Sleeping in sunbeams

 We've had a spell of warm weather this week, up to 22C, although it has stayed fairly breezy.  So instead of doing anything productive, I have spent several hours in the afternoons reading or dozing in the garden.  It's nice to be retired.

I did finish my little cross stitch house, and turned it into a little display pillow with a velvet back.

I felt like sewing something, so I drafted my own pattern for a scissors case, based on one that I saw online some time ago, which was designed by Charise Creates Sewing Patterns.  Mine is a different size, made to fit my fabric scissors.  Just a bit of fun. I used one of the metal zippers I bought in Japan, and one of the little charms from Korea.

I've continued to work on the 1:24 scale retro caravan project.  I've made a base for it, and also 3D-printed various accessories plus a folding table and chair set for the outside part of the scene, and designed and printed the exterior window and door frames so that I could install the windows.  It's so cool to think 'I need a hassock' and just design and print a flat-topped mushroom shape in the right scale, ready for upholstery.  I can't see myself working much with wood in future.

I spent some time this week working on the long term plan to relocate in England somewhere.  We plan to sell this big house with all its maintenance needs and garden in probably six years or so, before I get too old and feeble to look after it properly or to manage the stress of a house move.  Ideally we would find somewhere a little smaller that's all on one floor, without too much of a garden.  However there is a big shortage of bungalows (single storey houses) in the UK compared to the huge demand from retirees and people who need accessibility.  New bungalows aren't being constructed because developers can get far more money building a house (or several houses) on a plot.  So I spent some time researching climate (winter lows and summer highs) and looking on property websites for single storey houses with access to shops, health care and a train station.  Sadly the places in the south that have the mildest winters and coolest summers, tend to be rural areas not so great for retirees because of limited transport and long distances to health care facilities.  Anywhere remotely suitable has been long ago overrun with buyers and housing stock is scarce and expensive. We may end up just staying in our current town, even though we don't love it here but it's alright.  I anticipate difficulties in selling our house because it is not a typical family home, so I think we will probably have to sell first and then rent while we trawl the market.  Not looking forward to it at all but it has to be done.  We have seen DH's parents become more and more feeble and incapable, trapped in a home they should have moved out of years ago that they just can't manage now.  So we want to do some futureproofing for ourselves.

I'm more or less packed up and ready for the airport tomorrow.  I hope the tapestry retreat will be good.  If I like doing tapestry, I think I can also do it on my little table loom but I'm not sure how much access you need for weaving the various patches of colour.  I'll be back next weekend so DH gets a week on his own - he is looking forward to having the 3D printer all to himself for a week, lol.

Gearing up for travel season

 Definitely in the 'gearing up' phase of 2026 travel planning now. I've finalised all the main bookings for my August Norway trip, and the St Kitts trip at end May is ramping up.  I'm also back to France next week for a tapestry weaving retreat, although that hasn't taken much organising as the week is all planned for us, I just need to get there - jet fuel shortages hopefully not affecting!  I've done some unsuccessful shopping expeditions trying to find nicer swimsuits for St Kitts, and have ordered some beach gear from Amazon (beach tote, towel clips, UV-blocking swim top etc.)

When I travel, I take a little folding tray to corral stuff like my phone, charger, earplugs etc on the hotel nightstand.  It was getting fairly worn out, so I sewed a replacement this week using some of my Japanese fabric purchases. I put Bosal foam in the sides this time, which should help it keep its shape.

I've been in a cross-stitch mood this week so have mainly been stitching on the CrossStitcher magazine house chart - it's almost finished now and I'm just adding the backstitch.

I've also felt like knitting.  I've been feeling reluctant to work on the Dirty lace shawl  that I started a while ago.  I liked the sock wool colours I had chosen, but wasn't enjoying the pattern which was a wide strip of garter lace with big holes in it.  I had knit about 14 inches but decided enough and ripped it all out and re-wound the yarn.  Instead, I tracked down the pattern for a shawl I saw on display at the Nantes show, which I think is 'Chale Neve' by Tone M Andersen.  I can use the same four colours of sock yarn, plus some white, and it is a more conventional triangle lace shawl.  So I've started that now and it may be my travel knitting project if I can squash all the yarns into a vacuum pack.

I spent some time this week re-organising my ribbon collection.  I had wound it all onto cards several years ago, which I keep in two boxes.  And of course ever since then, I had been chucking new additions onto a pile awaiting their turn to be wound on cards - the pile had become pretty enormous. So I cut more cards and wound all the longer lengths, and organised by category (ric rac, lace etc.) which took a while but it is much more useful now.

