Aftermath

The first part of this week was spent regrouping after the holiday and the in-laws visiting: laundry, unpacking, retrieving all the clutter from the hidey-holes where I had concealed it, hacking back the garden, unpacking DS and getting him back into his room (which doubles as the guest room), moving furniture back into the proper rooms etc.  So not a lot of energy for anything major craftwise.

I did block the Rose Window hat and it is now finished and handed over to DH. It fits fine and he quite likes it. I haven't wound the skein of yarn yet into a cake for the second hat for me.

I've started the Ciao! cowl by Gretha Oceann using the Debbie Bliss Cotton Denim I bought on the Isle of Wight.  I will knit roughly one-third in each of the three denim tones I bought.

TV knitting has mostly been crocheting around the 20 squares of the GAA Afghan. I've done about half so far.  It is slow going as it involves lots of counting (something I'm not good at) to check I'm getting the right number of stitches on each side. Hopefully this is all going to pay off with an easy seaming job at the end. Then there is a knitted edging to make.

This is the sewing-themed wall clock I bought on our holiday. It's just a budget clock with a machine embroidered fabric circle inserted.

I didn't like the black frame so I took the clock apart and sprayed the plastic base with primer and then a nice blue colour.  It looked really good so I glued the embroidery back in and added a few buttons as an extra touch. The final step after adding the clock, or so I thought, was to click the plastic face back into the frame and I would be done.  However, I hadn't reckoned with the very tight fit of the plastic face.  It basically scraped the blue paint off the frame in several places around the inside rim of the clock. As well as being unsightly and filling the clock interior with shavings, through some quirk of physics many of the shavings were attracted by static electricity to the inside of the clear cover and almost welded themselves to the plastic.

I glued a ribbon around the inside of the clear cover to hide some of the damage, then a farcical 20 minutes ensued where I would (*) brush out the shavings and try to un-static the shavings sticking to the inside of the clear cover, then try ever so carefully to slide the cover on without scraping, but without success then have to take the cover off again (*).  Repeat the directions from * to * approximately 10 times. Eventually everything that was going to scrape off had done so, and I was able to get the now rather beaten up cover on with just one paint crumb sticking to the inside which I have decided to ignore.  I then had to touch up the frame a bit where it had become damaged. I've hung it on the wall and called it done.  It looks fine as long as you don't look too closely, lol.

As I said earlier, I've hacked the garden back a bit this week, cutting back things that had finished like the geraniums and campanula.  We had decided some time ago that our attempt at growing a box hedge around our central feature had not worked. I think it's just too dry and exposed there, and the Japanese Ilex I had planted was not growing at all.  I'd been thinking about replacing it with a lavender hedge when fortuitously Aldi (a budget supermarket) brought in a bunch of good-sized lavender pots at only £2.49 each.  So I bought 15 of those, potted up all the Ilex in case we can use it somewhere else, and planted the lavenders instead.  It instantly looks much better and hopefully they will thrive there.  I don't know what variety they are as it doesn't say on the label, some lavenders don't like exposed sites. It will probably be alright for the summer, it's the winter that might do for it, but the price was cheap enough that I am prepared to take a punt on it. As you can see, our lawn has suffered in the hot weather.

On the sewing front, I've trimmed all the blocks for my 25 block applique quilt to size and have sewn them into five rows so far.  On my lace, I finished winding all my bobbins and have finally started my Bucks Point hexagonal edging.  This is a picture of what I'm making. It's a mat designed to have fabric inserted in the centre.



It's the biggest project I've tried so far, and I will probably be working on it for quite some time.  I've successfully started (after one early false start) and have all 42 pairs of bobbins in play now - so far it's going ok.  I'm going to take a day course soon on Bucks Point, and this will be the project I take with me, hopefully the teacher will approve of what I've done so far.

I haven't done any dollshousing this week but I've started to think about one of my remaining UFOs which is a model of a 1930s hairdressing salon. I inherited the project from my older friend Eileen who has since passed, it recreates her father's salon where she also worked.  She talked me through what her plans had been for it so I have something to go on.  Today I was working on creating some decorative paper to cover the plain wood on the outside of the room box.  I scanned in advertisements from some genuine 1930s needlework magazines that I own, then cropped them and collaged the ads together to fill an A3 sheet which I can get printed. I think it will look cool and in keeping with the theme of the box.