The lurgy

 Apparently I have lost all my commuter immunities, now that I live in a low-contact home bubble, because I went down with a dreadful cold following my trip to London.  Wednesday was a complete write off, Thursday not a lot better.  I'm feeling more energetic today although still bunged up.  At least I had our brilliant new telly to watch, which is still a marvel to behold.  And I kept busy with cross stitch (in between naps) so have almost finished the next house in my Houses of Britain SAL.  This is house 7 of 14 and I still need to do the backstitching that will add the detail.

I also used some of the time for learning more about how to use our new toy, the 3D printer. The manufacturer (Bambu) has a free online academy set of courses to work through, and I've also been watching Youtube videos on how to use a free 3D design software called Tinkercad.  Meanwhile the printer has been running most of every day as I try out various files for my Japanese dollshouse.  I have agreed joint custody of the printer with DH, he gets it on weekends and potentially evenings if he had something ready to send to print after work.  I get it during his work day.

[here follows several photos of 3D printing - if this is boring for you, skip ahead]

My first attempt was a 1:12 scale Japanese style table, which I printed at 60% to make it 1:20 scale.  It came out great but a little tall, more coffee table height than Japanese sitting-on-the-floor height.  I laboriously worked out how to cut 2mm off of the height in Bambu Studio and printed two more shorter ones.  Then with much more labour, I eventually managed to contract the length to make it into an end table, and printed four of those.

The next attempt was to take what was described as a 'thumb size teapot with lid' and attempt to print it to 1:20.  The first attempt was too big (plus I promptly dropped the lid on the floor and lost it forever), it's the one on the right.  Then I scaled it down further to get a better size on the left but the .4mm printer nozzle was leaving blobs. So I had to learn how to change the hot end nozzle to the .2mm instead.  That produced much better quality teapots.  So I printed more of those, and then found a 1:12 scale crockery set that had handle-less cups that looked Japanese, and printed a bunch of those plus some food bowls and small plates.

Then I tried my first design attempt in Tinkercad, a simple wall shelf.  This took me probably over an hour but printed ok.  Then I watched some more videos to improve, and had a go at designing a small lacquer tea tray in two colours with cut-out handles.  I printed a prototype, tweaked it a bit to enlarge the handle openings and reduce the base thickness, and then printed several of them to use in my Japanese inn.  I was incredibly proud of these, and not something I could have made very well from scratch. I gave them a coat of Satin varnish for a bit of lacquer gloss.

Then I could make up tea sets:

And put one teaset in each of the balcony sitting areas of the Japanese inn.

Looking through the photos I took in Japan, I found some pics of large storage jars from museum displays.  It's basically a flower vase shape, so I found a flower vase file, took it into Tinkercad and added handles and a lid, and printed it at a suitable height for a large jar.

That worked fairly well so I tried reducing it to 75% to print a small version.  The first one printed perfectly.  The next half dozen kept failing halfway through, leaving me with a lot of 'spaghetti' extruded filament and some interesting half jar shapes that look like big bowls.  Eventually I worked out that the shape needed more support, so bodged in an internal support in Tinkercad and enlarged it back to 80%, and was able to print two more.  I'm going to paint them to look like ceramic (hopefully) but so far have only primed them.

I went through more Japanese photos and then looked for free files online, to print some sushi platters. While I am loving the semi-instant gratification and the ability to instantly scale things to size, this print started to fail as well when one of the platters (foreground) detached from the print bed.  Luckily our printer has the capability to pause, tell it to ignore the failed object, and to continue to print the remaining platters which all turned out fine.

Then I printed two little red boxes which I will age to look like a lacquer box I took a photo of in a museum.

At the moment, I am experimenting with printing 'baby yoda eyes' for my knitted doll, trying to achieve something that looks cute rather than creepy.

