Post holiday brain doze

I apologise for the blandness of my last two posts, which were scheduled placeholders while we were in Japan.  I didn't want to leave a three week gap in the blog because I know some of you would worry, and I also don't like announcing "hey, we're away on holiday!" online even though DS was house-sitting.  We had a wonderful trip, my excessive over-planning paid off and everything went really well. To my relief, all the bookings I made in advance for hotels (two of them in Japanese using Google Translate), the car, the sumo tickets, the pocket wife etc. all worked out fine.  We flew in and out of Tokyo so had a few days there, then went to Osaka to watch an afternoon of the sumo tournament before heading to the island of Shikoku for a week and a half which included a five day driving holiday.  We returned to Tokyo via Himeji to see the stunning castle there. The spring weather was similar to the UK, varying between a chilly 6C to a sunny 17C, and we only had a few rainy days.

We got back Friday night after being awake for 22 hours, but as per our last Japan holiday I haven't had too much physical jetlag travelling east to west (Japan is nine hours ahead of the UK).  What I do have is mental fog which I think is partly a feeling of  anticlimax now that the big holiday is behind us, and partly trying to adjust to not seeing amazing things and tackling new situations all day every day.  Instead I've spent the weekend doing several loads of laundry and sorting out the paperwork that piled up while we were away, plus making a start on tackling the spring tasks in the garden and re-stocking on groceries. And tomorrow I get to go back to work - yippee! But it is great to be back home, I especially appreciate all the space after living out of small hotel rooms for so long, and my comfortable bed: Japanese beds seem to be quite hard and the pillows are just thin slabs (one hotel pillow had about two inches of padding on top with the underside of the pillow being stitched channels filled with hard beads - why????). It's also a treat to wear clothes that didn't come out of my suitcase.

But we saw many amazing things, ate lots of wonderful food (sometimes without knowing what it was exactly), tried new experiences, marveled at the history and beauty, shook our heads over all the concrete and overhead wire tangles, and enjoyed much shopping (to be fair, this would be me more than DH). 

My table full of loot after unpacking

I'll blog some of my purchases over the next few posts.  I visited a great dollshouse shop in Tokyo, paid a return visit to Nippori Fabric town and Tokyu Hands, and also stumbled across several other fabric shops, and bought a fair number of souvenirs, gifts and some craft books.  I did find a knitting shop in Himeji but I didn't buy anything because I still haven't figured out the Japanese sweater pattern I bought last time.

While I only remembered a fraction of the Japanese I studied the past year, it really helped us out especially on Shikoku where there is much less English spoken.  It made a real difference to be able to ask simple questions, order things in restaurants, ask for a full tank of petrol and make polite remarks. We were still functionally illiterate as we can't read kanji, which could be frustrating, but I could sound out kana script (Japanese has three written scripts) which led to small victories when I could identify what the next train stop was or make an educated guess as to what the food was in the window of the restaurant. You don't appreciate how much you take reading all the text around you in daily life for granted until suddenly you can't read most of it. I haven't decided yet if I will keep studying Japanese. On the one hand, it seems a shame to give up after I've invested so much time. But on the other hand, it is such a difficult language that I know I will never be anything like fluent and there aren't many opportunities to use it here in the UK.

In the last few days in Japan, we finally started to see some Sakura, or cherry blossom, which was what I had hoped for when I planned a spring trip.  The Japanese go crazy for it, there were huge crowds in the Tokyo park we visited on our last day, with probably a hundred photos being taken every minute of every possible aspect of blossom.  It felt like taking part in a national celebration.  The trees were beautiful even though it was a grey day.

We also stopped to walk around this lovely canalside cherry grove in Uchiko on Shikoku, along with many locals all stopping to take pictures.

It's good to be home.

One block at a time

Is anyone watching the Great British Sewing Bee?  I keep hearing an ad for British Gas on the radio when I'm working on my dollshouse and I'm sure the voiceover artist is the comedian presenter from GSB.  While it is a rare treat to see crafts and sewing on British television, I'm not keen on the emphasis on speed over quality, and I just fast forward through the transformation challenges as it's often just fancy dress made out of bin bags etc.  But it is amazing how much they can achieve in just a few hours.  It would generally take me longer to cut out the fabric than it does for them to sew an entire dress. I feel envious. And their dresses fit their models.

Meanwhile my sewing proceeds at a snail's pace and I have cut out but not yet sewn another 6.5 inch block for the 30s Sampler Quilt.  Much as I find sewing repetitive block quilts quite tedious, there is a lot to be said for production cutting and sewing of a limited number of blocks all from the same set of fabrics.  It is much slower to work on a scrappy quilt where every block is different,  has different fabrics which have to be selected, pressed, cut into different shapes than the previous block, and assembled in a different way than the previous blocks.  Although it does mean that you get to fondle much more fabric and play with many more colours.

