Road Trip fun

One of the Youtubers I watch has been vlogging her fabric and antique acquisition road trip in Pennsylvania this month and I have been very envious.  But today I had my own highly enjoyable road trip right here in the UK, thanks to DH nobly volunteering to chauffeur me around.

Our first stop was the Fitzwilliam Quilters 25th Anniversary Exhibition just outside Peterborough, which I found out about in the Events diary of Today's Quilter magazine.  I was imagining a small group show but it turned out to be a really well organised and well presented show, with loads of quilts and sales tables.  We ended up spending about an hour and a half there, with DH waiting patiently while I enjoyed:

• a cushion and bag raffle, where you bought five tickets for £1 then put each ticket into the fabric envelope attached to each raffle item that you wanted to win - so you have a chance to win something you actually would like.  And the items were really well made.
• a mystery parcel table where £1 bought you a wrapped handmade gift.  I had two goes and received a handmade mug bag complete with mug, and a fabric basket including a 'cupcake' pincushion - both beautifully made and worth far more than £1 each!
• a fantastic secondhand book table, with fabulous expensive books all priced at .50p or £1.  I spent ages on this one, handing books to DH to hold as I worked my way along.  They had quilting and knitting books and some other stitching hobbies as well.  Rowan magazines for £1.  Australian magazines for .50p.  New looking hardcover knitting books for £1.  I could have taken it all home but settled for two boxes of books and magazines which I shall enjoy reading for some time to come.
• An Alzheimer's charity table full of handmade items for sale.  I got a little kit to make a decorated clothes hanger with an applique cover, the sample looked really cute.
• Four rooms of quilted and embroidered display items, including an entire room of Christmas themed items.  They have some really talented people in their group and there were some wonderful quilts on display.
• Fabric traders - I was strong and didn't buy any more fabric but I had a good look.
• A good sized cafe with tea and cake to finish off with.

A really great start to the day.  Then we drove around Peterborough to the Plush Addict fabric shop, whom I have bought from at shows but never visited.  They trade out of a large warehouse in an industrial estate, and have loads of fabric for both dressmaking and quilting, lots of interfacing, bag hardware, patterns, some yarn, and quite a lot of trims, ribbons and zips.  Great resource and I'm sure I will be back in future.  I purchased three widths of  bias tape makers that I need for my current quilt project, a christmas decoration kit, and some gingham ribbon, and I enjoyed looking around.

After a longish drive up to Leicester, and a stop at a supermarket for a picnic lunch, we arrived at the Big Textile show at Leicester racecourse.  I've never been to this show and I don't think I would go again.  It wasn't very big considering it cost £10 to get in, and it was a random and muddled mix of a few traders, quite a few textile artists and displays by textile groups, a few yarn shops, a few guilds (Leicester quilt guild, Leicester machine knitters etc.), and various workshops for printing on fabric or making ripped magazine page collages or similar.  I did buy a small kit to make an A4-size crazy quilt collage of ribbons and laces from one textile artist, and a half-price lavender bag from another textile artist.  My main buy was a box full of 'free' magazine cross-stitch kits from a charity stall, I was looking through it and I asked what donation they wanted for a kit.  It was the end of the last day of the show and they jokingly said I could have the lot if I wanted.  Money changed hands and I walked the box out to the car.  Now I've got it home I can go through it at leisure, keep the kits I want to make, and offer the others to friends or donate them back to local charity shops.

So between the box of books and the cross stitch kits, I've got lots to look through over the coming weeks.

Crafting this week has mainly been working on my Let's Bake applique quilt.  I finally finished up all the cutting apart from the background fabrics, altogether it took about five hours of cutting I think. I now have a bunch of plastic baggies labelled for the various applique motifs.  I'm going to choose background fabrics as I go along, to contrast with each applique.

Step one was to layout all the border blocks and sew them together.  The original quilt has embroidered flowers in all the gingham squares.  I haven't done that yet although I might do some embroidery later on so I've left the blocks loose for now and not sewn them into rows. I love having a design wall, it makes this type of quilt layout so much easier to work on.

I am following the online Let's Bake Sew-Along tutorial which starts with the pies:

Each shape is made by stitching around a traced line on interfacing then turning the fabric through. The shapes are secured to the background by a narrow zigzag stitch.  Some of the shapes have additional hand embroidered details.  For some reason these three pies all had their own background shape which you then stitched together, which seemed like a waste of effort so I just cut one full panel and appliqued all three pies to that.

Next I made some measuring spoons and a measuring cup.

