the heating is on

 It has definitely turned autumnal now.  We were resisting putting the heating on despite cold evenings, because the afternoons were still warm.  But that seems to have gone away now so we put the heat on a few nights ago.  The winter clothes have come out from under the bed, and I've brought down a few winter coats from the spare closet.  The government is warning that we could have some severe storms this winter due to climate change and El Nino.  They've recommended that British people lay in emergency supplies to cope with up to three days without power and/or water.  Everyone I've spoken to is just ignoring this as very unlikely to happen.  I have compromised by stocking up some water and buying a little campstove (so we can still have tea, one of life's necessities) but I think typically we would have 3 days of food on hand already. Also due to the chilly evenings, I've put a quilt back on the bed.  This is one I made many years ago out of vintage Dresden Plate blocks that I purchased from an antiques dealer at the Houston International Quilt show.  I had seen them but left them, but elsewhere in the enormous show was a sample quilt with this layout in modern fabrics.  I counted the plates then went back to the antique dealer and counted the vintage blocks - there were exactly the right number.  So it was meant to be.  A friend gave me some antique muslin to use as matching background fabric, another friend drew the quilting pattern, and a Mennonite friend of theirs did the handquilting.  So it was a real group project.  I added the icecream cone border in modern repro fabrics.

Hard to believe that I was sweltering in 31C humidity in St Kitts back in the spring.  I finished quilting the wallhanging but have yet to trim it up and bind it.  I ended up using it as a practice piece for mostly ruler work.  It's a bit wonky, I didn't manage symetry very well in several places, but it was good practice. And done is better than perfect.

I had some fun pulling out my Christmas fabrics, and sewing a Christmas project bag in preparation for my christmas cross stitch project which I will start on 1 December.

Still no sign of the replacement artwork for my 1:48 Bliss dollshouse, hopefully it will turn up soon.  In the meantime, I completed another kit from my stash.  This is a 1:150 model of a traditional Japanese farmhouse which I think I picked up in a museum gift shop in Japan.  It was a flatpack of laser cut thin fibre board with paper details.  I felt it needed a base so I printed one on the 3D printer.  I explored several similar old farmhouses on visits to open air museums in Japan.

So this turned up today:

I've been occasionally checking the UK stocks of portable air conditioning units, which sold out almost completely during our summer of heatwaves, and haven't recovered yet.  When I checked on Friday, the AI said everything was still sold out, but it directed me to another page which said that Meaco were taking pre-orders for when stock would come back in.  So I went to the Meaco site and ordered one, expecting to get an email telling me to expect one in the spring.  Instead I got an email saying it would be delivered today!  I must have just hit the sweet spot of a re-stock.  So maybe next summer's heat waves will be more bearable and I won't have to sleep in the livingroom or the basement.

We drove up to the caravan today and emptied most of it, bringing home a full carload to stash away in the attic.  We'll make another trip to pick up the last few things.  Normally we would give it a good wash for the winter, but all the hosepipe bans from the summer's drought are still in effect and our storage yard has closed their caravan washing area.  Many people caravan all winter but we don't see the point if it is miserable and cold outside.

Time is relative

 This week seems to have flown by - it feels like only a few days since I wrote last weekend's post.  I read somewhere that this phenomenon is exaggerated for retired people who have generally moved on from time-defining frameworks such as paid employment or higher education.  So there aren't so many milestones in your week to give you an anchor in time.  I go to Aquafit twice a week and that's about it for weekly appointments.  Although I did go to Specsavers to order some replacement sewing glasses (the lost ones still haven't turned up).

My knitting/lace/journalling room is finally in a useable state, although not everything has been put away yet.  I even printed off some digitals and have been cutting them out.

I fired up the 3D printer and printed four of these boxes for storing washi tape - they have an insert with shaped rows to hold the tapes, and they stack on top of each other, and I printed a lid for the top of the stack.  A big improvement over my previous jumble of tapes.

One of the retreats I am going to later in the month, issued a challenge for us to make a soft cover for an A5 booklet using a random combination - mine was 'four blue circles'.  So this week I sewed up this junk journal style cover using up some of my fabric stash.  It's mostly fusible applique with some 3D elements added.  It came out a little smaller than I had planned but still fits my A5 booklet.

I'm getting near the end of longarming the St Kitts wallhanging.  I've mostly been doing ruler work on it for practice.  There are a number of imperfections and wobbles, including one square where I need to unpick the sky because I didn't notice my tension was off and the top thread was pulling up the darker coloured bobbin thread (I could do with better lighting in my attic room).

