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!