Many pins later

I now realise why I've had to buy two extra boxes of lace pins this past year - because they were all used up pinning the Bucks Point hexagon to the pillow!  It literally took a couple of hours to carefully pull them all out - carefully because if you just yank them out of the picots, it can pull the thread loop as well and ruin the picot.  So each one has to be individually removed while you hold down the picot thread loop with something else like a divider pin.  So many pins - I had to go and find an empty box to put the rest of them into.

But here it is, the right side up at long last.  I'm pleased that it's finally done but at the same time a little disappointed that it isn't perfect.  There are some wobbles in the ground and footside, a couple of dodgy picots, and my join is unobtrusive but not invisible. But overall it's not bad for my first big project and considering lacemaking is not my main hobby.

So in the above main picture, the join is not too obvious.  In the below closeup of the join, you can see the distortion in the ground and a blurring of the edges of the motifs which have the sausages of ends hidden behind them. But it's not awful, I have seen (and done) worse in the past.  Next time hopefully I will improve.

Last week I forgot to blog some adorable little dollshouse tins that I bought on ebay.  I saw these in the V&A gift shop where they were filled with sweets and selling for £4.50 each.  I looked them up when I got home and they are made by a wholesale UK manufacturer called Elite Gift Boxes and were designed in 2011 by Dana Kubick.  There was a set of six different designs on ebay for less than the V&A (but no sweets much to DH's disappointment).  The outsides and insides are fully decorated in 360 degree artwork, really cute.

And while I am blogging my shopping finds, look at this cute teacup pincushion I found today when we were browsing an antiques mall in Huntingdon.  It was a stall full of not-antique but vintage-inspired homemade sewn items and decor, and I liked the way this is accessorised with charms and decorated pins.

I had to pull out almost all of my second lace fingerless mitt.  I had knit up past the thumb thanks to some talks that I went to (I was knitting while I listened).  By now I am knitting the lace pattern from memory but it was starting to seem like something wasn't quite right.  Sure enough when I actually compared the knitting to the pattern, I had 14 stitches in my lace repeat when I should have had 17 stitches.  Turned out I had missed out a couple of YOs early in the proceedings and then obviously lost another stitch along the way which is pretty poor.  I pulled it back to the first repeat and am re-knitting.  I've finished the chart and main hand part of the second Winterland mitten and am now knitting the remaining thumb.

I have spent a lot of time this week wrestling with the roof of doom on the Japanese dollshouse.  How it should have worked was that, having created the armature of the roof, you then glue on a narrow edging all around the 'spokes' sticking out. The edging marks the edge of the underneath eaves as well as providing a support for the upper roof papers that will support the tiles.  However because my 'spokes' were sticking out at all sorts of odd angles and levels, thanks to my earlier issues, I had to do the reverse.  I had to float the narrow edging in mid-air - trying to keep it level, parallel to the main roof and at the same distance from the main roof all the way around - and then try to adjust the spokes so that they met up with the edging.  Much bodging ensued.  I think I had to clip back all the spokes in the end, break off and re-glue the corner ones several times, and adjust the edging, until eventually the octopus was tamed.

Now that the edging is in place, the next step is to cover the underside of the eaves.  The kit supplies very thin bendy veneer and doesn't instruct to paint it.  I thought the light wood colour was going to look incongruous with the rest of the house.  I googled for a while and it looks like the majority of eaves of traditional buildings in Japan are either in the white-coloured spectrum or dark.  I gave my bits of veneer a light spray of white paint.  Each segment has to be individually cut to shape.  To combat the bendyness, I am gluing bit of card on the reverse of the veneer shapes so that they won't develop curves as I glue them to the house.

 Gluing the coverings on to the eaves is fairly straightforward but takes a lot of clamps so I am having to do it in stages.

This week instead of working on my ongoing Christmas cross stitch, I was distracted onto a little 'quick' cross stitch kit I bought on the secondhand table at one of the Lace Days.  It's a little bowl of cherries that decorates a little notebook.  I've finished the cross stitching but still need to assemble the notebook so I haven't taken a picture yet.  My sewing machine is back from the shop and working much better, so I finally sewed together the block I cut out a few weeks ago but haven't cut out or sewn any others.