Now that the endless cutting stage is finished, I'm enjoying the actual stitching. I'm looking forward to gradually 'baking' the various elements.

I also finished the applique and embroidery on my two purse panels this week. After the stitching was finished, I tried painting the pink marks from the heat transfer pencil with Vanish stain remover, dipping the panel into detergent water briefly, then scrubbing the pink marks with a stiff paintbrush before rinsing the whole panel.  It worked quite well and the pink marks are gone, I just need to press the two panels to remove the wrinkles.

I'm pleased with how it's turned out although I found applique with this coarser woven fabric fairly challenging.  The petals have to all come together in the centre which makes for quite a lot of bulk, with the small yellow circle in quilt fabric sitting over the top but having to hide the raw edges.  The embroidery is with three strands of floss, I'm not very good at embroidery but this was pretty basic stuff and looks alright.  The next step will be to cut out the purse panels, line them and do the hand quilting. The Japanese process is to produce completely finished components, which are then stitched together into a finished item, with an emphasis on handwork.

Yesterday I was on a one-day bobbin lace course to start a new Bucks Point lace mat.  It took me about 2.5 hours in the morning to get started and get all my bobbin pairs pinned onto the pillow and in work for the pattern.  I was quite pleased to get to the point where I could get on with making lace, so was a bit devastated when my teacher wandered by and critiqued the starting point dictated by the instructions, and decided it should all be undone and started again at a different point. To give her credit, having seen my crestfallen face, she volunteered to undo it all herself over lunch and re-start it. By 2:30pm she had got it back to almost the same point, so I was able to get on and work a little bit of lace before DH picked me up at the end of the day. It probably was the right decision to re-start as it will make finishing the mat much easier in the long run, but it means that I didn't really get a lot done.  I haven't done very much bobbin lace lately but now that I've got this new mat started, I shall have to try to work on it more regularly.  I've got a few lace days coming up this next month but I don't know if this mat would be too complicated to work on in a distracting environment.

Have you had any good road trips lately?

As it turns out, I do NOT have enough fabric

This is what my sewing room looked like last weekend after I trashed it trying to pull enough fabrics for a new project.

I feel like I have a lot of fabric.  The design wall in the corner of the picture is hung on the back of a row of IKEA bookshelves which are full of fabric, and fabric has spilled over onto other shelves and into containers on the floor. Admittedly a lot of it is rather elderly, much of it dating back to some quilting holidays in America in the late 90s and early noughties. 

So you would think I wouldn't have a lot of trouble pulling fabric together for a new project, which is a free quilt pattern called 'Let's Bake' by Lori Holt.  She hosted free tutorials on her website a while back and I kept up with them, and there is a Let's Bake Sew Along Guide which contains the cutting instructions and fabric list.  Her finished quilt looks like this:



I thought it was quite cute so I saved the pattern for my queue.  Having recently completed the top for the 30s Sampler, it seemed like a good time to tackle this pattern in similar fabric colours because I had my 30s fabrics to hand.

Now I had not reckoned with the marketing juggernaught driving this pattern line.  The entire pattern is presented on the basis that you will buy all of the designer's fabrics, make the applique shapes using the designer's packaged plastic templates and sew with them with the designer-brand interfacing, then embroider said shapes with the designer-brand thread, before assembling your quilt and finishing it with the designer-brand trim.  Trying to work out how to make the quilt without buying any of that has proved quite a challenge.  The Sew Along Guide has thumbnails of all the fabric, and there is a LOT of fabric: 54 fabrics in total. Presumably to work in a bit of all the designer's fabric lines?  My printed copy of the guide (thank you office laser printer) isn't very true to colour but I did my best to work my way through the fabric list and pull suitable fabrics from my stash.

I thought I had a lot of these bubblegum colours in my stash.  Well I can tell you now that I do not have nearly enough for 54 variations.  Even resorting to stealing fabrics from wildly different stashes like my Edyta Sitar fabrics, an American Jane jelly roll, a couple of other Moda jelly rolls, my fat quarter stash pile and some of the elderly fabric buys, I still have had to double up on a few fabrics.  In particular, I do not have the lovely aqua blues that she used.  I did manage to pull together some painter-blues. In general, I think my fabrics are going to be a bit darker in value.  We'll see how it goes.