I also went through all my cross stitching and embroidery kits and projects waiting for their turn, photographed them all and compiled a list, then ranked the list by desireability.  Hopefully this will help me tackle some of the older 'want to stitch' projects instead of constantly getting distracted by the latest cute chart in CrossStitcher magazine.

3D printing this week has been mostly for my 1:24 caravan.  I designed and printed a little headboard for a bed I made, frames for the cupboard doors for a kitchen unit as well as an oven, a sink, and a set of taps; and some seats (awaiting upholstery) that I modified from a hall stand design I found online. I'm basing the decor on a 1:12 scale commercially available Chinese kit, which is decorated in a very retro, cosy style.

I've been considering other 'problems' around the house that I can solve with 3D printing - one of which is these stands which hold my interchangeable knitting needles.  The needles were constantly falling out of the stand when you were removing / inserting others, very annoying.  I measured then printed a little box for the base which holds the needles in place now. Very satisfying.

I needed table gifts for a cross stitch retreat I'm going to, and came across a key chain name generator on Makerworld.  I used it to create then print off ten of these, hopefully people will like them.

I used one of the Nantes travel journal booklets I bought and turned it into a little scrapbook of my Nantes trip.  I find I need to do this now for every trip, or I just forget where I've been.  Reading it on the page and seeing the photos brings the trip right back.

While we were looking for swimsuits in Milton Keynes yesterday, I paid a visit to Neil's Fabrics in the marketplace where I found this handsome fabric which will make a good bag lining.

The garden is coming to life now that it's spring, so that is requiring a bit of attention.  I'm trying to harden off some fuschia cuttings that I took last autumn, but the weather is very difficult for them currently: up to 19C in the daytime but down to 2C at night.  I don't want to kill them by leaving them outside all night, so they go back into the shed every evening.  Our irises have just started to bloom, very pretty.

Nantes textile show

 I enjoyed a pleasant city break in Nantes, France, this week - for my long-planned visit to the Pour L'Amour du Fil textile craft show.  Nantes turned out to be a very pleasant, low-key city; very walkable, lots of green spaces and waterways, a huge chateau, many interesting shops (including fabric shops and knitting shops) and the people were polite and friendly (which may sound like an odd thing to say, but I still remember the disdain for English tourists encountered in Calais and Paris back in the 80s and 90s).  Not much English was spoken, but I was amazed to find French vocabulary from my school days materialising from the dim recesses of my brain.  I thought I had forgotten most of my French, or at least replaced it with Japanese, but things were coming out of my mouth that I didn't even know I still remembered.  Perhaps it was being immersed in the language and hearing it all around me. Although I did say 'yes' in Japanese several times by accident before hastily changing to 'oui'.

The show itself was good, about 125 stands plus around 20 small exhibition spaces.  It was quite crowded on the first morning, and the line to get in was immensely long but only took about 30 minutes to get through.  Inside the show was equally crowded, with women 2 or 3 deep at the popular stands, but my experience over many years of politely worming to the front of crowded dollshouse show stands stood me in good stead. I was pleased to almost immediately come across Mother's Dream, all the way from Tokyo - they must have to sell a lot of kits to recoup their airfare!  I bought another one of their applique bag kits. My impression is that it's a great show for quilters, probably more than half the stands were quilting related, plus several dressmaking stands (of patterns, or fabric, or childrens patterns etc) and also several bagmaking stands (supplies, patterns, kits).  The next biggest category would be embroidery, but probably only a half-dozen were for cross-stitch.  Then several crochet stands (heavy emphasis on amigarumi), some knitting stands, an antique textile dealer, someone demonstrating bobbin lace, and a few gapfillers like two stands selling dressy silk scarves or snoods, and a few others selling textile related jewellery.  It was quite enjoyable to see so many new-to-me traders, and an aesthetic different from what I see at the Festival of Quilts.  I had bought a ticket for two-day entry, but after three hours I felt I had visited all the stands that interested me, and as I wasn't doing any workshops, I didn't feel the need to return.

The exhibition spaces weren't huge but showcased some really lovely work, with a wide range of styles - from Amish quilts from a private collection, embroidery on quilts, textile art, to modern bojagi.  I took more photos than this but I won't fill the blog up with them.

Shopping haul: I loved the vintage cross-stitch designs of Des Histoires de Broder, but actually ended up purchasing a pattern book and the cutest buttons from Atelier Bonheur du jour.