Yesterday we went to a garden open day owned by a snowdrop expert.  Her garden was just a sea of snowdrops, crocuses, hellebores and early daffodils, really gorgeous.  I developed garden envy so we stopped at the garden centre on the way home to get a tray of pretty pink primroses and a white hellebore.  It's been ridiculously warm and sunny for February, up in the high teens, so I planted them out when we got home and finished the tidying up / hacking back that I started last week.  We have some nice clumps of snowdrops and crocuses as well, and a couple of early daffodils have opened up, so it's pleasant to spend time out there.  Are the temperatures unseasonable where you are?

The roof of despair

The Japanese dollshouse roof construction is turning into a bit of a disaster, which is both frustrating and a tad embarrassing since I am supposed to be an experienced house builder :)  Perhaps I just got too cocky with the first 90 chapters going fairly well.

The first intimation of trouble was when I finished off the central section that joins the left and right wings into an overall 'H' shape.  The triangular roof supports at the two ends of the central section were part of the construction of the left and right wings so were already glued in place.  But it turned out when I went to glue in the beam running along the peak of the central section, that the two end sections were sitting too high by about 3/8th of an inch or more which would have resulted in the central roof section being valley shaped.  By that point I had wet glue in all the notches so I did some quick butchery on the notches of the end triangles so that I could drop the beam into place and let it dry.

Initially I thought it was due to the miscut notches that I had found  earlier. As everything was now glued together, the only thing I could do was trace a profile off one of the correct middle sections, draw it onto the two end pieces, and hack them down to the new profile with a combination of cutting disks on my Dremel moto-tool, stanley knives and sanding. It looks terrible but will be hidden when the roof is finished.

So I thought everything was ok again and I moved on to gluing on the additional 'fingers' that stick out from the roof to support the curved eaves in chapters 95/96.  Only my roof didn't look like the close-up pictures because the side sections of my left and right wings were also sitting proud of the roof triangular supports by about 1/4 inch.  Depressingly, it was now clear in the photos in these chapters that the side sections should be flush with the roof triangular supports so that there is a smooth curve all the way from the peak of the roof down to the eave.  I don't know how this happened. I sanded all the notches in both the side sections and the triangular supports so they fit easily together,  and all four sat proud by the same amount so I thought they were meant to do that.  The pictures were small in those earlier chapters so I didn't notice the difference. In retrospect I assume that either the notches were not in fact cut deep enough, or perhaps somehow I managed to consistently not close any of them all of the way. Bleah.  I looked at the Italian blogger's pictures and initially her side pieces were also sitting too high, but later they have been sunk down to be flush. I can only assume she worked it out earlier and was able to break the side pieces free and get them to sit lower down.

As my side pieces were glued on with carpenter's glue that is stronger than the wood, I was a bit stuffed.  So it was back to the workshop for more bodgery, hacking and sanding to cut the side sections down to be flush with the roof curve.  This meant I also had to cut off the 'finger' that sticks out at either end of the side section and re-glue those on, trying to keep them level with the other protrusions.  Needless to say they didn't want to glue on because of the tiny gluing surface. I glued in the additional finger struts to help brace the bodged ones, and then dripped hot glue down into all the crevices to help brace the whole thing.  So the whole roof is a shredded mess of botched cuts, dried glue, splinters and hot glue drips.  Yay me. 

Moving on to the next step where you glue on the edging along the finger struts, which becomes the edge of the eaves, I've now discovered that none of the glued-back-on struts are in the right place so I am going to have to break/cut them off AGAIN. I should have skipped ahead to gluing on the edging pieces and used the edging pieces as a guide for where to glue on the broken struts - but I was too busy trying to plug the holes in the dyke.  I am starting to feel like throwing the whole disaster out the window and giving the ryokan a nice flat roof instead.  Grrrrrr.  Just to make it additionally interesting, some of the edging pieces are too short and others are too long, so I am having to cut bits off the latter to splice into the former.  Deep breath.  Hobbies are fun. Hobbies are fun. Hobbies are fun.

On a more cheerful note, I spent some quality time yesterday at the Fenny Fiddlers Lace Day in Bletchley.  Sadly this is the last one, their club having shrunk to the point where they feel they don't have the resources to put on a lace day.  It's a shame because this is such a nice day, with a tombola, raffle, suppliers and on this day a fantastic sale of fabric in the afternoon.  I don't know if it was someone's stash but there were tables covered in priced plastic bags of fabric pieces mostly £1 a bag, and fat quarters three for £1. As you can imagine, it was an absolute feeding frenzy for about 20 minutes as we mobbed the tables and grabbed things.  I didn't have time to examine everything I grabbed in detail until I got home, but almost all of it is good quality patchwork cotton (there are couple of low quality Hobbycraft-type fat quarters mixed in).  And look at my haul all for £14.50! (not the yarn).

