Bank holiday weekend

It's a long weekend here in the UK, and as is traditional the weather has been cold and rainy.  I know I moaned a lot about the heat but it seems to have gone completely the other way now.  We went over to the Lamport Hall antiques fair yesterday and I felt sorry for the outdoor traders who had to keep their stock concealed under opaque tarps.  We enjoyed wandering around (most of the fair is inside the old stables), there seemed to be some new dealers this time and familiar dealers had new stock.  I came home with a vintage Royal Winton cake platter and a much repaired but still pretty balloon-backed Victorian chair.  It just kills me that something like this lovely carved chair  with tapestry upholstery is going for less than the price of a meal out for the three of us, I had to rescue it.  Brown furniture is so out of fashion here in the UK.  Hopefully it will come back in with a bang around the time we need to downsize in 15 years or so, he he he.

Over the past week I finished the second bedroom of the Japanese dollshouse including carving the traditional hanging fish pot suspension system over the fire pit (when I took this picture, I didn't realise the stewpot was hanging crooked!).

Carving the fish was challenging, it was a flat fish-shaped blank about 3/4 of an inch long, and the picture directions showed you needed to carve it into a 3D fish, preferably without slicing into your own fingers.  I roughed out the initial fish shape with my Dremel multi-tool but after that it was carefully cutting with a scalpel. It doesn't look too bad, not the same as the picture but I still have all my fingers!

On my day off I put together the stretcher frame for my ancient cross-stitch and carefully stretched the stitching while trying to keep it even.  I like it and it is hanging in the hallway near the kitchen where I can see it often. I still can't believe it is actually finished, it's been hanging around for most of my adult son's lifetime.

I also sewed the buttons onto the Purple rose cardigan.  Unfortunately it turns out that the cardi is too small for my friend's daughter after all, I should have knit the bigger size.  But it is quite cute, and will go in the stash waiting for another baby to come along.

Also on my day off, I felt like a quick sewing project so I pulled out the little packs of cigar-rolled Japanese fabrics that I bought in Nippori fabric town in Tokyo.  It was a shame to unwrap them, they looked so enticing in their neat rolls, but I wanted to use all the fabric I had bought on the last trip (so I can buy more on the next trip!!).  I used a 5-inch tumbler template ruler from Missouri Star to cut a few tumblers out of each of the fabrics, and stitched those into a table runner.  The edging and binding are also from Japan, left over from the handbag and wallhanging I made after we got back.  I chose to channel quilt because the resulting texture reminds me of how the fabric was packaged when I bought it.

Having surveyed my queue of quilting projects, I have now chosen to start another quilt.  This is from a pattern called Ode to the 1930s: A sampler quilt, by From my heart to your hands studio.  I bought the pattern a few years ago with the aim of using up some of my large-ish stash of 1930s fabrics, some of which date back to the early 90s. It has 42 different blocks both pieced and appliqued.

So I pulled out all my 30s/40s fabrics and piled them near my cutting table where I can easily get at them to pull fabrics for various blocks.  As you can see, I've pieced the first block.  I've cut the pieces for a second block but not stitched it yet.  This project should keep me busy for a while and use up a small part of my stash.  I like scrappy quilts and I like that every block will be different, I get really bored stitching repeating block patterns.

I've finished the stripes on my 10-stitch triangle shawl and I've started knitting on the edging in a solid blue yarn I bought in Cumbria.  I charted out a couple of edgings from the book of knitted lace edgings by Tessa Lorant that I found in Penrith. The first one was too complicated to repeat along an entire shawl (I got confused several times in the first 12 row repeat as it is lace in both directions).  The second one which she calls 'Wheel edging' is a simpler garter stitch edging so I'm trying that along the edge of the shawl to see what it looks like.  She says it curves a little, hopefully it won't distort the shawl if I block it straight.  I'm still knitting the Batik Swirl shawl on my commutes, it's widening out now but is still very pointy.  I don't really like shallow crescent shaped shawls, I don't find they sit well on my shoulders, and I'm starting to wonder if this shawl is that shape (you can't tell from the photo). There's only one photo on Ravelry and it looks like it might be crescent shaped.  We'll see. I could always adapt the pattern to make it deeper, or pull it out and try something else.

More days home this week than expected

...because the abrupt change in weather seemed to trigger a head cold for me so I ended up missing two days of work being sick instead.  It meant that in between nose blowing and sleeping, I could do some quiet work on crafts.  I'm feeling better now by the way although still a bit stuffed up.

