Back to work, although not when I expected

So I dragged myself out of bed on the morning of New Year's Eve, got dressed, made my lunch, and trudged the mile down to the rail station at 7:30am in the dark and cold - all while the family were still fast asleep since they had the sense to book the day off.  I vaguely noticed a lot of buses as I arrived at the station, but did not put 2+2 together until I went inside to get warm and discovered that there were no trains running.  Apparently it was planned engineering work which I suppose they announced during the Christmas week when I was at home.  It never occurred to me to check in advance because a) I was going to work therefore everyone must be, and b) I haven't worked New Year's Eve for years so am out of the habit.  I am not so dedicated to my job that I was going to spend three hours on a bus to get there, so I trudged back home again and phoned my manager to swap my days this week.  At least I ended up having a longer holiday after all.

I used the extra day to take down all the Christmas decorations and pile them in the front room, where I gradually put them away over the next several evenings.  We bought a couple of plastic storage crates on sale at Wilko so we have finally retired some of the tattered cardboard boxes we've used for about 15 years or more.  So things are a bit more organised now. DH took the trees to be recycled at the dump yesterday.

This week I've been working on the other porch of the Japanese dollshouse.  I've got the room box portion assembled and am just adding the windows, and I made the two tatami mats that go inside this porch as a unique touch compared to the other three porches.

I've made four more blocks for my 30s Sampler quilt.  The last one (which is the top picture) is quite wonky again even though I was trying hard to cut accurately and my seam allowance should be ok now.  I'm also careful with pressing so as not to distort the triangles.  I hate triangles.  It's discouraging to have a block come out polygonal and smaller in some dimensions than it should be.  I blasted the block with steam at the end and got it to be a bit bigger although still not square.  I used to be good at this.  Twenty years ago quilting was my main hobby and I was sewing for hours every week.  I guess practice makes perfect and then when you stop practicing, you lose it again.  Grrr.  I may have to re-make some of the blocks in this quilt or it's just not going to go together because it's a real jigsaw puzzle of different sized blocks.

In knitting this week, I finished the Scheepjes Secret Garden Shawl and wet blocked it.  I was a bit worried that when it was washed it would get a bit crispy and scratchy because of the cotton content, but in fact it has relaxed into a lovely soft fabric which I really like.  It reminds me of the old Rowan Summer Tweed but without the scratchy bits that were spun into that yarn.  I wonder what this yarn would be like in a garment.  There were a lot of ends to weave in as I was playing yarn chicken with some of the colourways that came in the kit and at the same time trying to cope with unhelpful variegation (like when the two alternating yarns both variegated into a very similar colour so there was no contrast, which happened a few times).  So I was having to break the yarn and rejoin at a more appropriate part of the colour progression.  But I like how it's come out.

I've now returned to two hibernating  knitting projects.  The Drops Leaf Yoke top down sweater which I started over two years ago has been sitting inside the drawer of my knitting table in the front room almost untouched.  I don't like knitting top down sweaters for several reasons, one of which is that knitting the body just feels like knitting wallpaper.  But I was knitting on it occasionally when I wanted a change from my other projects and finally achieved sufficient length on the body and have now knit the garter hem and bound off.  I've tried it on and it looks very lumpy as it hasn't been blocked, hopefully it will even out and relax a bit once wet blocked.  Now I need to continue knitting both the sleeves.  I also went up to the attic and rescued my hibernating Winterland Mittens which I started five years ago.  They were abandoned for the same reasons that several other people have expressed in their online project notes for this design:  these mittens come out huge, and the floats are really long so no matter how you try to deal with the floats, you end up with peek-through.  I remember having a few goes and I was never happy with the huge lumpy spotty result - thus the hibernation.    So I have now unraveled the mitten back to the cuff, and I steamed the yarn to remove the kinks so I can re-knit with it (I also managed to drop it on the hot burner and have it catch fire, twice.  Did you know burning wool smells like burning hair?).  I've gone down a needle size and am not going to weave in my contrast yarn at all on the back of the hand where the main design is.  I'm just going to leave all the long floats and see if that improves the knitting, and then deal with the floats afterwards.  I know I read one knitting designer's blog where she said that in a pure wool, the floats soon felt and attach to the inside, so she never weaves them in either.  Or there is the machine knitter's trick of latching up the floats on the inside.  We'll see.