I started weaving my grey fabric placemats, using some torn strips from some leftover quilt backing.  They look a bit dull, but we need some grey placemats to use with a particular tablecloth so they will be useful.  They could do with some pops of colour really.

I'm close to finishing another of my cross stitched Houses of Britain.  This is the 7th one of 13, I am beginning to regret starting this stitchalong as I am such a slow stitcher.  I still have the back stitching to do on this one. I've also done a bit more on my fancy French monogram but it's not finished yet.

We have a yukka plant which we attempted to murder when we moved in 12 years ago, as it was so wizened and ugly.  It proved impossible to dig up so we just cut it down right to the ground.  A few years later it started growing again, surprisingly, and has gradually turned into a small shrub.  It must have liked the very hot summer because it has amazed us by suddenly throwing up this tall flower stem for the first time ever since the attempted homicide.  I'm looking forward to seeing what it will look like.

And in other organisational news, I grew tired of the jumble of tea boxes in the kitchen cupboard, constantly falling down and out and making it hard to see what we actually had.  So I have invested in this fancy organiser which makes me feel like I'm in a hotel conference room.  Now I feel like I need to buy three more kinds of tea to fill up all the slots.

We drove over to the town of Stamford today.  We have been before but were now looking at it as a possible retirement destination for when we downsize.  It seemed nice but I don't know that we can afford anything there.  After walking around, we had a cup of tea in a nice tearoom that had these charming character dolls of c. 1:6 scale set up in their front window, really well made including the appropriate furniture.

DH asked me which of the depicted retired tea room denizens would be me, I think it would be this one with her knititng and her slippers:

Decluttering and other infinite tasks

 I have continued to plug away at my attic room this week.  I decided to replace the ingenious but space-inefficient folding desk where I kept my bobbin lace stuff, with two IKEA Billy bookcases.  DH kindly went to a nearby town to pick one up secondhand for me that I bought on FB marketplace.  The other we had to buy new from  IKEA yesterday, after a very long day picking up DS then driving 2.5 hrs down to visit the in-laws in their respective retirement abodes, then back to DS, IKEA, then finally home after 10.5 hours on the road.  We are both feeling a bit wiped out today.  With the new bookcases, I can rehouse the bobbin lace stuff, and get a lot of the junk journalling stash up off the floor.  It's not there yet but already looking much better.  Meanwhile I now have a massive pile to take to the charity shop:  tatting books, a big bag of acrylic yarn I will never use, a bunch of clothes that I don't wear, a cushion that sat on the chair that I sold, and various other oddments.

I finished the Petworth Miniatures 1:48 scale Pride and Prejudice box, after assembling the internal furniture kits including lasercut candelabra about a whisker in thickness.  It looks ok, some of the finishes aren't perfect, but the interior light shining through the window is kind of cool.

I finished the first of the Norwegian houses socks from the kit I bought in Norway.  You will notice that it isn't actually a sock.  I have so many handknit socks already, plus this wool is quite robust so I think a sock would be too hot to wear.  So instead I have turned it into an anklewarmer to wear in the winter with trousers.    I had to knit the charted portion twice.  My first attempt, although it did fit my leg, was too tight and the tension was very bumpy where I had caught the floats on the back.  I changed to a slightly bigger needle and purposefully did not catch floats very often, so the second attempt is much more elastic.  I've started the second one now.

I'm still working on the backstrap weaving (still struggling to weave a consistent width), the cross stitch monogram and other projects.  I've put a warp on my loom to weave some placemats but haven't actually started weaving yet. I haven't done much in the sewing room this week apart from search for my sewing glasses which have completely disappeared.  I looked everywhere and underneath everything but no joy, so I guess I will have to buy a new pair.  They were bifocals set for the top half to view the sewing machine needle while sitting in front of the machine, and the bottom half set for closer up for handstitching and threading needles.

The biggest time suck this week (apart from driving to Worcestershire and carting furniture up and down the stairs to the attic) is a new video game I've started called Tainted Grail - the Fall of Avalon.  It is apparently billed as the Arthurian Skyrim and it certainly feels a lot like Skyrim.  I've got enough levels to be temporarily enjoying myself running around exploring the open world and collecting loot.