I finished the Japanese fabric picture and made it a little frame by cutting up a couple of pound-store frames to the right size. I've included a side view so you can see the texture created by the kit which has you pad certain pieces with felt to give a more 3D effect.

We saw thatched houses like this when we visited the UNESCO world heritage site of Shirakawa-go in the mountains.

I had already finished knitting the purple roses cardigan so I sewed it up and blocked it but haven't sewn the buttons on yet.  In this pic, one front is looking longer than the other but it isn't really!

This is supposed to be a size 2-3 years and the chest has come out about 18-19 inches.  I've emailed a friend whose daughter is whom I had in mind as the recipient, to see if she thinks it will fit her.

Now I've started knitting a shawl from the Stylecraft Batik Swirl I bought a few months ago, using a pattern from Simply Knitting magazine.  The shawl is knit on the diagonal to begin with so you are increasing on one side and decreasing on the other to knit a diagonal point.  There is no picture of this part of the shawl and I got a bit confused and ended up with six inches of knitting bent like an elbow.  So I had to pull that out and start again!  The second attempt is looking better.

I also did some more work on the second bedroom for the Japanese dollshouse.  I created an aged effect for the floorboards similar to floors in photos I took on our Japan trip inside historic houses and temples, and I fitted the irori or traditional fire pit.  It looks great with the Japanese tea kettle that my friend Anita gifted me with.

After that I fitted the sliding fusuma doors and I'm currently working on the ceiling.  There will be a traditional stair cupboard at the back of the room so I decided to create a false ceiling hatch back there  to give the stairs somewhere to go to, as if the occupants could go up into the attic.

The garden is really appreciating the cooler damper weather.  Yesterday we trawled a couple of garden centres looking for bargains, I particularly like to buy perennials off the 'sick plant' table because they are cheap and usually recover fine with some care.  We tried Podingtons first which is part of the Wyevale chain, and it was so expensive!  A lot of their plants weren't even in that great condition yet everything was really highly priced, like a smallish pot of rosemary for £10.  DH remembered another one called Seasons in Burton Latimer so we tried over there, and hit the jackpot.  A whole table of reasonably healthy medium sized perennials all at £2.69 a pot to clear!  So we came home with 17 pots which filled in a lot of gaps in the garden and hopefully will all survive the winter and add value to the garden for years to come.

Today I noticed that the hibiscus we were given by DH's uncle back in the spring has suddenly thrown out two flowers and they are so beautiful!  I didn't even know you could grow hibiscus in this country, and when he gave it to us it was just a bare stick in a pot.  I planted it in a large container where it remained a bare stick for several months.  Finally in early summer it started throwing out leaves.  The uncle said it might not flower its first year so we were excited when we noticed buds about a month ago.  And now there are these gorgeous tropical flowers, so pretty.

Hope you are staying healthy!

What are these things called 'socks'?

I was chilly last night and went upstairs to put some socks on, then realised as I was doing it that I had literally not worn socks for several weeks. It's been way too hot for socks so it's been bare feet in the house and sandals outside.  But the weather has now broken and in true English fashion has turned cold and rainy.  It's good for the garden, and perhaps the poor lawn might resuscitate now. But they tell us the hot weather will be back in a few weeks so the lawn had better hurry up.

The big finish this week: at long last the ancient cross stitch UFO is done!  It's not framed yet, but I've ordered some artist's stretcher bars to make a frame to stretch it over.

To give you an idea of scale, it's 22 inches tall.  The price tag reads '2001' and I think I bought it on a trip to America plus all the threads to do it.  I started it, struggled with the counting and only got about halfway down the first dresser before it went into hibernation. It lived under the bed at our last house for 10 years but I never wanted to throw it out.  Then three years ago I discovered that the world of cross stitch had moved on and you could now do something called 'gridding' with coloured fish line, to divide the canvas into blocks of 10 squares.  This is a huge help when you are number-challenged like I am.  I'm much better at thinking in terms of "three squares past the gridline". I picked it back up and worked at it off and on, it came on a few holidays with us, and now it's finally finished! I feel a sense of achievement and I do really like it.

So that means I've been able to move on to the next cross stitch UFO which is a younger-but-still-middle-aged Christmas house that fits into a house shaped frame (had a few worried moments where I thought I had lost the frame over the years but I found it).  Some years ago I did the first 'room' which was the hallway.  So I've loaded the fabric onto the frame and it is now living in the living room so I can work on it while watching TV.  The house frame is bare wood, I don't think I will paint it such a strident red as in the picture.

I finished the other two book pincushions this week, these are such fun. I feel tempted to make more but you only need so many pincushions and they are a lot of handwork to make up.

