Replacing old electronics

 Some changes to our electronics this week, partly prompted by our broadband bill increasing beyond the acceptable, and partly due to Prime Day. I have ended up under my desk more times than seems reasonable, crawling around trying to figure out just what the heck I was doing when I created the old-fashioned mess of wiring 10 years ago that connects my tower PC, accessories and telephone to each other and to various power points.  So many identical black cables -why didn't I label them??!  Snaking through various holes in my desk and its vertical shelving, most of them inaccessible behind books or filing cabinets.  And the telephone cable similarly snaking through bookshelves and various drilled access holes to join the mess of wiring behind the desk.  Then when the new stuff arrived, having to work out how to feed it all back through the holes to where it needed to connect.

On the plus side, I found an extra power point (plug socket) I had forgotten about, hidden behind my desk. And I found £61 in an envelope left over from when I was selling off machine knitting stuff a few years ago.  Anyway, after a visit from an engineer and an excruciating 20 hours without broadband on Wednesday, we now have:

• full fibre broadband, which does seem a bit faster than our old phone line broadband, and it's cheaper.
  
  
• new PC speakers, which sound so much better than my 10 year old previous speakers, and don't need a separate power supply so one less wire behind the desk.
  
  
• a new set of cordless phones to replace our ailing ancient handsets which were all refusing to hold a battery charge any longer even though I'd replaced the batteries a few times.  The fibre broadband has replaced our landline with 'digital voice' so we no longer have a landline which feels a bit strange.  So if there is a power cut then the cordless phones won't have a signal but I suppose that's what mobiles are for.

The new stuff is now all configured and installed so hopefully good for several more years.  The next big wiring and configuration headache will come when Microsoft withdraws support for Windows 10 next year, because my ancient tower PC is not suitable to upgrade to Windows 11.  So I'll either have to get a new PC, or pay for the extended security update subscription for a few years then get a new PC. 

After all the stress on Wednesday, it was nice to have a sewing day on Thursday while DH was away for the day.  I put the borders onto the envelope quilt and moved it up to the 'to be quilted' queue upstairs. It's a fun quilt and a great way to use up some FQs.

I also quilted the sumo cushion with some simple lines and turned it into a zippered cushion.  I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, and it brings back memories of stitching the embroidery while I was staying in Japan.

Last night I finished knitting the knitted cat, but haven't stuffed it yet.  The construction was the strangest affair, I am super impressed that anyone could come up with the pattern.  It was all held stitches, short rows, picking up stitches to knit in a new direction... so that the whole cat is in one piece of knitting apart from two rear paws that are sewn on later.  At the moment, it looks like a cat shed its skin like  a snake.

Last weekend we visited an open private garden in a nearby village, which the owners had opened under the National Open Garden Scheme for charity.  It was immaculate, which made us feel unhappy with the jungle behind our house.  So this week we have done some major hacking back of the bay tree (aspiring to reach 30 feet high and 20 feet wide), the bamboo grove (which surpassed its predicted height of 12 feet a few years ago) and various random limbs of other large shrubs.  This has considerably opened up the garden and we can now see the gazebo again from the kitchen window.  The gazebo itself had turned into a giant bug hotel, so DH bravely scrubbed down the spider colonised ceiling, and I scrubbed the walls and algaed floor then sprayed it all down with the hose.  It looks so much better now and we've actually sat out in the gazebo a few times this week.  I didn't dare go in there before in case some creepycrawly landed on me.

I bought the cancer patient a new cat tree from Amazon, which of course she is mostly ignoring although she is using the scratching post portion of it.  She did have one nap in the top portion but otherwise I haven't seen her using it at all.  The vet is happy with her condition and said she could live for years, or it could be months, impossible to say without a biopsy which it isn't worth putting her through.  But her stomach issues are likely permanent, which seems rough on her and us.  DH jokingly suggested that I knit another 'cat skin' which could be like an allover balaclava for the cat in the winter.

Cat is stable

Our cat has responded to the steroids and is much improved, although still not herself.  The vet has cut her down to one pill a day because two daily would cause health problems in the longer term. She doesn't seem quite as happy as she did on two pills but still has her appetite.  She's going back in for a check up on Tuesday.