Very unseasonably, I have finished the next room in my Christmas House Cross-Stitch, the parlour with a fireplace and stockings. I've just got the attic to stitch now so hopefully this should be ready to display in plenty of time for next Christmas. I need to decide how I am going to decorate the house-shaped wooden frame.  The kit picture shows it painted solid red but I was wondering about going more down the dollshouse route and differentiating the walls from the roof. I have some brick-effect wallpaper I could use.

Now that I've finished the Bucks Point hexagon, I retrieved the Floral Bucks Edging from the attic, the one that I started on the Knuston course back in September.  I spent some time looking at it and worked a bit of ground, but it's hard to remember what I was doing with the main part.  I did write some notes at the time and have reviewed them, but I think it's going to take a while to get back into it. I now have a copy of the Alex Stillwell Floral Bucks book which my teacher recommended, I should probably look through that again.  Annoyingly, at some point the pillow must have taken a fall because several bobbins have snapped their threads so I have to work those back in.  Luckily it's only a sample.  I've heard dreadful stories of pets knocking over pillows containing works in progress with hundreds of bobbins ending up in an unworkable tangle.

Lessons in aida

I finished the Victorian-style pincushion that I blogged about a few weeks ago.  The supplied aida cloth wasn't very wide, resulting in the stitching being within a few rows of one side, so I trimmed the other sides to match.  This turned out to be a big mistake as the narrow edge of the aida cloth just shredded apart when I attempted to sew the pincushion right sides together on the sewing machine and turn through.  I guess you have to leave a much deeper edging with aida cloth to avoid fraying, or perhaps I should have zig-zag stitched along the raw edges first before seaming.  I was able to rescue the project with hand stitching but the edge looked terrible, so I stitched on some trim to cover it which I actually think sets the pincushion off rather nicely. It's almost too pretty to use.

In between working on the roof of doom on the Japanese dollshouse, I have done some more work on the Tansu step chest and it is mostly assembled now apart from I haven't put the handles on the drawers yet because I want to apply some ageing paint shadows.  I've also had problems with the bottom sliding doors, it was very difficult to get them to fit into the cupboard and one of them popped out again when I was working on the drawers so I am going to have to fidget it back into its grooves.  The topmost drawer is the one I lost and had to recreate.  This was quite a fiddly piece of furniture to work on, with two sets of sliding doors and all the drawers to get to fit in and open/shut easily. But it's going to look effective in the room and we saw cupboards like this in some of the historic houses we visited in Japan.

In sewing, I cut and sewed another 6.5 inch block for the 30s Sampler quilt.  Both the repro fabrics have bunnies on them.  I forget where I'm up to now, I think this is around block 28 from 42 blocks.  And yet I have made no noticeable dent in my stash of 30s fabrics.

I was watching a few Youtube videos on how to make a jellyroll rug - have any of you done one?  The rugs are really pretty but the assembly process looks incredibly tedious.  Basically you create a long folded strip of fabric wrapped around wadding, then zigzag it round and round (in either an oval or a circle) to create a rug which has probably cost you about £100 if you bought two jelly rolls (£35 each), two packs of pre-cut wadding (£13.50 each) plus all the thread you will use up.  Or you could cut 80 strips worth of 2.5inch strips from your own stash plus cut up wadding scraps but the end result would likely not be nearly as pretty and colour co-ordinated. It also looks like there is much potential for sewing a giant fabric bowl-shape if you don't get the strips lying exactly flat!

Meeting my tribe

Back in the 90s when I was into machine knitting in a big way, I used to go to a machine knitting club once a month in Surrey.  I enjoyed it and learned a lot but also did very well there because most of the quite elderly members were downsizing so I came home with bin bags of yarn, books, machine bits etc. Eventually with the virtual death of the machine knitting hobby and the shrinking size of the membership, the club folded like so many others. Recently I discovered a small machine knitting club that is still going and I went along to see what it was like.  It felt very familiar, with some similarly elderly members, a few members crocheting while they listened, show and tell of knitted items etc.  It was like revisiting a tribe I used to hang out with. They had two machines set up and made an effort to involve the beginners, plus there was a demonstration on how to use the garter bar.  I enjoyed being exposed to the hobby again, perhaps if I keep going it will get me re-interested in my own machines.  I feel it's a bit of a waste to have part of the attic tied up housing my three machines and their associated stash and gadgets when I've barely touched them for years.  I'm in a curious position of not being a beginner but not really remembering how to do it properly either. These days I never feel the urge to machine knit because, since the 90s I have learned how to handknit properly and now find it so much more relaxing to ensconce myself in front of the telly with my handknitting.  Machine knitting is not relaxing.  It's more like horseback riding: challenging and lots to remember, and the moment you start to relax and think you've got the hang of it, the horse shies at a butterfly and you end up on the ground.  Or in the case of machine knitting, with your knitting and weights crashing down on to your toes.  We'll see.