Finishing the pincushions meant that I could choose another project from my queue, so I picked one of the fabric-foam picture kits I bought in Tokyo a few years ago.  I did an American kit about 20 years ago where you cut fabric and push it into slits cut into a foam base, which made a quilt scene.  But being Japanese, this kit is organised to the nth degree:  all the fabric is provided with individual pattern sheets for cutting out each colour piece; the pattern sheets are self adhesive so they don't slip off the fabric; the foam block is self adhesive; there are full colour photographic instructions (which is good, because they are in Japanese and mostly using Kanji which I haven't learned yet); etc etc.  It's a countryside scene with traditional Japanese houses and a sprig of oranges in the foreground so I think it is an autumnal scene. Although it isn't difficult, the fabrics are mostly kimono-type fabrics so a bit slippery and tending to fray, so it does require some patience and care for a neat result.  There's a pleasant mindlessness to it as the picture slowly builds up.

The last couple of days I've been working on the second bedroom for this floor of the Japanese dollshouse.  This room is a bit different as it has a planked floor instead of tatami mats.  So there are floorboards to lay that I am currently painting.  This room also features an 'irori' which is a traditional firepit.  The dollshouse version was just a wooden box sitting on top of the floor but I decided to sink it into the floor like the traditional versions we saw in historical houses in Japan.  So I've cut a hole in the floor which luckily is raised up so there is room underneath for the hearth box. I've cut the floorboards to go around the hole when I lay them.

And that's pretty much it this week.  I did do a bit of work on my big Bucks Point hexagonal lace mat while I watched Youtube videos about Tokyo Disneyland as research for our trip next year. I finished the first sleeve of the Purple Roses cardigan and have started the second sleeve, and I've added some more inches to the ten stitch triangle shawl final round.

Hope it's cooler where you are as well.

Heat makes me stupid

I'm supposed to be studying my Japanese but I just can't concentrate, it's too warm.  It's back up to 30 degrees again until mid week.  But at least we are better off  than southern Europe where it is literally roasting hot.  I've done very little today apart from some stints in the basement dollshouse room where it is cooler.

I've finished the first bedroom on the next floor of the Japanese dollshouse apart from making the tatami mat floor, and I've started work on the other bedroom today. I'm skipping the intervening hall for now so that I can tweak the width of the hall if need be once the bedrooms are built.

I used a Japanese print from a cheap book I found on sale for the inside of the sliding doors, and a graphic wave print scrapbooking paper for the cupboard doors in the tokonoma.  The 'tree trunk' is papier mache applied over the dowel that comes with the kit.

 You can start to get an idea of how big the house is going to be now that the next floor is under construction. I've now opened kits up to number 72 (out of 120) although I've left several bits for later like stairs and furniture while I'm doing the basic room construction.

Also while hiding in the cool of the basement on my day off, I  made the components for three more 'book' pincushions and finished the first one off today.  I used the embroidery alphabet on my Janome 6500 to stitch 'Journal' and then surrounded it in a leaf embroidery stitch to make the cover title.  I found some lace in my stash to go around the edge of the cover.  I might embellish it with a bit of ribbon as well.  This book is a quarter-inch thinner than the prototype and I think looks better proportioned.  I think you could still go thinner without compromising function.  I think these are really cute.  DH is more dubious, perhaps it's a girl thing.  When these are done I will have to decide what to tackle next from my enormous queue waiting.  It's rather exciting after not being able to start anything new in quilting for almost a year while I was finishing off old UFOs, to be able to look at the queue and pick things to do.  These books were on the queue by the way, I had seen a picture on Pinterest a few years ago and thought they looked cute so I had printed it off and stuck it on my design wall.

I thought I had finished my ancient cross stitch UFO this week.  I took it off the frame and admired it then pulled out all the fishing-line grid stitching I was using as reference lines.  Then I realised I had missed a bit. Grrrr.  So I just need to do that bit and THEN it will finally be finished.  I'm tempted to wash it to remove the grime of 17 years but I worry that the ancient embroidery cottons might not be colour fast so I may leave well enough alone.  I need to decide whether to take it now for framing, or whether to stretch it over an artist's canvas which would also look nice.  I'll take a pic when it's properly done.

I've knit the back and two fronts of the little purple rose cardigan and have started a sleeve.  I switched from metal points to wooden points on my interchangeables because the acrylic yarn seemed a bit 'sticky' on the metal points.  My corner of the living room is a bit of a disaster zone at the moment, I'm spending evenings surrounded by a high tide of craft projects I am intermittently working on.  Luckily we rarely have visitors  :)