I loved this sample of theirs, so with the pattern book and buttons I should hopefully be able to make something similar.

I didn't buy much fabric, but loved this pack of fat eighths of Japanese fabric from a Boro stall, and a pack of fat quarters that looked vintage French style to me but actually came from a shop in Barcelona.  I picked up the two ribbons, the sewing book and the magnet at shops in Nantes city centre.

These cute pins for decorating pincushions were from the show.

This is my Japanese bag kit, plus some cute continuous zip and some nice colours of cotton webbing from the show.

The vintage spool is from the show, but the vintage ribbon and adorable lace baby cap are from an antique shop in Nantes.

These junk journal-style notebooks are from a stationery shop in Nantes.

I took a cross-stitch project with me to work on in the evenings, the next house in my Houses of Britain SAL.  At home I have been stitching on the little house from CrossStitcher magazine.

Before I left, I sewed the hems of my woven tablerunner and it's on the table now.  The fabric did not full very much, probably due to the nylon content in the sock yarn.  It looks nice, with the different pattern areas adding interest.  I'm enjoying the weaving but am starting to feel like you only need so many towels, coasters, mats and table runners, lol.

I got in a bit of 3D printing before I went.  Makerworld, the free file site, has tons of free designs for craft tools.  I printed one of these cloth tape measure roll-up devices and it turned out so well that I immediately printed another.  They tidy the tape and turn them into retractable tapes instead of just a tangled mess. I also printed a clever folding zipper pull jig to help with putting zip pulls onto continuous zipper tape.  Still really enjoying using my printed workstation for cross stitch, which keeps everything to hand - no more playing 'hunt the scissors'. DH has been printing various model soldier files although he's still not satisfied with the quality - some of them are fine but not to the standard of purchased models.  That's more to do with the designs and the nature of printing in a filament printer, than to do with the printer itself.

Hats off to travel agents

 This has been a heavy travel planning week, which became a bit confusing because I've been making bookings for four different countries/trips at the same time. I don't know how travel agents can keep dozens of clients straight and manage all their bookings with accuracy and efficiency, but then I suppose they have a lot of software systems and research databases to call upon.  I'm off to Nantes on Monday for my long-planned visit to the Pour L'amour du fils needlework show - I was booked to go during COVID which got abandoned due to the first lockdown, then every year since I've had hotel reservations but ended up going to Japan or New Zealand or somewhere else.  But this year I am definitely going so have been finalising bookings for that.  I've also been finalising a trip in 2027 to China for three weeks, working through my own researched itinerary in conjunction with a China tour company for a private tour (not a group) which is affordable there because local prices are fairly low.  At the same time, every couple of days I have been booking my train journeys one by one for Norway this August, which can be booked 115 days ahead which happens to fall into these past few weeks.  And also a few tours etc.  And communications are ramping up for my trip to St Kitts with a quilting group at the end of May, plus I had my travel clinic appointment to see if I need any jabs (I don't) and have been doing a bit of shopping for the expected too-hot-for-me weather.  First world problems I know, but it is taking a lot of brain power and now I am wondering if it is the demands of planning and research which will start limiting my travels before my physical capabilities give out!  I suppose that's why people use travel agents, but I've never had much luck with them myself.

I washed my Double Wedding Ring quilt and it didn't explode or fall apart. The 80/20 wadding contracted into a nice vintage look.  So it just needs pressing and binding now.  I've not done anything more on the Vintage Linens quilt, we've had a bit of nice weather this week (up to 18C and even 22C one day) so I've been relaxing out in the garden and been on a bit of a reading jag.  I did start stitching on a little house chart from CrossStitcher magazine.

I finished weaving the Sock Wool tablerunner, which is adapted from a pattern from Little Looms magazine.  This photo is fresh off the loom before I washed it to full the yarn a little, and I will be sewing folded hems at each end (so there won't be any fringe).  My tension got a bit tighter towards the end, so the pattern band at that end is a bit shallower but I'm hoping it won't be obvious once it dries.

I glued together the 3D printed dollshouse furniture from last week, and gave it a nice wood colour with some alcohol ink markers in accordance with online advice.  Then a spray of satin varnish.  The Chesterfield chair I painted to look more like leather.  They look decent, and not obviously plastic.

Meanwhile I did a six hour print of this interesting chair which has a 'wooden' spindle frame and printed upholstery, it printed pretty cleanly.  I still need to paint it.

