The knitted doll reached its destination and has been ecstatically received by its new young owner. Apparently she has a thing for hats so is delighted that I included a hat with the outfits. I've been sent some lovely pictures of her obvious happiness - I wish everyone I gave handmade things to was that pleased! I think all of us hand-crafters have been burned in the past by people who weren't impressed by things we put a lot of work into.
I won the eBay auction for the little table for my dollshouse room that I will be building the Japanese house on, and DH kindly went and fetched it for me. I think I might keep it afterwards, it fits in nicely and will add extra display space. So I bought a plastic tablecloth today to protect it which I put on after taking this photo. This shows the table and the huge box of all the part-work kits which DS and DH struggled down three flights of stairs with.
I've had a look and the original owner had completed the first six steps but not very well. He's painted the wood instead of staining like I am planning to do, which is unfortunate as his wood won't match mine. I've got a day off tomorrow so I will have to look at what he's done so far and consider how to go on. I spent some time typing the Italian from the books into Google Translate which is very tiring but gave me a general idea of what's going on. The accompanying booklets are very detailed and also include historical information about Japanese houses in each one.
Meanwhile I made a push to finish the third Chinese box theatre miniature scene to clear the decks for the new project. This tin is 'In a happy corner' and the instructions were in English again which helped. This was definitely the hardest to build, the buildings are made up of several separate components that just sort of balance on each other while the glue is drying. You can't clamp because it's inside the tin It's cute and I'm pleased with it, but I think three of these kits is enough. I'm staining the bunny stand this time so still waiting for that to dry. Due to the inclusion of the telephone box and pub sign, I think this is meant to be an English scene - or a Chinese idea of an English scene. Looks more like New York or Boston to me apart from the telephone box. Lots of cute detail again, including tiny cakes in the bakery, and books for the bookstore.
I've been sewing the binding down by hand on my big Blue and white china quilt, although the quilt fought back and had to have a time out for a few days. I machine sewed most of one long side only to discover that my needle had unthreaded at the beginning of the seam, so by the time I noticed, the thread was all fouled and hooked inside the head of the machine. I had to unscrew the top cover and side cover to pull out all the stuck thread. Then when I re-sewed that long seam and started the next side, my bobbin thread ran out. I re-wound a bobbin and started sewing again, then realised that back when the original foul-up had occurred, my seam width had reset to default and I hadn't been stitching a 1/4 inch seam since the original problem. Since I cut my binding to 1 1/4 inch, it isn't wide enough to wrap around the default seam allowance. So after some bad language and a time out for a few days for me to get over it (aren't hobbies supposed to be fun?), I ripped out the two offending wide seams and re-sewed them AGAIN to finish the machine part of the binding. Grrrr.
I had an enjoyable day out on Saturday at the Fenny Fiddlers Lace Day in Fenny Stratford. It's a good sized lace day that I've been to before, well organised and with lots of amenities like suppliers, a raffle, tombola, and a secondhand stall. One amenity it didn't have this time was heating, it was absolutely freezing all day and I had to keep my coat wrapped around my legs to block the icy draft at floor level. They had some portable heaters going, and a few inadequate wall mounted heaters, but it only started feeling a bit warmer in late afternoon before we went home. It was also fairly crowded, the tables are not very deep and we had nine people clustered around our double table, so my elbows were occasionally touching the lacemakers on either side of me. It was like making lace on a really cold aeroplane. I took my new travelling pillow so I wasn't taking up as much width as usual, but still the same depth so I was extending well into the opposite person's table space due to the narrow table. Luckily she only had a little pillow which just fit on as well. But otherwise I quite enjoyed it, I sat with some friendly people, I got lots done on my Bucks Point edging with almost no reverse lacing, and I cleaned up on the secondhand stall to the tune of about 20 pairs of very reasonably priced bobbins. I bought a couple of new painted bobbins by Sarah Jones as well, very pretty. Afterwards DH was a star and took me to the nearby and excellent Thread and Patches quilting shop, which is like a small version of an American shop with its wide variety of stock. I enjoyed looking at the fabric but it's so expensive now that I didn't even feel tempted to buy any. I think my brain is stuck in the past when it comes to the cost of quilting fabric, I can't believe that people are paying £17 a metre for it now. I did buy a bottle of purple dye for a UFO knitting project I need to finish, and a packet of tiny white buttons I could have done with when making the knitted doll.
On my day off this week, I spent some time watching some excellent free video tutorials on repairing vintage Singer Featherweight sewing machines, on the Featherweight Shop site which was mentioned on Facebook. My 222 has always had erratic tension so I want to try some of the tips from the videos to see if I can improve it. It will also benefit from some of the cleaning and polishing tips if I can acquire similar products to what they used. It's very generous of that shop to share so much knowledge to help owners trying to troubleshoot their old machines. Mine dates to 1957.
Most of the rest of my time this week has been spent on my new knitting project, the Ten-Stitch-Triangle shawl by Frankie Brown. It's like a log cabin triangle: you start with a small garter stitch triangle in the middle of the back, then knit a 10-stitch wide garter strip around and around until you make a triangle big enough to wear as a shawl. I'm knitting it with the little balls of Opal sock yarn from my Advent calendar so it's quite fun to see what the next colour will be. It took me a long time to get going on this project, I had to rip back several times because I wasn't happy with my joins or corners. After watching some YouTube videos on the related 10-stitch Blanket, I tried out a few different things and finally got going. By that time my first ball of yarn was getting a bit matted from being re-used so many times! I'm doing the corners as given in the pattern, but I'm joining at the sides using the join shown in the Nervous Knitter video , which is a flatter join more suitable for a shawl. My triangle is growing but still a bit wobbly which I think blocking will help a lot with. it's rather addictive knitting, mindless and yet not mindless because of the short row corners. When I'd had enough of lacemaking yesterday at the Lace Day, I pulled this out for the last hour, and I'm knitting it on the train there and back to work.
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