Meanwhile DH has been attempting to print far more complex items, starting with a model German soldier that had a lot of sticky-out bits that needed extra supports printed.  He's having more issues, trying to refine the models for better quality and less intrusive support fixtures, without yet knowing what parameters to adjust.  More spaghetti prints.  But we are both learning and it's more fun than not.

I've been pottering away on the 1:24 Caravan kit.  The modifications look a bit crude but ok I think, although there are a couple of odd bulges in the wood pieces I soaked to bend them to the new round shape.  But it's supposed to look like an old caravan, anyway.  The kit was to make this boxy caravan with a roof opening:

But I've given it a rounded nose and a side opening instead:

Before I fell ill, I installed the new thread guide on my longarm and got back to quilting.  I'm doing yet another Baptist Fan, this time on my wonky Double Wedding Ring quilt.  The Baptist Fan pattern is very forgiving at smoothing out most irregularities while at the same time holding everything together evenly.  I'm about halfway through the quilting now (this photo is just the first row) and apart from a few areas of fullness, most of the quilt is looking much less wonky now which is pleasing.

I have corresponded with the dealer about the engineer visit, carefully as they are the only dealer and it wouldn't do me any good in the long run to fall out with them.  I'm being billed for one hour, which is less time than she spent here so I'm just going to pay it.  I've also got the machine booked in for an overdue general service in a few months, we will drive it down to the main dealer for them to do.

Last weekend I started on a project to use up the last remaining larger pieces of my handwoven cloth.  In Japan I had picked up a pattern for a fabric box with a clasp frame top.  I had just enough cloth to cut out the body piece, and I created a lid by piecing together three other pieces.  I used fusible fleece for the stabiliser - I think the shape would have benefited from something a little stiffer as the metal frame is heavy but I was worried about the fabric becoming too thick to fit into the frame when I was already using a thick handwoven cloth.  It was a bit of a job to force the cloth into the frame as it was, but got there in the end.  It's a useful size.  I've never seen these frames in the UK, the lip is horizontal for the lid, but vertical for the box base.

When I started feeling a bit better, I got back to the tablerunner that I am weaving, it has an interesting split pattern (from Little Looms magazine) which took concentration to warp correctly.  I've going to weave the middle plain then repeat the pattern in reverse at the other end.

Some happy mail thanks to a bit of enablement from my online cross stitch group: these colourful trays from Poppekins, a UK designer, with a sewing theme.  And a coaster.

Too much technical interfacing this week

 I seem to have used up most of my crafting energy this week on interfacing with, and learning new, technology.  I bought us a new TV after one too many night scenes in programmes where I couldn't see diddly squat - the breaking point was watching the reboot of Shogun and not being able to make out what the heck was going on in the night scene ninja attack - on our 14 year old LED television.  I went for a QLED mid-range telly which arrived in an enormous box - you have to either sit closer or have a larger screen for these smaller LEDs it seems.  The new TV is 65" and the old one was only 46", so it feels like some kind of giant black hole has taken up residence in the living room.  It was a lot of effort to get it all connected up, the stand assembled etc. and get the new TV to talk to our existing streaming devices and input all the log-ins etc. but eventually we had sound and picture.  I am now rewatching Shogun and it's like an entirely new show, so many details I had missed or couldn't see.  And the current sumo tournament is just amazing, it feels like I can see every detail of the audience  even.  I feel a bit stupid that we were putting up with the old technology for so long.  Although speaking of old tech, I've had to order a SCART-to-HDMI converter so that we can hook up our antique DVD player.