I've done a lot of work this week on the dollshouse I'm building. It's starting to look more like an actual house although there is still a long way to go. Still not sure what I will do with it when it's done - it's so much bigger than I imagined when I first bought the kit years ago.   With great trepidation, and keeping my fingers well out of the way, I have even been using the little electric chop saw that I bought on Amazon last year, for trimming up skirting board.  It works really well on wood strip that is narrow enough to fit under the blade.

I posted last week that I had put the envelope blocks onto the design wall.  This week I made up the four remaining blocks which are meant to look like addressed envelopes.

I had some 'stamps' fabric, and I used selvedges for the address portion.  I have since sewed all the blocks into rows, and have started to sew the rows together. It looks good.  Good way to use up odd bits of fabric. The pattern was in an American quilting magazine that I picked up in Paducah a couple of years ago. Although I didn't follow their instructions because their method for cutting and sewing the blocks was incredibly wasteful: sewing big half square triangles together then discarding half the block.  I just cut quarter triangles instead.  My sewing machine is still playing up with its rattling bobbin and bobbin case, but following a tip from online, I have adjusted the bobbin case stopper which has helped a little.

I made up a cushion front from the sashiko sumo embroidery that I stitched last year in Japan, using some sumo prints that I also bought in Japan as a simple frame.  The blue fabric, featuring sumo techniques, will be the back of the cushion. Not sure how I will quilt the front.  I'm excited for Sunday - not because of the England football final like most of the country, but because the Nagoya sumo tournament starts. DH however will be commandeering the television from 8pm, and I'll tape the sumo.

Still plugging away on the Di Ford quilt on the long arm, I'm getting better at simple ruler work.  In the centre I am meandering around the broderie perse appliques.

I've started knitting a cat as an additional housewarming gift for DS - I came across the pattern 'The Scullery Cat' on Facebook and then bought the download through Ravelry.  It has some very complex shaping so I'm having to pay close attention to the instructions row by row.  I'm knitting mine in some cream aran yarn to resemble a white cat.  He and his girlfriends both love cats but she is allergic so they can't have one.

And it's autumn again

 Very strange cold snap this week, the high was only 13C today and it's been cold enough at night that I am sleeping under my newly-bound Lone Star quilt.  I've started the quilting on the Di Ford Giggleswick Mill quilt, doing stitch in the ditch around the various frames to start, and now the tedious repetition of the continuous curve quilting on the half-triangle squares.  And I also got the binding onto the Red Houses quilt - shown here on a double bed but it was actually made for a queen-size where the overhang wouldn't be so deep.

I had a big tidy up in the sewing room and made quilt backs for the Tilda tablecloth, Little Kimono wallhanging, and Japanese tea cup wallhanging - so they are all moved upstairs to the to-be-quilted queue.  I've also put all the blocks I made for the Envelope lap quilt onto the design wall to see where I'm at.  I need to sew four more focal blocks then I can start assembly.

We've been over to Milton Keynes to visit DS twice, because they have just bought their first house and got the keys yesterday.  So today we took a bunch of cleaning supplies over and gave it all a good clean although it wasn't too bad. But last weekend when we visited, it was just for lunch and to take them to IKEA to look at stuff for the new house. And I was able to pick up this Vattenkar clamp-on shelf which I saw on FB as the perfect storage accessory for my Jack H2 industrial machine. Only £15 and it holds all my threads and accessories so I won't keep knocking them off the table like I have been.

As well as sewing on lots of quilt binding, I've done a bit of knitting on the second Latvian mitten and also some more work on the bobbin lace border that I started a while ago.  The bobbin lace has been a learning curve because I didn't realise that the pricking pattern differs a fair bit from the worked sample in the photo.  At first I thought it was just me going wrong, but eventually I realised that the pinholes are in different places and in different numbers than what was worked in the sample.  Perhaps I am just supposed to be experienced enough to know that.

In other news, the Barbie dolls that I sent off to the auction house back in November, FINALLY went into a sale and to my surprise, they achieved £900 at auction!  That's the hammer price - after commission and VAT, I think I will get about £650 but it's still a nice reward for hanging on to them all these years.  And they were in 'played with' condition, in no way mint, no boxes or anything.  I guess for the buyers it's nostalgia. And perhaps having come from Canada, those dolls weren't as common here in the UK.

I've spent a fair bit of time working on the Mckinley Dollshouse this week, it's coming along very slowly.  You are literally waiting for paint to dry a lot of the time.  So far it's going ok I think, although as usual I am struggling with decorating decisions.