There's a printed tablecloth panel, loads of FQs, two bags of big scraps, a bit of yardage, and a Baltimore Album book with a started applique project.

The yarn was a separate purchase from one  of the suppliers 'The Spotted Sheep' from Leighton Buzzard who had some lovely yarns.  This is a skein of Manos del Uruguay which I bought because it came with a free pattern for some cute fingerless mitts in star stitch.

On the day I was working on a small Bucks Point round motif I started last week, using a pattern I got on the secondhand table at the Rushden lace day.  I also took my travelling lace pillow with the Bucks Point edging and worked on that for a while in the afternoon for a change.

I did not take my big Bucks Point Hexagonal Edging  - because it's FINISHED!!  I did the last of the joining last night. It's still pinned to the pillow so what you are looking at is the wrong side of the lace - the right side faces the pillow.

This is a close up of the join - can you see the little raised sausages?  Those are the ends wrapped and knotted together to hide them on the reverse side.  Hopefully when I turn the lace over, the join won't show much.

I've looked it up and I started pricking the pattern for this back in June 2017!  I had thought I'd been working on it for a year but in fact it's been a year and eight months.  The joining process alone took several hours.  I have more sympathy now for the many lacemakers who finish projects and throw them in a drawer without hiding the ends.  I would still like to attach this edging to fabric to turn it into a doiley but the next stage is to carefully remove all the pins from the edge without tugging/distorting any of the edge stitches which will take a while as well.

I didn't do any sewing this week apart from a few alterations, and now my Janome has gone off for a service so there is a gaping hole in my sewing table.  I feel a bit bereft but if I want to sew something I could get my Featherweight out. I should get the Janome back next weekend, hopefully back to its old self. It had become a bit cantankerous the last few months.

I finished the decreases on the sleeve I am knitting for the Leaf Yoke Sweater and knit to the advised length then tried it on.  The sleeve was skin tight and the bracelet length inappropriate for this heavier weight yarn.  So I pulled the sleeve back AGAIN.  I'm going to wear this yarn out.  I pulled it back to about halfway through the decreases which seems to be a better width for my arm, and now I am just going to knit straight.  I'm about elbow length now and I've tried it on and it feels a lot better on my arm.  On the second Winterland mitten I am almost to the top of the chart now, so will be doing the ribbing soon.

The weather has turned to warm spring the last few days and the garden has suddenly geared up and taken off.  Weeds are sprouting everywhere; snowdrops, crocuses and even a few daffodils are blooming, and new green shoots are starting to peep out of dead growth.  So I spent some time yesterday hacking back dead stuff, clearing up dead leaves and pulling weeds, and there's still loads to do so I'm heading out to the garden again now.  Nice to see the sun!

Does trouble come in threes?

It's been a bit of a destructive couple of days craft-wise: I snapped two pieces off the complicated roof structure I am building for my dollshouse, lost one of the drawers for the dollshouse cabinet I'm assembling, and finished off my trio of troubles by accidentally snipping a hole in my bobbin lace. Sigh.  Hopefully that's it and I've reached my quota for the current time period.

I've glued back on one roof bit and am thinking how to make the other one adhere as it's in an awkward place, I may have to peg it back on.  I made a new drawer for the cabinet, and I applied a tiny amount of glue to the snipped thread in the bobbin lace to stop it fraying any further.  A couple of people at my lace club said they've done the same thing, it's certainly a lesson to be more careful with where the scissor tips are when trimming threads off.

This is the current state of play with the Bucks Point hexagon.  All those tangled thread ends have to be hidden somewhere so that they don't show on the front of the lace.

I am bumbling my way through the lengthy joining process, using as much magnification as I can get to see what I'm doing.  You have to bunch threads together and hide them behind elements of the lace. It takes a lot of concentration and forward planning. There are still some live bobbins at the top of the picture where I have still to work the final picot edging. I was having a little moan at lace club about the dark mystery of joining lace, some people  told me they just tie knots and snip the ends off short because they are going to frame the lace or put it in a drawer rather than use it.  I would like to attach this to fabric and use it as a doiley so it needs to be quite neat.  It's a learning curve.