Then there was the long-arm fault.  The engineer came at last on Thursday, about 15 minutes after the new TV turned up.  I was already stressed about how much the visit was going to cost just for one hour (plus call out and travel costs) and after 90 minutes she was still saying that she couldn't see anything wrong with the machine apart from a very loose thread guide above the needle which she recommended replacing.  She ran it to demonstrate for me that it was stitching perfectly, which had me shrieking 'stop, stop!' because of the terrible thunking noise.  She thought the noise was a normal machine noise.  Whatever she had done had made the thunking better than it had been, but still definitely not the quiet purr the machine used to have.  Mystified, she departed and phoned her supervisor to report in and see what he thought.  So he called me and asked for videos of the machine running.  I went up to make the video and had trouble threading the loose guide, which is when I realised that the noise all along had been the loose guide hitting the presser foot on every downward needle stroke!  I took the guide off and hey presto, no more noise.  Apart from me yelling a few swear words rather loudly.  I'm assuming that the thread guide started to loosen and started making the noise while still having a normal appearance.  By the time I had run the various tests they asked me to, and the engineer had run the machine quite a bit, the guide had been hitting the presser foot long enough to become quite distorted and loose which is why she had noticed it sagging.  I'm kind of peeved that she didn't realise that it was actually the cause of the noise.  I phoned up the dealer and reported that I had identified the problem.  They have sent me a replacement guide which I need to fit tomorrow, but I assume I am still going to have to pay a couple of hundred pounds for the engineer visit even though I'm the one that ended up fixing it.

And our new 3D printer arrived this week, but didn't get set up until today.  More leafing through instruction booklets, a complicated unboxing process to follow as there were various screws and stabilisers that had to be removed, two new apps to install, more passwords, blah blah blah.  Eventually we managed our first print, the traditional little boat called a benchy.  Then we printed a handle for the scraper tool, and then I struggled through my first download of an online file and using the slicer in Bamboo Studio to print a 'poop bucket' to catch the unwanted filament that gets ejected out the back of the printer. So much new stuff to learn now, a whole new world - it's supposed to be good for your ageing brain to have to learn new things. We've set it up in the laundry room which may prove too humid in the long run, I don't know.  In the first instance, I want to use it for printing dollhouse minis and DH wants to print some model soldiers. Meanwhile DS has commented "I thought you were meant to be decluttering", lol.

I went down to London yesterday and had lunch with DS who was doing an office day. Originally I was booked to go down because my niece was supposed to be flying over from Canada, but she had to postpone her visit until September.  I already had the train tickets so went down anyway.  Before and after lunch, I visited a couple of historic Georgian townhouses which were interesting.  In the morning, I went to the Handel-Hendrix house, a townhouse that was the home of the famous composer, and next door is where Jimi Hendrix had his London flat.  In the afternoon, I toured the Benjamin Franklin house, where he lived for many years while representing the interests of his colony prior to the revolution.  Both houses have been restored from near ruin and are fairly bare with none of their original furnishings, but it really gave you a sense of what it would have been like to live in a narrow, deep, tall townhouse in the Georgian period, looking out across the street at other townhouses.  The Franklin house had squeezed in a ladies loo by hiving off part of the former basement kitchen, leaving an old kitchen range marooned next to the sinks which made me smile.

Earlier in the week, I was working on a knitted rendition of Grogu, or the child, from the Mandalorian TV series.  I couldn't find a good pattern so I downloaded one to use as a starting point and riffed on it until I had something that looked how I wanted.  I still need to find something suitable for eyes - I may eventually try 3D printing them once I learn how to design.

I made up a kit for an iron bed frame from Dolls House Direct, which I originally purchased to go in the Mckinley house.  It was made up from the same components that my real-life iron bed frame has, complete with tiny pins to hold the four corners of the frame together onto the head and foot.  Of course, in 1:12 scale, this was like wrestling a tiny sticky octopus trying to get each pin to go through two frames and into the support bracket - I would get one in and then it would pop out again while I worked on the next.  With the help of many clamps, I got there in the end.

At the moment I am working on a kit for a 1:24 scale retro caravan that my friend Anita gave me as a retirement gift.  I'm having a go at kitbashing it to change the shape of the nose into a rounded shape, and have moved the viewing opening to the side of the caravan (it was via an opening in the roof).  The new rounded shape is requiring that some of the components be re-shaped into curves by soaking them and then clamping them into their new bent shape until they dry.  So far it seems to be going ok.