And some sad news this week as well - our cat Oreo hasn't been very well for several weeks and after various trips to the vets, blood tests and an abdominal scan, it appears she has large cancerous tumours in her abdomen.  She's too old for chemotherapy so they've put her on steroids to see if that will have a positive effect.  I hate this part about owning a cat, we've had three cats in the past that developed various serious illnesses and had to be put down.  It's too soon to know what will happen with Oreo, the vet wants to give it two weeks and see what effect the steroids have. She seems to be getting her appetite back a little.

Summer time

 We had a mini heatwave for several days, up to 29C a few days. While I hate hot weather, I remain incredibly thankful that it was only 29 and not 42C like previous summers or what's going on in Greece. But because of the hot weather I didn't go out very much, and I had to switch to longarming in the morning before the attic room got too hot in the afternoon.  The garden has needed regular watering and I've also spent a few hours hacking back the weeds that have sprung up since before our caravan holiday.

I finished the Lone Star reproduction quilt apart from blocking and binding.  It feels really good to have finally got this quilted - I bought the kit at Houston  22 years ago so it's been on the UFO list a really long time.  It turned out fairly well, I don't love my design in the border but it's not too visible on the right side. But the continuous curve quilting on the star went well.  I then spent a few hours clipping off all the micro-tacks that were basting the quilt, very fiddly.  I like the Micro-stitch gun because it's quick, the tacks don't rust, they don't add bulk to the roll on the frame, and you can stitch over them.  But they are a PITB to remove.   I had basted the quilt on my old frame because I thought I would be quilting it at my sit-down machine - I didn't know I would get a longarm. The quilt has been through the washing machine now on a cold cycle and is drying outside - I was very relieved that the washaway blue marker I had used for the straight lines all came out. It had been on there so long that it had turned a very dark green.

I've given the longarm and frame a good clean and loaded up the next UFO, which is the Giggleswick Mill quilt by Di Ford.  It's another reproduction quilt, featuring half-square triangles that I can do continuous curve on again, and broderie perse applique which I guess I'll have to stitch around. It's not as old, I put it together in 2020 from fabric I had bought a few years beforehand. (the photo dates from when I based the sandwich on my old frame)

I've sewn the binding onto my Little Red Houses quilt so I'm handstitching that down during evening TV time.  Because I decided to cut scallops into the side edges, I couldn't use the straight of grain binding strips I had pre-cut - and I didn't have any more of that fabric.  I found another fabric to use on the scallops which is unobtrusive, but the junction between the two different fabrics at the corners looks a bit untidy. 

The Cathe Holden fabric that I ordered has shown up.  Three different prints from her 'Curated in Color' line, and two fabrics from 'Junk Journal'.  I love the Curated prints, all three are different collages of antique ephemera.  Not sure what I'll do with them, you would lose the effect if you cut them up. It needs something where you could use a big piece like a totebag or a frame quilt. Perhaps I will just keep it and pat it affectionately from time to time.

I've spent a fair bit of time on the Mckinley dollshouse this week because it's nice and cool in the dollhouse room.  Most of that has been prep and painting, so I don't actually have a lot to show for it yet. It's going ok, I still don't feel like I know where I am going with it. 

The other big time-suck this week has been the unexpected early birthday present from my son of the 'Shadow of the Erdtree' DLC for Elden Ring.  I thought I would have to wait a long time until it went on sale.  I hadn't played Elden Ring since I became Elden Lord in October 2022, so it's taken a while to get going -  because I couldn't remember anything about my character, my skills or my inventory.  I chose to go back to a save from before finishing the game, so that I could go straight into the DLC without having to complete any preliminaries.  So far I am having fun exploring the first map region.  Luckily they have already patched the DLC to downgrade the difficulty, which will help me - I'm an explorer not a fighter :)

Caravan time

 We were away this past week in our little caravan, staying near Malvern for 4 nights and then moving to a site near Stratford for 3 nights.  So lots of walks through historic town centres, lots of tea rooms, some ice cream, and various secondhand book stores.   