Sorting out

 "I just need to get sorted" has become a humorous catchphrase in our house, because DH's elderly mother has been saying that for years - like there will come a moment when all the stars are aligned and she can finally get started on doing 'the thing' - only that day never comes.  But it does seem to be human nature to create mental barriers to pursuing the fun stuff - "I need to finish X project before I can start something new"; "I need to use up my old fabric before I can buy any more";  "I need to do some paperwork before I can go play in my sewing room" etc.

With the eternal chores of housework and cleaning temporarily off my guilt list, after our cleaning marathon for my relative visiting last weekend, I have been sorting out some of my barriers to creativity. I've been reorganising my fabric stash - in particular I unpacked two large carrier bags of repro fabric and folded it all into squares I can stand up in some plastic trays I bought.  I went through my crammed shelf of special fabric and dispersed it into more sensible collections where I can see what I've got (and hopefully use some of it). I emptied out bags of scraps and threw out a lot of small pieces I will never use, and cut up others for my scrap bins.  I also went through my boxes of 'patterns or kits I want to make' and pulled out several to kit up in preparation for some retreats I will attend in October.  

One of those was the clever Clover gadget that lets you easily sew jelly roll rug fabric tubes.  I tested it out on some wadding scraps after doing some Youtube research, then cut up a bunch of wadding scraps left over from longarming to be 2.5" wide.  The plan is to make some baskets from my scrap 2.5" fabric stash.  I also researched how to make selvedge fabric, and chose some projects to make with that, once I use my selvedge stash to cover some foundation fabric.  Today I sat in on an online zoom retreat organised by one of the regions of the UK quilters guild, which gave me something to listen to while I was cutting a million strips of wadding.  After that, I was stitching on a little beginner's Boro panel that I started in a quick workshop at Festival of quilts a few years ago, which I found in the box as well.

In the attic disaster room that houses my knitting, bobbin lace and junk journalling stashes, I have also made inroads.  I've pulled out some of the bookcases lining the edges of the slanted ceiling, so that I can access the wasted space behind them.  DH took the old dining table I was using as a stand for my ScanNCut off to the re-use centre today, which freed up a lot of room. I've moved several things I only use occasionally into the slanted low part of the room to free up more floor space.  I had two crates of tatting stuff, a hobby I've hardly done at all for a couple of decades.  One crate was just books, patterns and newsletters - I was able to discard or donate almost all of it.  The other is full of threads which I haven't tackled yet.  I've put together a big bag of acrylic worsted yarn to donate.  So it is gradually looking better.  I've been on a bit of a decluttering roll - I've sold a chair, a shelf and a towel rack on Facebook Marketplace this week, and let go of a wooden quilt display ladder that never really fit in this house.  So there is more space and more empty corners than there used to be - it feels good.  

The visit with my relative and her partner went fine, although very low key.  Disappointingly (especially after all our work) they didn't seem very interested in our nice old house.  I gave them the tour but they looked in most rooms without comment and showed no interest at all in my dollhouse or sewing rooms.  I suppose to Canadian eyes, our Victorian house may look old fashioned or cluttered.  Much more satisfying was a visit a few days later by my sister-in-law with her partner. They hadn't visited since we were renovating the house 12 years ago because we usually go down to them.  They loved the house and expressed much admiration and interest, and asked lots of questions, which feels more like what our nice old house deserves, lol.

While I was tidying my sewing room, I found the embroidered house sewing accessory that I finished a few weeks ago and realised I had forgotten to blog it.  I based my little house on photographs that I found online of a design by Australian company Faeries in my Garden, which they call 'Little House of Needles and Pins'.  I undertook it partly a technical challenge to see if I could come up with a suitable construction method.  I eyeballed the proportions for the components and used cardboard inside the pieces.  My embroideries riff off of their designs but are of course cruder, my embroidery skills are only so-so.  There are small pockets on all four sides, inside the roof panels there is needle storage, and there is a ribbon to hold a pair of scissors. Construction wasn't entirely successful, I had trouble with bulk in the seams so I wonder how the original dealt with that, but it did go together. I made a boxed pincushion that fits inside.  The final result isn't as cute as the original but it's still cute.  Not sure if I will use it or not, it may just be a decoration.

I said last week that I had finished the knitted shawl that I started in St Kitts.  It is now blocked and dry.   I like the design but I don't like the colour - I used a variegated sock yarn and it has come out much more lime green than I expected.  I have a friend visiting in a few weeks that likes bright colours so I might see if she will want it.

