Remember when

Ah, 1972. The fashions, the flares, the plastic yarn...  I was looking through an old issue of an American magazine, McCall's Needlework and Crafts, and the pictures were so amusing I thought I would share a few.

Crochet was hot.  And in 100% acrylic yarn, think how really hot these poor people would have been in their crocheted outfits. Check out the crocheted pedal pushers.

Or how about these stylish hot pants, and that fringed vest?  Still all acrylic.

You could crochet your own.

And this ad isn't sexist at all.  Check out the crocheted bikini.

Glamorous crocheted evening gowns, complete with white bra flashing through the navy mesh.

There was a minority of knitted patterns in this issue. How about a cabled trouser suit? I feel too hot just looking at this picture.

I wonder if 45 years from now we'll be laughing at the fashions in magazines from 2016?

Resurrecting old UFOs

Delving into my own past, I was clearing up my desk and came across a little petit point project which I started many years ago. It's a Janet Granger Designs bell pull kit for a 1/12th scale dollshouse room, done on silk gauze with one strand of embroidery floss.  I had limped my way to within an inch of the end. I think I stalled out first because two of the greens were so similar that I kept getting confused, secondly because I can't count so have trouble with stitched charts, and thirdly because I kept getting lost on said chart. Roll forward to modern technology and I could convert the chart into a PDF and track my progress using Goodreader on the iPad.  I found that if I did one row at a time then I didn't get lost and didn't get too confused with the colours, although it did mean a lot of threading and unthreading. It still took a year or so but since taking this picture yesterday I have finally reached the last row of the chart.  Of course, when I started this project I could do it with the naked eye in a good light, but I have finished it using my magnifying Optivisor so that I can see what I'm doing.

Another UFO, only a few years old I think, is this knitted telephone box.  I was very disappointed at the time because the finished sample in the book correctly showed a three-pane-wide window like the classic British telephone box, but I didn't notice until well into the project that the chart in the book was for an incorrect four-pane window. Also it is not small and cute like it looked in the photo, but big and unwieldy.  After I finished knitting it, I never stuffed it because I had no source for foam rubber.  But when I was cleaning up the workshop last week I came across some cheap decorating sponges and realised I could use them instead.  I just had to cut them to fit, add some toy stuffing at the top and sew the roof on.  So it's done.  And as DH said, now what do I do with it? I suppose it is a conversation piece. Or a really big pincushion.

I think I'm on a roll because I went up to the attic and rescued my Readicut hooked rug project which I last worked on a couple of years ago when we were renting, in between houses. Going on the rag rug course a few weeks ago made me feel like I want to finish this rug but we'll see how long that impulse lasts against the tedium of hooking.  There is a reason why things become UFOs.

Quilting

Today was Worldwide Quilting Day and I celebrated by excavating some of the cobwebbed corners of my sewing room where I had piles of things waiting to be put away, waiting to be mended, waiting to be completed etc.  After four hours of putting away fabric, ribbon, buttons, cardmaking stuff, rugmaking stuff, framing three pictures, changing the buttons on a waistcoat, returning items to other parts of the house, hanging two mirrors, sorting out a two foot high stack of magazines, clearing the remains of the last several projects I've completed, sticking cuttings into inspiration books and sorting out more storage - it really doesn't look much different.  But I feel better for having done it.

I topped out the Let it Snow quilt on Thursday when I needed to stay in the sewing room within earshot of some workmen replacing windows in the woodshop and dollshouse room.  I proudly hung the top to take some photos, then sat back to admire it. That's when I noticed that I had sewn the bottom panel of snowballs on upside down.

I fixed the mistake yesterday afternoon after work. I'm going to piece a back out of the leftover snowman fabrics I collected. I decided not to put a border on the quilt, I like it the way it is and it's about five feet wide so big enough to be a throw. I like all the cheerful scrappy colours and the plaid squares dancing with each other.  The snowmen are all made from white wool felt so look realistically 'snowy'.

Real house

Nothing much happened on the dollshouse porch kit this week because I had to spend one evening clearing out the study so an estimator could measure the floor for fitting Amtico over the rough floorboards, and two more evenings clearing out the dollshouse room/putting everything back in the dollshouse room so that the windows could be replaced.  We had a broken window in the workshop (inherited) so needed to replace that one, and while we were at it we had the two windows in the dollshouse room beefed up with laminated glass. It took them about three hours of hammering to get through decades of paint and get the beading off and clear out the channels, then a mere 40 minutes to fit the new windows.

Knitting

On the knitting front, I finished the Salpeker square from the GAA Afghan. After sewing on the cabled border, I disguised the seam by crocheting a chain over it. Then I picked up all around the cable to knit on the garter border.

I've now started what I think is the 20th and final square of the afghan.  In commuter knitting, I am in the middle of turning the heel on the second Basketcheck sock. Progress has been slow because I tend to read on the train in the mornings now instead of knitting. Bad knitter.