So having trashed the sewing room and having spent almost two hours re-folding and putting fabric away, I started cutting.  Each of the 54 fabrics has a specified cutting list, sometimes just a couple of pieces, sometimes half a dozen.  I have now put in about four hours on cutting and I'm still only just over half way.  It's slow as you can't batch cut, each fabric has to be individually unfolded, pressed, then cut out the specified shapes, then add each shape to a separate labelled baggie (mixer, flour sifter, cookie sheet etc).  I will eventually have cut little kits for each applique motif on the quilt.

The next challenge will be drawing out the applique shapes without owning the designer's plastic templates.  The sewing guide does show the shapes as small thumbnails, so I will just have to work out the easiest way to scale them up to the specified size.

Eventually I will get to sew something.

You can appreciate that I haven't done a lot else this week.  I've been pricking out a lace pattern ready for an upcoming lace day, knitting on a chunky jacket, crocheting a bit on the crochet granny square afghan, and continuing the handquilting on the 25 block applique quilt (very slow progress).  I haven't been doing much commuter knitting lately as I am mostly using commute time to study Japanese now that my course has started again.

Are you tackling any gargantuan projects?

I'm a quitter

I found that headline very hard to type, despite the fact that I am trying to celebrate a maturity level  which allows me to be a quitter. I was raised to believe that quitting was failing and that you could do almost anything you set your mind to if you tried hard enough and really wanted to achieve it.  Consequently I have spent a lot of my earlier craft life finishing things simply because I had started them, even if subsequently discovering that I didn't like them, or didn't enjoy doing them,  I heard a podcaster explaining the 'sunk cost fallacy' once, which states that people demonstrate "a greater tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made." Once I have committed to a project, for example by spending money on the fabric/book and toting it home from foreign parts, it claims a permanent slot in my queue and a permanent claim on my future time.

As a supposedly mature adult, and in particular one faced with creeping decrepitude/diminishing energy levels, I am trying to combat this thinking.  Fresh on the heels of throwing out the horrible cross-stitch kit last week, I have now unravelled the 5/8th finished Misty Meadows Shawl, and the reskeined yarn is currently soaking in a hot water bath to remove the kinks ready for re-use.    It was this one if you've forgotten:

I had knit the cable section past the halfway point and decreased down ready to knit the next stripe.  I haven't enjoyed knitting with this yarn which is West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4 ply, it feels thin and a bit scratchy and it is splitty to knit with.  The pattern is not well written either.  And when I tried the shawl on after reaching the next stripe, I realised that it looked very unattractive when worn.  The horizontal cable section across the back gave the impression of some sort of carapace or knitted armour, and the stripes were just not attractive at all.  So out it has all come, and I think the yarn may face a future as a pair of socks instead.  So hurrah for being a quitter!!

I have also been a finisher this week, completing the top for my 30s Sampler Quilt at long last!

I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out.  The different widths of the top and side coping strips are not obvious at all, the scrappy quality of the border balances out the scrappy middle in a different way than a solid border would have done, and the whole feeling is cheery and retro.  Also it easily fits on my queen-size bed as a topper so I'll be able to use the quilt.  I just need to choose a backing and cut the binding strips and then it can join the queue for future quilting.  Ironically however, although this project was chosen to reduce my stash of ancient 30 repro fabrics, I've actually probably increased said stash by at least a third as I had to buy more solid colours and then there were the three abortive attempts at buying a border print fabric. Sigh.

I also tried something new this week. When we were up in Nottingham for the lace weekend, we visited a bonsai nursery out of curiosity.  We had both enjoyed visiting the bonsai village when we were in Tokyo and seeing all the amazing living creations.  I found out they did day courses to get people started so I signed up for one of those and went on it this week.  It was a fascinating insight into the hobby although rather long winded on listening and short on actual practice.  But we did practice repotting a Chinese Elm bonsai from China, and then in the afternoon did a full conversion of a garden nursery Cypress shrub into a bonsai, including wiring the branches to shape it.  So mine went from this:

To this:

With the teacher's help, we thinned out the tree and wired it to shape it so that it looks like a miniature mature tree.  The wire will come off when it grows a little but hopefully it will have been trained to stay in that shape by then.  Looking after it will give me a taste of what it's like to have bonsai, it's a bit like getting a new pet as they have to watered almost daily and trimmed and maintained several times a year. But at least it is not going to sneak into my sewing room and make a bed in my fabric like some cats we might know.

The work reorganisation I mentioned some time ago has gone ahead and my team was officially disbanded on Friday.  We have been dispersed to other teams around the building and I start with my new team tomorrow.  They seem like they will be alright but my first reaction is always going to be "I hate all of you and I hate everything you do differently from what I'm used to."  It took me months to get used to my old team and will probably take me months to get used to this one before everyone stops annoying me.  At least I have three other people from my old team who are moving with me so I'm not completely isolated. Hopefully the things the new team are doing which seem stupid and inefficient will become familiar routines. Bleah.