In Warwick I came across the Quilter's Den, a nice little shop with a good variety of fabric and what looked like a nice classroom in the back.  I wasn't planning to buy anything but then spotted this charm pack of Moda 'Junk Journal' by Cathe Holden which I loved immediately.  As soon as we got home, I went online to see if I could order yardage (Quilter's Den didn't have any) but as always seems to be the case when I find something I love, the fabric line is long gone.  I've managed to order about five of the fabrics from a combination of British shops, and British and German etsy shops.  Darn it.  The designer also did the Flea Market range some years ago which I also really liked. There were some American shops that still had some of the line, but the postage costs 2-3 times the cost of the fabric and that's before customs charges.

While we were away, I finished the 2022 Shetland Wool Week hat that I started in Latvia. It fits fine.  The brim design splits between corrugated ribbing and an inset band of fair isle, which makes the brim feel a bit flimsy and it wants to curl up a bit but blocking helped.

And this week I finished the penultimate Little House cross stitch in my alphabet sampler.  One more house to go then the sampler will be finished. I don't even remember what the livingroom looked like without the sampler floorstand frame set up next to my chair.

Our first campsite was near the Three Counties showground and the big Royal Three Counties agricultural fair happened to be on, so we went along to check it out. There was loads to see, all kinds of animals and exhibitions, but  I was disappointed that there was no handicrafts competition - although I did see several people spinning yarn from their sheep, or goats, or lamas.  One tent did have various floral exhibits, including a competition for attractive displays of floating flowers which were very pretty - a nice way to display cut flowers.

I've done a bit of work on the dollshouse today, and my little electric palm sander died partway through. I suppose I did buy it in 2007 and have used it for various dollshouses and other projects over the years. Surprisingly the basic Mouse sander only costs £1 more now than it did in 2007, so I've ordered another one. I've also ordered some wallpaper and wood mouldings.

Tackling the queue

 I spent last weekend enjoying several hours of sewing, it was really nice to be back in the sewing room.  This week I've been tackling various projects that have been in the queue for a while.

I put together a hand-appliqued wall hanging of Japanese style tea cups and tea bowls, based on a pattern from Today's Quilter but I redrew the shapes to make them more symetrical, and seamed squares together instead of using one background piece.  I still need to embroider the 'rim' onto each cup.  This was a case of having recently ripped the pattern from the magazine, then shortly afterwards coming across the Moda 'Kimono' layer cake on sale last year, which was perfect for it. Love these blue fabrics!

Another Japanese-inspired make was this kit for foundation pieced little kimonos that I bought at FoQ last year.  They went together really easily and the pattern is perfect for these ditsy Japanese-style fabrics.

I even made a start on the Hatched & Patched pincushion kit that I bought in New Zealand!  I've done the embroidery and applique but need to add some buttons for wheels on the caravan.

I added a skinny border to my Lori Holt My Favourite Things large wallhanging. I had bought the fabric to use as a backing, but it worked for the border as well - reminds me of a vintage style fabric. It was a bit of a struggle to find a suitable border that would pop the quilt colours rather than overshadow them, this was the best choice from my stash. So this quilt has now moved upstairs to the longarm quilting queue.  Once it's quilted, I will probably trim down the side borders a bit so it will fit onto my hallway hanging system.

I discovered the Edyta Sitar Little Red Houses quilt in the back of my sewing room, waiting for its binding.  I think I parked it before I went to New Zealand.  So I've trimmed up the borders, and marked and cut eight scallops down each side using the Easy Scallop Template Set by Darlene Zimmerman - a useful bit of kit that is the right tool for the job.  Next will be sewing on the binding.

I started knitting the second Latvian mitten, and realised that what I was knitting was turning out so much better than the start of the first mitten when I didn't know what I was doing. So I was gloomily thinking that I would have to knit a third mitten.  But then I realised that I had just reached a plain black row on the new knitting, at the end of the cuff, which would be the best place  to graft if I wanted to replace the cuff on the old mitten (which was the worst bit - all tight and lumpy).  So I snipped the corresponding black row on the old mitten, and carefully grafted the new cuff into place stitch by stitch.  It was quite tricky, especially with black wool which is hard to see.  But eventually the old cuff fell away and the new cuff was in place - magic!  I had to go around and tighten up the new stitches until they matched the old mitten, but now it is hard to tell that it ever happened.  I've cast on again for a second mitten now.

And I've returned to the longarm to keep quilting on the reproduction Lone Star quilt.  I've completed all the continuous curve quilting on the star itself now, but I still have some background quilting and then the border to do.  It's so much easier to quilt this on the longarm than it would have been at the domestic sit-down machine.