I've been working on the roof of the Japanese dollshouse this week, puzzling my way through all the kit pieces and the not entirely clear photographs.  I even had to resort to translating some of the Italian on Google Translate, something I stopped bothering with many tens of chapters ago because normally the pictures are self explanatory.  I started out building the left hand roof structure from chapters 91/92, then skipped ahead to build the mirror-image right hand roof structure from 94/95 while the process was fresh in my mind.  A lot of the slots need sanding to get things to fit, and there has been a certain amount of brute force and hammering required (which is how I broke off the two bits by accident). Another piece was mis-cut and I had to fix it. At the moment I am working on 93/94/95/96 at the same time which feels more logical than doing small sub-sections hoping they will fit into other sections later.  I had to stop because I ran out of longer clamps. Once the glue dries I can unclamp it all and keep going. The pretty leaf backdrops are plastic IKEA placemats which stop the roof gluing itself to the table.

In evenign knitting, you can start to see the new design on my second Winterland Mitten now, but I'm a bit worried because my tension seems tighter than on the first one, even though I only knit the first one a few weeks ago. Maybe I'm stressed  :)

I mentioned last week that I had finished the first lace fingerless mitten apart from the thumb when I was at the hospital, but I didn't post a picture so here's a pic.  I'm still on the cuff of the second one.

Also in the evenings I've been working on my Christmas cross stitch house off and on, the living room is starting to take shape now that I've done some back stitching to bring out the detail.

I haven't felt like sewing this week, not sure why.  I did piece together the block I cut out last week but my machine kept wanting to stuff the corners down the needle plate which was infuriating.  It's getting serviced in a few weeks which hopefully will set it back to rights.  I know I can use leaders and enders (bits of scrap fabric to sew on to/ off of)  but I shouldn't have to.  I cut out the pieces for another six-inch block which I might sew tomorrow.

My nose has been fine, apart from the supposedly dissolvable stitches stubbornly refusing to go anywhere.  The graft, although still scabby, is starting to look pretty good but the ring of tufty stitches makes it look a bit gruesome so I am still covering it with a plaster (bandaid) when I go out of the house.  I'm supposed to be getting any remaining stitches taken out (which in my case is all of them) on Tuesday hopefully.

This week I made my annual pilgrimage to the V&A museum in London (planned some time ago).  I'm still a member although it's not really cost effective now that we've moved away from the London area. But on the other hand it motivates me to go and hit several exhibits at once.  I started with the recently opened Christian Dior exhibit which would cost £24 normally and was sold out on the day I visited, but as a member I can walk in (well, I had to queue for a few minutes).  This is probably heresy but I was disappointed with this exhibit.  You and I as crafters want to see inside the garments and find out more about the ateliers, how they were run, what was it like to be a Dior seamstress, what are the construction secrets, how were the garments made etc etc.  Instead this is a huge exhibit with room after room of dresses on mannequins.  Not a single one is shown inside out, there is nothing at all about construction, the ateliers are mentioned only briefly, there is one room of toiles (mockups) on display with no additional information about how they were used.  On top of that, the exhibit is so arty and with such dramatic lighting that about 30-40% of the garments are really hard to see.  A couple of times they are displayed so high up the wall, in a small room, that you can only look partly up the skirts and in a foreshortened view.  A couple of rooms are pitch black with dramatic lighting - in one case this is fluorescent tubes inside black display boxes, with so much glare that I had to physically block out the light with my hands to see the garments.  One of the final rooms, a large ball scene, is so dimly lit that even after letting my eyes adjust for a while, it still wasn't great.  There were some absolutely lovely outfits of course but overall I did not feel I really enjoyed this as much as I wanted to.

 I did like this fairy-forest ceiling effect in one room.

Then I toured the recently re-opened Cast Courts, full of Victorian plaster casts of sculpture from around the world, which I found fascinating and full of amazing things.  The corridor between the two courts is the interpretation centre with some interesting films on how the moulds were made originally and how electrotyping was done.  I hit an exhibit on painted miniatures, again very interesting; a temporary exhibit on the Portmeirion pottery works; and then went round an exhibition on the art and design of video games which made me think of DS because it finished off with film from the 2017 world finals of League of Legends watched by tens of thousands of people in a stadium (he also plays LoL).  So it was an enjoyable few hours, it's such a great museum.  I didn't bother visiting the new members cafe because I hated it last time I went, just a big noisy crowded cafe now and not the oasis of calm that the old members room was.