The heat is on

Autumn is definitely here, and the house is starting to feel chilly in the mornings and evenings so we are putting the heating on for short intervals. It would get too hot (and too expensive) to have it on all the time as yet.  My walk to the station in the morning has transitioned in temperature from my late summer coat to my autumn warm coat, and the winter coats are waiting in the wings.  Hand knitted hats and gloves are also back on the equipment list.

I even bought a couple of early Christmas decorations at Matalan (shock, horror! I haven't even put up any Hallowe'en decorations yet!). So it seems fitting that I finished the Christmas House cross stitch, stretching the stitching over a bit of mat board cut to fit the frame and finishing the back with felt. It's quite cute, I'm pleased with how it turned out.

I wanted to get the next project in the cross stitch queue ready for stitching and chose a kit I picked up on a long ago American trip. It was a pre-printed canvas printed with Monet's Japanese bridge at Giverny, which you are meant to embellish with cross stitch to highlight various details. To cut a long story short, I ended up throwing it all out (what the gaming world calls 'rage quitting'). The threads were in pre-cut lengths tied in one big loose knot, and I spent well over an hour peering at them in good daylight trying fruitlessly to determine which of the many greens and blues matched the lengthy colour chart in the kit.  No matter what combination I tried, the number of strands would not match the stated number of strands for each colour, and there also seemed to be a couple of colours missing.  The greens were the worst, there were about 8 or 9 of them, all with stupid names that bore little resemblance to the actual colours, and some of them virtually identical. I became more and more frustrated trying to decide which was 'dark blue-green' versus 'dark green-blue' and trying to arrange a set of five corresponding to very light yellow green/light yellow green/yellow green/dark yellow green etc. etc.  I resorted to comparing the complicated chart to the printed picture, trying to decide which greens seemed darker or bluer than the others.  After about 90 minutes of this I realised I hated the whole project, was not going to enjoy the random counted chart since few blocks of colour adjoined, and the pre-printed colour panel was quite crudely done. When I looked online, there were other reviewers complaining about similar issues.  I decided life was too short, it hadn't cost too much back in the day, so into the bin it all went.  Result! Queue instantly shorter.  I am viewing this as a sign of maturity, in my younger days I would have finished it regardless of whether it was a good use of my time.

I stuffed and assembled the felt doll that I stitched a few weeks ago, and added the doll hair that I bought in St Ives last weekend.  She is looking cute, now to make her some clothes.

I've done a fair bit of sewing this weekend.  Having given up on finding a fabric to make a solid border for my 30s Sampler quilt, I looked around online for ideas and eventually found this tutorial for a scrappy wedge border. I had to get DS to help me with the math to calculate how many wedges I needed and how wide the coping strips around the centre should be.  I've got as far as piecing the main border strips so far and I think it looks good. Much more interesting than a piano keys style border. Apart from the math, it's easy enough to make and looks much more complicated that it is really.

Chain piecing the wedges:

This week I finally started a project I've been meaning to tackle for a while, which is another Japanese applique from the quilting books I bought in Japan.  I worked out a pattern to fit a snap purse frame that I have (which took three mock-ups before I got something I was happy with, the geometry of a purse frame bag is weird) and I'm appliqueing a group of flowers from the book on each side panel using fabrics I bought in Japan. This is the first time I've ever used my Hemline heat transfer pencil. It worked great on the first panel, but managed to smear on this second panel so there is a lot of faint pink showing outside of the applique which I'm hoping I will be able to remove somehow although it is meant to be permanent.

I've started machine knitting a fair isle mitten using the same pattern that I tested last month in acrylic, but this time using wool and a punchcard pattern. It's looking nice but so tedious to do because of having to continually stop knitting and do the thumb increases every couple of rows. I shall persevere.  I've also started pricking a new bobbin lace pattern for a butterfly mat and winding bobbins for it. I find pricking really difficult as it hurts my hand to hold the pricker for so long and photocopies often have random specks on them which may or may not be pinholes. So I have to do it in stages to give my hand time to rest.

We spent some time tidying the garden last Sunday and found TWO pigeon corpses, one is presumably Chompy and the other must be the next earthbound visitor.  A few days later DH found yet another pigeon corpse in the front garden. This is all very strange and not something we've had happen before in the five years we've lived here. I hope it stops soon.