I finished a magazine kit from CrossStitcher magazine.  This took me ages because of the mottled blue background which I found difficult to count.  But I'm pleased with how it has turned out.

I've warped up my loom for a new table runner but haven't started weaving yet, I need to sort out a few missed slots first.

I'm off now to watch my new huge TV!

Crafts: an utterly pointless exercise designed just to use up time til you die?

 I occasionally correspond with a friend in Newcastle that I met on holiday, and  we were chatting about our 'crafting mojo' being at a low ebb  lately - perhaps because we are spending time decluttering our massive hoards of craft stash and have already made 10 of everything.  She made me laugh with her comment: " I fluctuate wildly between enjoying crafting, then at other times feeling like it’s an utterly pointless exercise designed just to use up time til you die." I quoted back to her a paragraph from a recent article in a quilting magazine, which was discussing how different the Game of Wool debacle could have gone (Game of Wool was an attempt to make a reality style TV show out of knitting, it was a cringing disaster).    The writer mused: "What values so intrinsic to crafts like quilting or knitting ought to be shared in a show to encourage others to explore them?  I would begin with: the sense of achievement that creative endeavour offers and its moments of quiet, powerful mindfulness; the joy of mastering a new skill and its support of self-esteem; the tactile pleasures of good materials and their role in grounding us and quieting the false empty craving for novelty; the sociability and comradery of shared skills and its support of community and intergenerational generosity." 

 I make a lot of things that I don't actually use, or need, but I get a great deal of satisfaction from the accomplishment; enjoyment from  learning new things and exercising my creativity; and contentment when I can achieve that 'flow' state where you don't even realise time is passing as you focus on your project.  So while it would be nice to have access to a pool of recipients or buyers for what I do rather than have my projects just sitting around or getting donated, I feel there is still benefit and value to me to be making them.  On that note, I took the two woven houndstooth mats to DS's house today and gave them to his partner who seemed pleased with them.

I've made some more blocks for the vintage linens wallhanging, which is desperately wanting to grow into a quilt because I have so many vintage linens to cut up and some of the blocks are turning out rather large.  I don't have a plan yet, I'm just choosing compatible embroideries and fabrics and throwing them up on the design wall.  Eventually I will need to come up with some kind of grid, and also add more embellishments to fill in the plain fabric areas.

I finished my little Japanese applique house basket, it is so cute and was such a faff to make.  The top edge is stitched in Palestrina stitch, not something I have tried before.  The kit included the embroidery floss, all the fabrics, and the buttons, so the end result looks very Japanese.  I have another kit from the same shop, same sort of thing only much bigger houses which are appliqued onto a tote bag. 

I made up the very last wooden kit from my box of small miniatures kits, this was a Banjo Clock from Cynthia Howe Miniatures - a rather strange looking but apparently historical object. The only kits left now, besides the Japanese bunka rug, are some Janet Granger miniature tapestry kits which I'm not even sure I can do any more with my middleaged eyesight - I would definitely have to use magnification to start with.  I think next that I may tackle my small pile of House of Miniatures furniture kits and make them all up into finished items.  Either that, or choose one of several smaller scale house kits waiting to be made.

I finished stitching the borders on my handtowel that I bought in Salzburg, and am now using it in my bathroom where it looks very handsome.

Over the last few weeks, I've been trying my hand at making an altered book, which is a subset of journal making involving taking an existing hardcover book and giving it a completely new appearance and purpose.  For example, turning pages into pockets, gluing in new artwork, giving it a new cover etc.  I used a pack of digital paper with a beach theme to decorate a discontinued library book I got for .30p.  It was an interesting exercise but I think I prefer making a book from scratch. It did make me want to go to the beach - not really an attractive destination in March in the UK however.

Frustratingly, my longarm is still out of commission. The dealers are really good but it's their busy season with lots of shows that they are away to.  They have quoted for an engineer to come and correct the timing but I still don't have a date for that.