I've finished gluing all the struts onto my Japanese dollshouse roof eaves.

A view with the top porches open.

However when I took a shot looking upwards with the porches open like this:

... the eye is offended by the unfinished gaps around the underside of the roof projections.  I looked ahead through the remaining 20 or so packages and I can't see any steps for remedying these, so I guess I had better do it now before the black paper gets glued on and I can't turn the roof upside down any more. Also planning ahead, I have predrilled holes in all the corner beams ready for the six lanterns that will eventually hang from them.  And as I've decided to leave the roof loose from the house, not glued on, so that the house will be easier to transport in future, I have glued on some locator blocks to the top of the house while I can still reach through the interior structure of the roof. I put three on each side of the house. So hopefully I can lift the roof off or drop it back on, exactly into place.

I've reached the thumb again on the re-knit of the second fingerless lace mitt.  I occasionally count my lace repeat to make sure I still have 17 stitches this time round.  I've almost finished one sleeve on the Drops Leaf Yoke jumper, I'm just knitting the garter stitch hem but had to pull out a little as it's hard to remember that you have to purl alternate rounds when knitting in the round, in order to produce garter stitch.

The garden has definitely decided it's spring now.  The magnolia tree has great fat buds all over, and even the apple tree has started to produce tiny buds.  The rhubarb is peeping up out of its winter manure blanket and we have quite a few daffodils and crocuses.  I was annoyed to find that slugs have decimated several of the pretty primroses I planted only a few weeks ago, hate those things.  We went out and laid out our three drip hoses before the plants get too high, as I had learned my lesson last year when we didn't lay them until about May and it was a nightmare trying to settle the hose down to ground level without breaking off too many plants.  The drip hoses were such a timesaver in last summer's heatwave because I could just hook the garden hose up to each in turn and go do something else while the garden watered itself.  Is your garden bursting into life?

It's a bit windy out

Storm Freya has come to visit.  We've just been for a walk (building up our stamina for our holiday and breaking in our new walking boots) and the gusts are pretty strong, with regular showers of rain being blown into our faces.  But still unseasonably warm.  I've got several daffodils blooming in the garden now except they are all lying flat at the moment, battered down by the wind and rain. Hopefully they will recover next week.

Here's a picture of the bowl of cherries cross-stitch notepad project I blogged about last weekend. Very Cath Kidston.

I've started work on another quick cross stitch project from a magazine, bought from the same secondhand table.  This one is a Victorian-style small pincushion.

Sewing time this week has been mainly altering clothing that I might take to Japan.  I narrowed and hemmed the legs of some drawstring trousers that I might wear on the plane, made a pig's ear of hemming a pair of work-type trousers because my overlocker blade is getting dull, and straightened out the hem of a t-shirt because the shirt-tail type of dipped hem doesn't suit my pear shape.  But I did do a bit of quilting, cutting out another block for the 30s Sampler Quilt and sewing it together today.

I've finally finished the Winter Wonderland fingerless mitts.  I dealt with the long floats in the end by crocheting them upwards the way machine knitters do, and tying the final loop in with some spare yarn which I then wove in the ends of.  In this picture they are still drying from being wet blocked, so hopefully the stitches will plump out a bit more evenly as it dries.  For some reason the mitt with the church on it came out slightly smaller so I tugged it out a bit while it was wet. It feels good to complete this long-standing UFO at last.

I have persevered with the roof of doom from the Japanese Dollshouse and got the rest of the under-eave covering glued on and trimmed.  Then you glue on some large beams which appear to support the corners of the roof.  I had to trim all of mine to individual length which took some time.  Now you can start to see the effect of the roof combined with the house.

I took the advice of the previous bloggers and skipped ahead to the part where you glue on the under-eave roof struts.  Again, each one has to be cut individually to length, the tip painted white, then glued in position.  I had all the ones for this back edge cut and painted, and laid in place waiting to be glued.  The cat came in and wanted to be petted, which resulted in cat hair sticking to my gluey fingers and thus to the roof.  Without thinking I blew to get the cat hairs off, sending several of my loose sticks cartwheeling. Sigh.  I got the back edge glued in place then stopped for a picture as it's a pretty tedious job.  But it looks effective and the struts conceal the seams in the eaves covering.