Remember remember

Tomorrow is Guy Fawkes day (Remember remember the fifth of November) so there should be a lot of fireworks going off.  It's still legal in the UK to buy and let off fireworks at home so lots of people have a few in their garden once it gets dark.  I saw a brilliant display on Thursday evening which I think was from a local school, who were probably rolling Diwali, Halloween and Guy Fawkes into one celebration.  I heard the bangs going off and went up to the top floor of our house, where I could just see the display over the roof tops. It lasted about 10 more minutes and was quite good.

Halloween was fine. It was fun at work because people brought in sweets  for Diwali.  I wore a Halloween waistcoat I knitted donkey's years ago (it's lasted well as it only gets worn once a year) which was well received and I wore my knitted witch's hat to and from work.  At home we set up shop with the pumpkin lit out front and waited to see if we would get anyone.  It was really quiet until about 7:30pm when suddenly  people started coming.  In the end we had half a dozen groups of visitors, ranging in age from tiny tot up to teenage girls with brilliant face makeup.  So not a lot, but at least it felt worth doing.

I finished quilting the Japanese quilt so it has gone downstairs waiting for binding.  I finished hand sewing the binding onto the William Morris grid quilt so that is completely done now.  I'm not quilting on the frame pending the acquisition of the new tracks, but I did load on my Indigo Bear's Paw quilt and basted the three layers together with a combination of safety pins and my Microstitch gun.  I find the tacks from the gun have too much play in them to be used on their own, so I'm hoping the safety pins will stabilise the layers.  I'll be quilting this in a grid downstairs with my walking foot.

I still need to quilt the border that I left unquilted on the stack and whack hexagon quilt. I've decided on a pattern of diamonds so I traced that onto some Golden Threads tissue paper which I will adhere to the border using 505 spray then stitch through to create the quilted pattern. I traced one complete pattern strip then stapled that to a stack of all the other tissue strips and stitched along the pencil line without thread in the machine, to create a set of duplicates.

On my day off I decided it was time to do something about the jumble of lace pillows and projects.  I've been cannibalising tools and cloths from one project to work on others and it was all getting in a big mess now that I had four pillows on the go.  I organised all four pillows, assigned them all a tool bag and a document folder, then headed to the sewing room to hem three large cover cloths in patterned quilting fabric and four smaller plain blue working cloths.  Now every project has a cover and sufficient working cloths to protect the pillows.  Why is it that hobby equipment seems to mushroom in size from small beginnings to large stash?  It felt good to get it all organised.  Now I just need some kind of rack for storing pillows in progress.

Later in the day I sat down and finished off the second metallic thread snowflake and sewed it onto its bangle ready for gifting at Christmas.  So that reduces projects to three pillows: 1) my large Bucks Point hexagonal edging; 2) the smaller Bucks Point edging I've started, and 3) the Angel decoration I started on Monday on the Alison Winn course.  This is what the angel will look like when it's finished, this is a picture of Alison's sample.  It's made of two pieces of lace: a body and separate wings.

On the day I managed to complete half an angel and half a wing.  Today I worked some more on the wing and it's about two-thirds done. It was fun to spend a day doing lace in company.

The plumber is still with us, I'm beginning to wonder if he will be joining us for Christmas dinner.  He's working on the ensuite shower and is slowly progressing:  the tray is in and he's got tiles on the wall. I'm hoping he might finish up in another week or so.

I spent a lot of time this week repairing the floor in the main bathroom: making the floor good and filling holes, putting a coat of primer on, then several nights cutting vinyl tiles and fake plastic grout strips to size to fill in the holes where the floor was pulled up during the works.  The final piece took me about a full hour to whittle to shape, because it had to fit round the toilet, butt up against the skirting board, and accommodate the water pipe that feeds the toilet.  Once everything was dry fitted, I labelled all the pieces as if they were quilt blocks, removed them, applied the adhesive and let it go tacky, then re-laid all the tiles.  It had to dry 48 hours and today I gave the whole floor a good scrub.  It has turned out pretty well, I feel proud of the result.  Some of the other tiles have been scratched and marked while the plumber was working in there, but it all looks fine from the doorway and will last us out while we are living in this house I think.  The ensuite is going to need a completely new floor because that's where we harvested the replacement tiles from.  That's beyond my skill level so we will probably be going to a local carpet place for a vinyl floor.

I  can hear more fireworks going off up the hill.  Luckily they don't seem to bother our cat, I think she's downstairs guarding her cat flap.  It's got a magnetic catch so other cats can't get in (plus we lock it at night with her inside), but from time to time they seem to try.  We call it 'flap wars' and occasionally there will be a tremendous banging  and crashing from the basement as they head-butt the flap trying to get in, and presumably she head-butts it from her side trying to get at them.  It only lasts 10 seconds or so then detente is resumed.