Happy Christmas!

It's Boxing Day and the great eating up of leftovers has begun. I hope everyone had an enjoyable day yesterday.  I even got some sewing done and finished up the Honeycomb Basket project I was working on.  I've posted an extra post this week with my thoughts on the pattern, which hopefully might help others making the project.

There is a lot of hand-sewing in the original instructions, as you are sewing down the binding on the tops and the bases of seven pockets.  So that's what I was doing for most of the Christmas television watching.

Once the hand-sewing was done, it was back to the Night before Christmas knit-along project, which has now published all 24 patterns on Ravelry.  I made it up to pattern 21, and was stitching down curtains and knitting 'presents' while watching The Queen yesterday afternoon.

I don't know if you can see that I have the back cover and the spine of the book sewn on.  I still have to knit the front cover pieces before I can finish assembling the scene, then there are a few more decorations to knit such as stockings for the fireplace. There has been a huge amount of knitting to get this far, the equivalent of knitting a couple of baby-sized garments I think.

Did you get anything crafty for Christmas?  I was very happy with what was under the tree this year:

- an A3 paper cutter which will be brilliant for cutting straight precise lines on dollshouse wallpaper and printies.
- a handmade keyhole cover cloth for bobbin lacemaking, from one of my lace friends.
- a handmade little zip pouch and some quilt fabric from my m-i-l
- a handknitted lace dollshouse bedspread from an older quilting/dollshouse friend
- and most delightful: a gorgeous  little miniature Japanese cast-iron traditional tea kettle from Anita which will be brilliant for my Japanese dollshouse one day when it gets built. We saw a lot of life-sized tea kettles just like it on our holiday. Plus a cute 'Sew' sign and a craft calendar which I am sure will fit into my quilt shop very nicely.

I haven't taken pictures yet, sorry.

I'm struggling today because I feel like I should be taking advantage of my holiday to get loads done on my crafts, but I've eaten and drunk so much over the last few days that what I really feel like doing is having a nap, lol.  I'm a bit stalled on my shed project interior, I always have problems furnishing the insides of scenes, I much prefer doing the exterior.  I don't want to have to buy a bunch of new stuff but on the other hand I don't want the inside of the shed to look crude compared to the outside. And I need to get this club project finished so that I can get back to the long list of renovating and completing of houses that I need to do before the club comes to visit in July.  My concept is that it is a writer's retreat, so that I can finally use a Jane Harrop desk and chair set that I made a long time ago. This is a test layout that I tried out on my friend Anita, who rightly pointed out that the tea set is out of scale and that things aren't 'gelling' yet.  It's not a very big space which doesn't help.

Now that the Honeycomb Basket is done, I need to choose my next sewing project. I've got a much-scribbled out list from a few years ago of what was in the quilting pipeline, so I've brought that upstairs to type out cleanly and update.  But I know there is a bunch of stuff that hasn't even made it onto the list yet, like the kits and fabric I bought in Japan, or the fabric for two more pairs of pyjama trousers.  Perhaps I will type out a clean list, take it downstairs and annotate it, then bring it back upstairs to amend it again.  And that's how you spell p-r-o-c-r-a-s-t-i-n-a-t-i-o-n, children!