Another long-time queue resident is a big dollshouse kit to build a Greenleaf McKinley victorian-style dollshouse which measures approx. 31" square by 9" deep - it's designed to hang on the wall like a display shelf.  I bought the kit in 2011 when Greenleaf had a 25% off sale.  They shipped it to the UK to me.  And there it sat in a closet for a few years until we moved house in 2013.  And it's been sitting in my dollshouse room here for 10 years.  I need to either build it or sell it.  I dithered a bit because I can remember how much I used to like the house years ago but now I'm not so into miniatures. But I've decided to have a go at building it anyway, I'll see how I get on. I won't clutter up these pages with the build, I'll put them in a separate blog.  I've had to move a couple of my other houses upstairs to our dining room, to make room for a secondhand table to do the building work.

Latvian mittens

 I got back from Latvia earlier this week- from a knitting holiday to learn about Latvian mitten knitting in the Kurzeme region.  The land-only tour was organised by Sena Klets shop in Riga, and it was really good.  Everything to a really high standard, good hotel, good bus, and great workshops with native master knitters in various locations.  The only thing wrong with the week was the extreme heat all week: up to 28/29C where we were staying in Liepaja and I think it hit 31C in Riga.  I hate hot weather, and air con was not common, and broken in the hotel. I thought I might be safe in May but no. I survived.

The focus of the tour is on educating about and promoting Latvian knitting traditions as well as traditional Latvian culture, and it did a great job.  It seems that the traditional handicrafts are more respected here, you can study them at degree level for example, and every town we visited had 'craft houses' and applied arts studios where artisans worked and taught traditional crafts such as weaving, knitting, braidmaking, ceramics, metalwork, amber jewellery, crochet, basketweaving etc.  We had workshops at a number of these craft houses, casting on 40-stitch samples in the round to learn techniques specific to mittens in the region such as triangular motifs, variations on the Latvian braid, Latvian fringes, scalloped edges, twisted edges, and so forth.  We also got to see many traditionally knit mittens, gloves, colourwork socks, lace shawls, some museum collections, and enjoyed a lecture on colourwork traditional socks from a museum curator.  So much inspiration and colour.  I took loads of photos, and also picked up some of the great value mitten yarn from Sena Klets to have a go at home.

A teaching sampler of various Latvian braids

Improv quilt seen at one of the art studios

Traditional Latvian folk music performance

Latvian costumes

Examples of colourwork sock patterns from the Suiti culture in Kurzeme

Lace shawls on display at one of the workshops

A display of traditional weaving at an arts studio

Back in Riga after the tour, there was a huge craft fair held at Riga's Ethnographic Open Air Museum.  Over 250 traders, who must be curated in some way because every single stall was exhibiting handmade goods produced to very high standards - none of the tat or unrelated general merchandise that creeps into UK craft shows.  Even the food stalls were all craft beer stalls and real Latvian food freshly made. It was probably the best craft fair I've ever attended. There was every kind of Latvian artisinal craftwork: basketry, hand-carved spoons, woven linens, traditional costume elements such as skirts and jewellery, lots of ceramics, handwoven rugs, blacksmith forged work, stained glass, hunter's stalls selling furs and items made from bone, linen clothing, even one stall of bobbin lace, jewellery, and of course many knitting stalls with amazing handknit lace shawls, handknit mittens (going rate 30 euros, or 45 for a lined mitten), handknit socks, some wool, hand knit and machine knit garments, an entire food area of Latvian delicacies from smoked pig snouts through to handmade pesto and cheeses and on and on. Many of the traders were wearing traditional costumes, and/or crowns fashioned from fresh flowers or greenery.  I bought a small handwoven rag rug for my bedroom and a handwoven table runner, and enjoyed looking at all the treasures on offer.

Handwoven fabrics for making traditional skirts

A wooden church in the open air museum

Inside a traditional wooden house in the open air museum

When I got home, I spent some time collating all the knitted samples together with their printed instructions, my own notes, and photos I took at the time.  And I've cast on for my second mitten.

Samples and notes

Hand knit lace socks with embroidery that I bought in a souvenir shop

Some examples of handwoven baskets and a coaster set with amber that came home with me

Adorable mini mittens I bought at Sena Klets