I did get this very pretty totebag in the shop using my members' discount. When I got it home, I boxed off the bottom corners with my sewing machine to make it a more useful shape.

So that's it from a very blustery UK which is currently being hit by high winds from Storm Eric. Hopefully it will calm down soon, we want to go for a walk tomorrow to start getting in shape for Japan.

Silver lining

I had my surgery on Tuesday and the silver lining is that I had the rest of the week off so I've got more done craftwise than normal this week.  Actually it's been alright, I really haven't been that sore considering I had two holes cut in my face, so I have been able to proceed almost as normal apart from not wanting to go out in the bitter cold which is gripping the UK.   Just a bit uncomfortable from the dressings taped tightly to my face and I can't sleep on my right side where he cut the patch from.

On the day, DH and I were at the hospital for seven hours as the surgeon was alternating between four of us throughout the day. The tumour on my nose was removed in two sessions, leaving a hole the size of a two-pence piece (or a quarter if you're American), then in the afternoon he cut a matching piece from in front of my ear to patch the nose with.  A bit like quilting I suppose.  All rather unpleasant but not actually painful apart from the initial injections each time to numb me up.  In between we were stashed in a small recovery room with our loved ones around us, which enforced sociability as there were four of us, four loved ones and a couple of spares.  I could have done with more peace and quiet at times but at least it took my mind off things.  I'm glad it's over.  I took my lace fingerless mittens and knit all the way to the end of the first one during the day so I've cast on for the second one now.

So the rest of this week of 'extra time', I tried to tackle some things crafty and otherwise that I've been putting off.  One of these long-queued projects was to make my own version of a bobbin storage bag I've been looking at for a year or more at lace shows.  I don't know the trading name of the ladies who sew all the different accessories but their bobbin bag at £48 cleverly holds 96 pairs of bobbins on a couple of removable 'pages' held into the bag with velcro.  I of course have been looking at it thinking 'I could make that' but never actually getting around to it.

So last week I trawled the internet looking for a suitable pattern so I didn't have to completely re-invent the wheel and was delighted to find the 'By Annie' pattern called 'A Place for Everything' which is very similar to what I wanted to recreate only bigger as it is intended to hold sewing supplies.  I also found a few bloggers who had sewed the bag and learned from them that this is also a class on Craftsy (now Bluprint) called Sew Sturdy Travel Organisers.  One of the bloggers also said that it was better to take the class as the standalone pattern doesn't have many diagrams.  Bluprint pimped me a 7-day free trial so I signed up and watched the class.  The class was quite good apart from bizarrely she several times used her rotary cutter to cut things like zipper teeth and foamboard which made me cringe. She must go through a lot of blades.

Then I got out a few lace bobbins and a small bag I already owned and calculated what size I wanted my version of the new bag to be.  Unlike the original pattern which nests the two pages on top of each other, I wanted my two pages to go side by side like my inspiration bag.  I also decided to move the handles to the other side of the bag like one of the bloggers suggested.  I ordered the Annie supplies of soft mesh and a handbag zipper off Amazon and got to work quilting the fabric I would be cutting the pieces out of. They are stabilised with Bosal foam.  It was a nice project to work on the night before my surgery to take my mind off things, and then I sewed on it the couple of days after my surgery and finished it up.

So here's my finished bobbin bag, I'm fairly pleased with how it's turned out.  I went with elastic to hold the bobbins instead of little pockets like the inspiration bag because I want the bobbins to stay put and I want to be able to see more of them than just their spangles.  It's a bit more fiddly to insert the bobbins but then they stay put until needed.  I slightly miscalculated how wide an elastic slot I needed for each pair (I was thinking a half-inch but it actually needed three-quarters of an inch) so my bag only holds 88 pairs but it's still pretty good and will be great for taking wound pairs to classes or to a lace day.  The fabric matches the tool bag I sewed a little while ago but I went with a different contrast fabric.

Another long-queued project was to make covers for a wooden ironing ham that my f-i-l made for me a few years ago.  This ham is modeled on the June Tailor board which is designed to make pressing a variety of curves and points easier..  It was quite tricky to make the covers due to the three-dimensional requirements.  I draped the pattern in cotton fabric first to make a pattern then had to adjust a lot when I cut it out in calico and Insulbright heat resistant wadding. The main cover is secured with elastic. Hopefully I'll actually use this ham now, I've been nervous about using it since the wood made a permanent brown mark on a sweater seam I pressed on it a few years back.