Once the family visit was over, I could start making a mess in my dollshouse room again so I have made a start on a kit by Petworth Miniatures for a 1:48 book box on the theme of Pride and Prejudice.  I remember buying this from a dealer at the York miniatures show some years ago, and there were several book boxes themed on different books.  I've been making the box itself first, but the kit also includes some laser-cut furniture kits to make.  I am not overly impressed with the kit - the instructions to my mind are not in the right order, like they want you to install papers and then try to paint the edges of the box (I did it my own way and reversed that), and are also a bit confusing; there is no mention of painting the ceiling that I have seen so far anyway; the supplied wallpaper was on light cardstock and difficult to fold into the room, and I'm finding it difficult to get a good finish on the laser cut wood.  Hopefully I will like the end result. There was no frame supplied for inside the window so I bodged one in Tinkercad and 3D printed one.

 

Four days of skivvying

 We were away in the caravan for a few days down to Suffolk, staying near Woodbridge.  It's a nice area with some very scenic views over the various rivers, we visited a few shingle beaches and did the usual mix of antique stores, stately homes, historical sites, ice creams, town walks, farm shops etc.  The weather was mixed, and we ended up coming home a day early as our last full day was just going to be heavy rain all day. It was also a pain that Suffolk is currently undergoing a perfect storm of roadworks, road closures and diversions as dozens of construction crews prepare infrastructure and level crossings in advance of building a new nuclear reactor, while at the same time the Council is undertaking a huge road resurfacing project.  It made going anywhere on the already sparse rural road network slow and occasionally frustrating.

I took the lace knitted shawl along that I had started in St Kitts, and finished it - but I haven't blocked it yet.  I also took along the seaside cross stitch that I was doing in Norway and got quite a bit done, then finished it once I got home.

Today I sewed it up into a little zip pouch, although I had trouble keeping the end corners neat with the stiff canvas.

I came home with a few secondhand craft books, including an interesting book on sewing with Japanese fabrics, and six of Elly Sienkiewicz's Baltimore album books.  I was thinking the other day that I felt ready for another applique project so maybe I will find something in those.

Once we got home, it was straight into major housecleaning for the upcoming family visit.  It's taken four days but we are finally ready for her visit tomorrow.  Quite apart from wanting the house to look nice for a guest, we found that the more we cleaned, the more we discovered that needed cleaning.  All those places that you don't often look at, like the tops of skirting boards, dirty marks around light switches and door handles, cobwebs in the ceiling corners, marks on the tiled floor etc..  We are now wondering why we live in such a high maintenance old house instead of a featureless modern box like on the television home shows. And I have a form of RSI in my right arm from all the wiping, scrubbing, mopping etc.  We also did a bunch more decluttering - DH is much more amenable to getting rid of things now that he has had to help his elderly parents move out of their cluttered home.  I don't think the house has looked this good since shortly after we finished all the moving-in renovations. It's entirely our own fault that it took so much work, we have been quite lazy about housework for a few years now.  We need to be more diligent.

I used some of my Norway fabric to sew another stand up project bag.  I didn't think it would need interfacing as the Norwegian fabric is like a heavy cotton or very light canvas, but in fact it came out a bit floppy.  I was able to slip a bit of interfacing in after the fact before I sewed the zip on, but it was tricky as I didn't want to melt the vinyl with the iron.  I still have plenty of fabric left, I will have to think of other things to make with it.

Before we went off in the caravan, I finished stitching my Sashiko spools panel from Hobbyra Hobbyre in Tokyo.  I am a novice at sashiko so the stitching is by no means expert.  I'm planning to sew some spool blocks at an upcoming sewing retreat to piece around the panel to make a wallhanging.

As a side effect of cleaning the house, I tidied up my sewing room.  I've been feeling frustrated for a while now that I have too much fabric for the available storage space, resulting in large bins stuffed full of fabric, or big carrier bags, that you can't look through easily or even see what you have. So then I don't use it, and forget what I bought.  I pulled out a few bins and discovered a whole stash of solids that I didn't even know I had, I have no recollection of why I put them all into a bin but it explains why my shelf of solids seemed a bit sparse when I was piecing the St Kitts quilt (which I have now loaded onto my longarm frame but haven't started quilting on yet).  I folded all the big pieces onto cardboard so they will stand up inside the bins and be visible, and I folded up all the smaller pieces and put them in a rectangular basket.  So that's an improvement but not really addressing the overall problem.  I bought a few more plastic baskets today with the plan to excavate the two big carrier bags of reproduction fabric next.  Similarly, my attic room where I keep my knitting, lacemaking and now junk journalling stashes is a complete disaster.  In fact, we are just shutting the door to the attic while our guest is here and we are going to pretend that floor doesn't exist.  That room also needs a major overhaul.  I think what I really need is a new craft room the size of a small aircraft hanger...