I also designed and printed some ridged roof panels to improve the look of the 1:24 caravan roof.  I've started designing some of the internal furnishings for future 3D printing as well.

But the print I'm happiest about this week is my own design for a Cross-stitch workstation.  I designed this using the Maker Lab desk organiser generator, to my own specifications.  I added holders for marker pens, needle packets, scissors, threader, seam ripper, a tray for floss, and even a removable tray for cut thread ends.  It turned out really well and has really tidied up my work table in the living room, replacing various other makeshift solutions.  It just seems so magic that you can imagine something, draw it out, and then the machine-of-the-future just prints it for you.  Although it did take 9 hours to print. It's not even that expensive.  This used about a third of a roll of filament, so maybe cost £4.25 to print, plus the cost of the electricity of course.  I am feeling a mild urge to design and print organisers for all the things, and all the drawers.

Easter weekend

 We have a four day weekend for Easter here in the UK - something that used to be a much anticipated holiday but now as a retired person, Friday seemed much like any other day, lol.  DH went down to see his parents so I got to do some uninterrupted crafting which was nice.

The 3D printer continues to be run every day.  This week I've been trying out furniture files, starting with some free ones for chairs.  I tried out these three files - it was a mixed bag.  The chair on the right seems larger than 1:12 and was quite chunky.  The chair at the back, which looked lovely, is poorly designed and the side struts have been falling off because they aren't connected properly in the design.  The chair on the left printed beautifully but is smaller than 1:12 scale.

So I made the left chair a bit bigger and printed it again, I think it will be ok with some bun feet added.  I paid £1.41 for the nice Arts and Crafts style dining table on the left in the photo below (not glued together yet).  Then I adapted the file to make a smaller version with a round table (also not glued together yet, on the right in the photo).  I printed a free file for the little end table, then adapted the file to make two smaller but taller occasional tables.  Then I bought a chair file for .44p to match the dining table (not glued together, leaning against the round table).  The first one printed fine, so I printed 8 more (6 for around the table and a couple of spares just in case).  I printed all of these in brown PLA filament but they will need overpainting to look more like wood.

I also designed and printed a couple of small signs for the outside of our front door, to assist in our never-ending struggle to have delivery people actually ring the doorbell rather than knocking inaudibly then fleeing the property, leaving our parcel to be stolen from the front step.

Before I did all the furniture, I bumbled my way through 3D designing a copy of a Japanese lidded wooden tub that I photographed in several old Japanese house kitchens.  It came out fairly well so I printed two of them.

Then I painted up the jars and half-jars, and the tub.  I was trying to make the jars look like old ceramic jars like I saw in the museums.

When they were dry, I installed them in various places inside and outside the kitchen of my Japanese 1950s ryokan inn.

The other thing I 3D printed this week was some eyes for my Mandalorian foundling.  They could have come out with a smoother finish but from a distance they look fine.

I finished the backstitching on the thatched cottage from the Houses of Britain SAL so I'm halfway now as this was house 7 out of 14.

I cut up some more vintage linens for blocks for my Vintage Linens wallhanging and decided not to use a couple of others.  So I probably have all my raw material now, I just need to work on how to assemble it into a collaged top.  And I've continued weaving the middle of the table runner on my little loom.

I finished the baptist fan quilting on my Double Wedding Ring.  While not perfect, the quilting has flattened out and improved the wonky piecing.  After I took this photo, I ran the quilt through a rinse cycle to wash out the starch I used in piecing and to shrink the 80/20 Hobbs wadding for a softer more vintage look, it's currently drying.  I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Today we had an outing over to Foxton Locks, a Victorian complex of a series of ten canal locks consisting of two staircases of five locks each, carrying the Leicester line of the Grand Union Canal up a steep hill in Leicestershire, about three miles west of Market Harborough. They are named after the nearby village of Foxton.  Very picturesque, and quite busy with people out enjoying the long weekend.  There was also a floating craft market of vendors trading from about 15 narrowboats moored along one leg of the canal, very colourful with various examples of canal art traditional painting.  The lower part of the locks is impossibly twee, like something out of a cross stitch heritage design, with the old lock keepers cottage and an old inn, and various bridges and moored boats.  We had a fairly mediocre lunch in the inn then visited the Canal Museum which tells the story of the adjacent ruins of the Victorian engineering marvel that was the Foxton Inclined Plane: basically a giant elevator that carried canal boats up the hill so they didn't have to queue to go through the locks.  A nice morning out.  All my photos came out rather grey as it was overcast, in real life it was nicer.