, and I have happy memories of stitching the blocks while I was in Japan a couple of years ago for language school.

After sewing on the binding, I went back to the Double Wedding Ring quilt and sewed another block for it.  Try as I might, the blocks are still coming out wonky.  I am just not a precision sewer.  Hopefully it will all quilt out ok.

On the loom, I have started on a scarf in a finer weave than I have previously tried, using the second heddle I purchased which is a 12.5 dent  so suitable for fingering weight yarns.  I've warped with a Yeomans Panama cotton, and I'm weaving with a Denis Brunton Magicolour yarn which changes colour every so often.  The effect is a little more subtle than I was hoping, but it's good practice for me as I am still trying to get better selvedges and avoid the edges narrowing in. It's also a longer warp than I have previously worked with.

This week I pulled out the little laser cut kit for a Maori wharenui or meeting place, that I bought in New Zealand.  The basic tab and slot kit was just white on one side of brown MDF, with the addition of a decorated red front and a window/door.  I should have taken a 'before' picture.  I wanted it to look more like the actual meeting places that I visited, so I consulted the many photos I had taken.  I've painted the roof and interior porch, added painted red pillars and decorated black roof beams, and drawn on the suggestion of board siding, and put it onto a base.  It's still obviously a toy but has much more of the look of what I actually saw.

The real thing:

This week I have been dabbling in a new interest: bookbinding.  I've watched quite a few videos, and I used my new Epson Ecotank printer to print off 80 sheets of doublesided colour journal pages.  I'm using a cherry blossom Japan themed set of graphics purchased from Vectoriadesigns on etsy, with the idea that it can become my travel journal when I get back. Very pleasingly, the printer ink levels for black and cyan barely moved, while the ink levels for magenta and yellow only went down less than 1/4 inch, despite printing 80 doublesided colour sheets.  My old printer would have used up a full set of cartridges, at least. After trimming the white margin off the pages, I folded signatures of 10 sheets each, and then sewed them together using kettle stitch in preparation for case binding.

After sewing the signatures and weighting them down, the spine is treated with PVA glue

Next I will be making a cover out of a 50p thrifted book (the insides are discarded). Fun to try something new, and as is usual when you are a multi-crafter, I already had some of the necessary tools: an awl I use for sewing, bookbinding glue I use for cartonnage, a bone folder I use for dollshousing and card making and so on.

DS has expressed interest in having more quilts for his new house, so I went through my vast collection to see what I am prepared to part with.  It made me realise that my tastes have really changed with the times: I am much more into the modern brighter colours now, and more whimsical designs, whereas before I had a long phase of reproducing antique quilts in darker colours and heavier styles. I also used to rescue vintage tops when I found them at a good price on trips to America and felt sorry for them, and I would fix them and maybe add to them then quilt them onto a modern backing.  I felt very torn about several quilts - while they no longer 'spark joy' for me, I still remember how much time and effort went into them (extreme amounts in some cases over years) and some of them cost a lot to make due to fabric ordered from abroad, or because they were a kit etc.  The rest of my brain was remembering my m-i-l crying in her cluttered room surrounded by things she can no longer use and hasn't used for years, and I know I need to downsize my collection.  I haven't counted for quite a while, I think last time I totalled up there were about 35 bed quilts and a lot of smaller things.  You can't sell them in the UK, I used to try and was lucky to get back 70% of the cost of the materials.  So giving them to my only son seems a worthwhile avenue (he already has several).  I picked out 7 or 8 and spread them out on his old bed to have a look at them, then put one back that I still like.  I'll take the others for consideration, although I expect most of them are not his girlfriend's taste either.  

Feeling like spring

 Suddenly it is feeling like spring is just around the corner: we've had a number of beautiful sunny days this week, the garden is full of snowdrops and crocuses (and a few primroses that haven't yet been gobbled by the slugs), there are buds on the roses I pruned in the autumn and I even spotted some early daffodils blooming by the side of the road today.  It's still dropping down to freezing at night, so we're not out of the woods yet.  I've dug out the Spring Flowers quilt that I made about 25 years ago, and hung it up in the hall (the creases haven't hung out yet). I think this was an Quilt in a Day pattern.

I came across a free stitchalong for the Rosa Supply Case, a pattern from Clover & Violet for a handy little zippered book-shaped organiser that is very customisable.  As part of the sew-along, the designer filmed some helpful videos explaining various techniques, and there is a private Facebook group to show off all the makes.  When tidying up my sewing room, I had re-discovered a pack of slow stitching materials including scraps of lace, vintage textiles, trims, embellishments and so forth, that I had purchased from a textile artist at the St Ives show I think.  So I decided to use those materials to make the Rosa Supply Case.  I had to add in a piece of vintage embroidered textile from my m-i-l's stash and a bit of my own fabric, to make a sufficiently sized cover.  It was quite fun coming up with a crazy patchwork design and loading on lots of different trims. As well as using up the slow stitching pack, I also finally got to use a lace 'S' motif that I bought in Tokyo in 2019.

For the inside, I customised it to hold my supplies for quilt binding, and continued the vintage theme. A fun project and I love the way it turned out.

I finished the first two woven fabric placemats and realised I don't  have enough fabric left to make two more.  I am still struggling with maintaining a consistent width on the loom (that's why they are overlapped in the photo to conceal the worst one :)   ).  DH and I are now using these on the table, so I guess I'll find out in a while whether or not they will survive the washing machine.

I traced off the Gail Pan BOM embroidery blocks and prepared a little travel embroidery kit to take with me on my trip.  For cross stitch, I am going to take a kit I bought a while ago to make a cute little cross stitch miniature handbag because it's on 14 count which I will have a hope of seeing in the poor light of hotel rooms at night.  For knitting, I looked through my stash and found the gorgeous skein of hand-dyed fingering yarn that I bought in Iceland from the independent dyer at a yarn shop. The dyer was wearing her own handknit 'Close to You' shawl by Justina Lorkowska which she said worked really well with the yarn. So I'm going to have a go at that pattern, I have wound the skein and prepared a knitting travel pack.

Further to my post about printing and making my own paper journal a few weeks ago, I went ahead and invested in the Epson Ecotank EG-4850 printer which promises to be hugely more economical on ink. The ink tanks are filled up from bottles of ink (see photo) which are far cheaper to buy than cartridges  It's a nice feeling to be able to just print things without having to worry about being miserly with ink.  Being a dinosaur, I still like to print hard copies of quite a lot of stuff, particularly for travel - I just find it so much more convenient to whip out my printed map or printed confirmation rather than trying to peer near-sightedly at my tiny phone screen or holding up a queue while searching for the confirmation e-mail.  So far the printer seems to be working quite well.  The scanner is definitely slower than my previous Canon printer, and the full colour prints are perhaps a little less vivid, but overall I am quite pleased with it.  I may have another go at making a printed journal.