Curtain making

Well, the curtain making went about as well as I had expected.  I have achieved a finished curtain which is doing the intended job, but it took me about six hours and a lot of going backwards.  Basically I somehow measured the drop (length) wrong and also managed to calculate the lining length as 220-8=202 instead of 212 (told you I was bad with numbers).  So I ended up with a well made but very short curtain, with an even shorter lining.  Luckily I was following this excellent tutorial by Debbie Shore for a simple lined curtain and her instructions include a four inch hem.  By unpicking then reducing my lining hem to 1/2 inch and my curtain hem to one-inch, and moving the hooks to the top loop in the curtain tape, the curtain has ended up the right length and looks nice.  The lining is still rather short on the inside but that doesn't show from the room.

Manipulating 2m square panels of fabric in 32C heat was not fun.   In the morning before it got too hot, I  put both leaves into the dining table and it made a good working surface for these big pieces of fabric.

Pattern matching the central seam took a while, I looked at various methods of doing it but my linen is a fairly open weave so quite slippery.  In the end I pressed under a hem and then secured the match with masking tape from the right side.  The tape acted like a hinge when I flipped the top layer of fabric over to get at the seam so I could pin it.  I stitched a basting stitch a little inside the fold, removed the tape, then stitched a final seam along the fold line which came out pretty well, the seam is quite unobtrusive.

The final straw challenge was discovering that somehow my curtain heading tape was two inches short when I thought I had bought more than enough.  So the final curtain hook is sewn on by hand.  Whew, I'm glad that's over with and now all the junk in the alcove is hidden from view.

I wore my new t-shirt dress to work, and it was fine.  Apart from noticing partway through the day in the bathroom mirror that I still had tacking stitches in my sleeve tucks, it felt comfortable and a colleague who also sews said she didn't think it looked homemade. I guess it's like a quilt: when you finish it, all's you can see are the mistakes, but over time those fade from your memory and it's just a quilt. 

Thankfully the heatwave has now broken and we are back to a nice rainy cool day, and I'm loving it. I've been able to do things for the first time in weeks like wear slippers in the house and have a hot shower, and return to clothing items I haven't seen since June.  Hopefully the cooler weather will stay with us for a while.  The garden got a good soaking yesterday so perhaps we might even get some green grass regrowing through the yellow stubble.

With the cooler weather I've had more energy for doing things.  Yesterday I spent part of the afternoon sewing something just for fun now that the curtain is out of the way.  I had purchased this pattern for book-shaped cushions and pin-cushions so had fun choosing fabrics to make a new pincushion for use on my lace pillow. These little books are really cute but there is a lot of hand sewing to finish them so they are a bit fiddly to make.  But I might make a few more for me and for gifts. I think I might reduce the depth of the 'pages' by a quarter-inch as the book looks a bit fat to me.  Possibly I over-stuffed it but I don't like a limp pincushion, I prefer one that is firmly stuffed and I actually stopped before I reached the point of this being firm. You can also make these cushions so that the front cover opens to reveal the first 'page' of the book, but I thought a closed book would be more practical as a pincushion.

In the evenings I have been working on my cross-stitch UFO which is almost finished now, and doing some extra knitting on my commuter project the purple rose cardigan.  I also did a bit of work on my Bucks lace edging while watching Youtube videos at my desk. And I've made a start on the next floor of the Japanese dollshouse, staining and painting the components for the first bedroom on the second floor.  It's constructed exactly the same as the previous floor so it's all pretty familiar.  This will be my last tokonoma (decorative alcove) as the other bedroom on this floor doesn't have one.

Our pear tree pulled the same trick as last year with all the pears coming ripe at the same time.  I was trying to pick them off with a long basket picker on a stick but they were so ripe they were just falling off.  So in the end I just shielded my head, and used the picker to shake branches so that all the pears fell off into the undergrowth. Then I crawled around collecting them, disturbing clouds of biting midges but I had prepared for them by covering up completely including a woolly hat pulled down over my ears (just what you want to be wearing in 32C heat) so I avoided being bitten this time.  So we now have about 120 pears (I didn't actually count them but it's loads) in the basement so yesterday I made a pear crumble. I threw in a handful of blackberries from the bushes that hang over from next door into our garden which added a nice pink tint.  Hopefully we'll be able to eat and/or give away the pears before they go rotten. I remember last year they only lasted a few weeks before going off.

I'm attempting to trick my brain into viewing Japanese as something it needs to remember, by creating an artificial deadline. I've done that by engaging an online Japanese tutor using an app called iTalki, a platform that supports paid-for language instruction. I had my first lesson this morning, it was terrifying and in panic I forgot most of the Japanese I had learned. But she was very friendly and speaks reasonable English, and after a while she managed to dumb it down to my level (speaking very very slowly and emphasising the individual words).  She has the same Japanese textbook as I am using, so we went through a couple of the exercises. I did not perform well but I've booked five more weekly lessons so hopefully over time I will improve now that I have someone to practice with.