Procrastination

 It's 10 months since I got back from my last trip to Japan, and only this week did I finally install the things I had bought for my Japanese ryokan house.  Talk about procrastination. Most of the time this house stays closed, I forget how incredibly detailed it is inside. And so authentic - I saw countless old properties in Japan with similar architectural elements and room furnishings.  It's nice to see the house open again.

I had a little house shrine to put in one bedroom, and some food dishes, a few ornaments and I had a postcard that I trimmed to become a wall mural for the guest bedroom.  While I was at it, I finally made the two futon with their duvet covers wrapped in protective sheets - just like the ones I slept under in Japan.  There are still loads of items I would like to make for this house - but, procrastination :)

I've spent a bit of time this week working on the Japanese appliqued basket kit.  I finished all the applique for the outer basket, lined it and turned it through.  And I made the inner basket, then spent quite a while quilting it all.

Now that the quilting is finished, I am sewing the side seams to make the basket shapes.

I also made a start on the vintage linens quilt, although I have downgraded plans from a bed quilt, to a large wallhanging - given the stack of bed quilts I still have.  I ironed on woven interfacing to give the vintage embroideries some body and protection, and started cutting out motifs I like.  These are just pinned on the design wall, I need to rearrange the crinoline ladies.  I'm just making things up as I go along.

I came across a little magazine kit for a cross stitched thread holder in a charity shop, and stitched that.  Nice to do something quick.

I wet finished and trimmed the three houndstooth mats that I wove on my little loom.  I am keeping one and will offer the other two to DS's partner to see if she wants them for their house.

I have loaded the Double Wedding Ring onto my longarm frame, and I was  basting long lines across it in preparation for rolling to the bottom to start Baptist Fan quilting.  About a foot from the end of the top, my machine suddenly started making an ominous thunking noise with every stitch.  I've been back and forth to the dealer about it, I had to take some specific close up photos and a video for them to determine that the timing seems to have gone out.  I'm assuming the needle hit one of the thick seam junctions in the DWR, made worse with starch, and it was too much and forced the timing out.  So now I am waiting for a quote to have an engineer come and fix the timing.  And it leaves me wondering if I am going to be able to quilt the DWR on the frame - it's full of bulky seam junctions and I can't afford to keep having the engineer come. I don't want to have to hand quilt it, I don't feel this quilt is worth that amount of effort because of all the wonkiness.

I did de-stash seven quilts this past week: two went to Project Linus, and the other five I sold for not very much on ebay- although I got more for a couple of them than I expected. They were all quilts that I had made up from vintage unfinished tops I bought in America on past holidays.  I enjoyed them for many years but they weren't really my taste any more.  I couldn't donate them because of the vintage fabrics, so I'm glad they've been bought by people who wanted them and hopefully will give them good homes.

Not that I need a new hobby, but I am becoming increasingly tempted by 3D printing, now that there are plug and play machines and I'm seeing an increasing number of attractive STL files for dollhouse miniatures popping up online.  I just don't know if I would use it enough, or if it would just be another expensive gadget sitting around the house waiting for the odd time when it is needed.  Do any of you have a 3D printer?

A woman's prerogative

 This week I had more energy and have got more done.  One thing I did was change my mind about my decorating choices for the McKinley Dollshouse that I built a couple of years ago.  For the exterior roof colour, I had followed the very 1980s box picture (and my younger self's dream) of leaving the cedar shingles natural.  It turned out great, just like the box, but I eventually decided that the natural colour is very toy-like and unrealistic, and didn't reflect my older tastes.   I decided to re-paint the shingles, so I looked up online images of what real cedar shingles look like once they have weathered: they go a lovely silvered grey but when you looked closely, you could see there were a lot of other colours underneath the weathering.  Sadly, the best time to colour a roof is when you are building the dollshouse, not when it is already finished and there are 50 fixed on bits that are now in the way.