Recording travel memories

 I've spent a fair amount of time each day this week, working on my Norway travel journal.  Although I still haven't made my mind up on what is the best way to record my trip memories.  While I am actually travelling, I keep a little digital journal of what I did each day, with photos, and share it with DH so he can see what I've been up to.  When I get home, I have various choices of what to do with that journal.  I feel like I need to make some sort of written record as my memory really isn't that great, and a few years later the details of a trip become very fuzzy unless I have a written record and some photos to trigger my memory. And I want a printed option as I know to my cost that digital documents are ephemeral and depend entirely on your storage medium not failing or your cloud provider not going out of business. So I've tried various options: printing the journal 'as is' in a photo book (easy but expensive particularly for longer trips); summarising each day's options into a scrapbook with photos I print and ephemera (fun to look through, but lacking details); or lightly editing the journal then pasting it into a scrapbook along with photos I print myself.  The last is what I am doing for Norway, it is satisfying to create but each day of the trip is taking me about an hour or more to add to the scrapbook so it isn't a fast process.

I did finish quilting the Gail Pan embroidered blocks wallhanging on my quilt frame.  These photos are straight off the frame.  Normally I wash quilts to set the stitches and fluff up the wadding, but I'm a bit worried about colour fastness with this quilt which has a strongly coloured border and backing, and a number of different DMC embroidery thread colours.  I think I may just steam it instead. Although there are a number of imperfections (stitching in the ditch on a frame is hard), I am fairly pleased with how it has come out and the quilting density is relatively even so it is hanging fairly well.

I've been playing with the Norwegian backstrap band weaving  with the help of a book by H Torgenrud and of course Youtube videos.  The book advised an initial warp of 3 yards, which I am somewhat regretting as it makes it a bit unmanageable when you are still learning and having to get up and down a lot to make adjustments and fetch things you forgot.  I'm also finding it a bit hard on my weak back - you have to sit fairly upright and sway a bit backwards and forwards as you weave and beat down the fell line.  But it is fun, it's like magic seeing the warp-faced pattern emerging, solely created by the initial warp colours - the weft only shows on the edges. It's sort of easy, and difficult, at the same time. My first several inches are all over the park in terms of width and evenness but I am getting the hang of it now and achieving a more consistent and narrower width.  One item I had to make almost immediately was a band lock - the wooden gadget that secures the end of the band to your waist so you can have tension on the warp threads.  I started out with just a plastic clip but it kept slipping.  You can buy band locks online but they are like £24 so I had a rummage in the basement to find some bolts and a couple of pieces of hardwood to drill holes into, and it's working great. Ideally you would have a hook-topped bolt but our local DIY store didn't have them and Amazon wants you to buy them in packs, so I improvised instead.  You can see my 3D printed heddle and shuttle in the photo.  It's a very portable set up, so in theory you could take it with you anywhere that you can secure the other end to something solid.  It would be much easier with a shorter warp though.  If I got better at it, I could take it when we go off in our caravan next summer.

I finished stitching my sashiko spools panel and it is currently drying - a cold water rinse made the stamped lines disappear like magic (to my relief). Once it is dry, then I can measure it and calculate the sizes for the pieced spool blocks that I want to surround it with, to turn it into a wallhanging. Or a table cloth.

Our young relative is arriving next weekend, so the cleaning and decluttering continues. DH shredded a whole box of paperwork from his parents but I asked for some of the more vintage pieces of paper (with old style typing on them, or old style certificates) which I will potentially use for junk journalling.  DH drove me to a craft destash sale in Burton Latimer where I was able to pick up some very cheap plastic storage boxes which hopefully will help me sort out my journalling corner which currently looks like a bomb went off in a stationery store.  (I was strong and resisted coming home with anything else other than some cheap Bosal stabiliser and a little pack of bag hardware). We've decided to just shut the attic door and pretend that floor of the house doesn't exist when my relative comes - it would just be too big a job to try to sort all my stuff out.  I don't know how I am ever going to downsize to a more manageable new house.  I need to go through my large collection of knitting books in the attic this winter and downsize that.