In knitting I have cast on for the second Winterland mitten, knit the corrugated cuff and started the new fair isle chart which is different from the first mitten.  I was surprised to find both on this project (five years old) and casting on for the new set of Sanquhar gloves (eight years old) that my tension seems to have considerably tightened up with time.  When I knit the cuff for the first Winterland mitten I did the corrugated ribbing on a 2.25 wooden needle but when I re-used those to knit the second cuff, it came out significantly smaller.  I had to go up to a 2.75 needle and the cuff is still slightly smaller.  As for the Sanquhar gloves which were originally knit on a 1.5mm steel needle, the new cuff came out tiny.  I've had to scale up to a pair of 2mm Zing double points and it's still slightly smaller but I think that's ok as the first set of gloves were a tad too big on me.  Although annoying that I have already purchased the spare 1.5mm needles for the Japan trip and now won't be using them, it's also better because I have 2mm wooden needles to take through airport security onto the plane.  So I knit a half-inch of Sanquhar corrugated ribbing ready for the trip and just need to make a safety copy of the knitting pattern and I'm good to go.  And I'm trudging on with the Leaf yoke sweater, I pulled out the sleeve because I had mucked up the decreases, and have reknit down to the straight part of the sleeve.  I may actually finish that project this year but I don't feel very enthusiastic about wearing it. I haven't enjoyed the knit, the Drops pattern is really hard to read, and the yarn has proved a bit scratchy.

I've done a fair bit of work on the Japanese dollshouse this week.  I made two sets of chairs to go with the tables: one wooden pair and one upholstered pair.

And I've hinged the two final porches onto the house.  This went alright part from one is slightly higher than the other, and one wants to swing open all the time.

At the moment I'm building the kit for a traditional stepped Japanese storage chest but I haven't taken a picture because it doesn't look like anything yet.

The final huge job on this house is to build the roof which is really big as it overhangs the whole footprint of the house and is fairly tall.  I've been reading ahead on the final 30 chapters which are almost all about building the roof.  It looks incredibly complicated, more complicated than the house from the looks of things.  At least 10 of the chapters seem to be just endless shingling.  I've unpacked the pieces from chapters 91 and 92 which are the start of the left side of the roof armature. The blogger in Italy had problems with things not fitting together so I think I am going to do a dry fit with masking tape before I glue anything but I don't want to open too many chapters at once in case I get confused (or lose bits).

I've been pushing on with the Bucks point hexagon and am working the final triangle, joining to the start as I come to each starting pin.  I basically have no idea what I'm doing.  Joining lace seems to be this great mystery which is almost invisible online.  I can't find any videos of someone joining Bucks Point although I found a few where someone was joining Russian lace.  The books don't say much about joining and finishing lace, usually something like 'now sew your pairs into your starting pins, tie reef knots and weave in the ends'.  Which is the lacemaking equivalent of 'Quilt as desired' at the end of a quilting pattern.  Some references say to push all the pins down so they are out of the way, but if I do that then my pin heads are so close together that I can't see anything.  So each join is taking me about 10 minutes under high magnification as I fight to get the crochet hook through the right loop amidst a forest of pins, and I don't think I'm doing the actual joining very well either.  I have a good German/English book called 'The beginning of the end' which is great for how to hide the ends but says nothing at all about how to physically arrange the pillow to do the joining or actually manage the sewing in afterwords. It's frustrating.


My doll clothes reached their new owner and actually fit onto the doll, and I received a charming photo of the end result. Doesn't she look happy? It's nice to knit something and get such a lovely reaction. Some adults could learn from this example...

After sewing the bag and the ironing board covers, I didn't have much energy for quilting this week but I did eventually cut out the pieces for the next six-inch block.  Just need to sew it together.

As I said, it's been very cold lately and we even had a dusting of the white stuff - but luckily not the inches which have paralysed parts of Britain.

I stayed warm inside bundled up in woollies (we have an old house which does not reach a consistent temperature) and spending the rest of my time watching craft videos on Bluprint until my free trial ran out.  I printed off several more bag patterns for possible future projects, watched some quilting videos on improving my cutting and piecing, and even a beginner's machine knitting video which made me feel like I should get back to my own machines one day.  I watched most of them on double speed even though the Bluprint model seems a lot more watchable than the old Craftsy format which I didn't like at all because it was so mannered and slow paced.

Stay warm and keep on crafting!