So the first big job was to mask all the parts of the house that weren't going to be painted.  This took about 2.5 hours to get into all the spaces around the asymetrical roof line with masking tape, washi tape, plastic bags, bin bags etc..  I was also worried about paint creeping through gaps in the roof, into the room decor, so I filled up rooms at risk with tissue paper to hopefully minimise any seepage.

Next, I sprayed several thin coats of Halford's grey auto primer from various angles, trying to get into all the nooks and crannies of the shingles, and crossing my fingers that I wasn't getting spray onto anything that it shouldn't.

The next, and very tedious step which took several hours, was to paint individual shingles in three colours: black, dark grey, and some touches of cedar red.  At this point the house looked like a crude haunted house and I was seriously questioning my choices.

But it all started to come together with the first heavy drybrushing of medium grey.  In this in-progress photo, you can see the difference the drybrushing is making on the lower half of the roof.

The first drybrush completed.

The final painting step was a second drybrush to hit the high points of shingles and their edges, in a light grey. You can see on the roof in the background that I have completed this step on the bottom half of the roof, and fully completed it on the roof in the foreground.  So the original three colours are still faintly visible as mottling, but the roof 'reads' as a light grey weathered roof now.

I'm actually really pleased with how this has turned out, it has completely transformed the house, and the colour looks just like the internet photos of real weathered cedar shingles.  The final 'holding my breath' moment was to strip off the masking tape and plastic and check for accidental overpainting.  But it really wasn't too bad at all.  Nothing had dripped through to the interior of the house, there were only a few small splashes of grey onto the house paint, and a bit of grey spray on the lower parts of some of the decorative trim.  All stuff that I could touch up.  The only real damage is that the washi tape I used on the papered chimney, despite being lower tack than masking tape, has still pulled off a bit of the 'brick' paper.  So I need to repair that.  But otherwise the house looks much more grown up, and the grey roof makes the painted exterior to look more painted lady and less playhouse (imho).  So, it was worth all the work I think.

I finished weaving the three mats from Little Looms magazine in a modified houndstooth pattern.  These are about 8 inches square, in 100% cotton.  The pattern says they are mug rugs but they seem a bit big for that.  I will probably just use them as mats.

I knit DH a pair of simple fingerless gloves to match his neon hat.  They are drying in the picture.  They've come out a bit loose but are still functional and he likes them.

A bit of stash acquisition this week when I saw this James C Brett Emotion DK (acrylic) in the Serenity colourway on Facebook.  I checked on Ravelry and saw some nice jumpers knitted in it, so I ordered a sweater's worth for future knitting.

I finished appliqueing the little houses for the Japanese house basket, and have given them a gentle soak to remove the glue.

I made another project using my handwoven cloth.  I saw this little storage basket in a foreign video (I think Spanish?) and thought it was cute.  The handwoven cloth once again behaved fairly well.  The basket is stiffened with Bosal foam.  The designer said it could be a tea caddy, with little packets of tea in each of the pockets.  I might use it as a table gift for the next cross stitch retreat I am attending in the summer.  I've still got a little bit of fabric left, to make something out of.

I struck it lucky at a charity shop, which had a bunch of new crafting books for just £1 each.  I came home with two Tilda books, a Lynette Anderson and a knitting book, I look forward to reading them.  Also had some pompom trim for £1 a packet, so I had that as well.

It's definitely feeling like early Spring now, we had a lovely crop of snowdrops which are just going over, our purple crocuses (crocii?) are opening up on sunny days, and the few daffodils which haven't been eaten are making bright cheerful spots in the garden.  There are even a few primroses that have escaped the ravages of the slug population, adding some colour.  My elderly tulip bulbs that I keep replanting instead of buying new ones, have all thrown up lots of leaves so hopefully will still get some flowers this year. And the magnolia tree has big fat buds on all its branches.  Still lots of rain though.