Where did the week go?

Only a few photos this week, sorry, because I just seem to be running to stay in place lately.  My 'days off' are spent mostly at my desk catching up on paperwork, finances, christmas online gift ordering, Japanese studies and conversation practice (using Skype), or catching up on household chores. On top of that the cat needed to go to the vet for the fourth time for her sensitive stomach (they are now wondering if she has IBS - oh yay); I discovered the study wallpaper that fell down during the leak couldn't be reglued so I had to be replace it (the previously damp paper had dried all out of shape like warped leather) in the area of the leak damage, etc etc.  And we put up some christmas lights outside today.

I did get a few sessions in on handquilting the 25 block applique quilt which will have to be moved out the living room pretty soon to make way for Christmas. I also did an hour or so on my bobbin lace butterfly mat yesterday, making a right old bodge of the transition between the first and next segments unfortunately.

And this week I finally ventured back into the cave of chaos that is the dollshouse room, frozen in time since the end of the 18 month build on the Japanese house.  I hadn't really been in there since.  Eighteen months of construction had left every available surface littered with bits for the Japanese house, bits for other houses that I couldn't put away because I couldn't get into the cupboards or said houses, much construction debris, tools and clamps, assorted useful containers for glue/stain etc. and of course there is a fine dusting of sawdust and dust-dust over everything in sight.  It was so depressing that I would just stand in the doorway frozen in indecision as to where to even start.  So I applied the 'I'll just do 20 minutes and then stop' methodology, and gradually things started to clear up. I've decided to keep the little table I was using for the build, so I moved a couple of the open-backed dollshouses onto that so that you can see both the front and the inside view. That opened up a gap on the central counter that I could move the Japanese house into, and so on, until eventually I had retrieved most of the room boxes that have spent the last year and a half piled out of sight on windowsills and behind other houses. 

The problem with keeping the table was that it was in the place that my big four-storey house used to sit on its stand.  I couldn't work out anywhere else to put the big house until I realised that if the filing cabinet by the door was moved out of the room, the house could squeeze in there.  It's not ideal because there is a railing that stops the side door of the house from opening fully, and I'm a bit worried about spiders getting into the house since it's now near the back door where they like to come in, but there really isn't anywhere else.  The house is too tall to fit on the main counter.  So we had to move the filing cabinet up three flights of stairs to the attic which took multiple trips, most of them done by DH as a sort of stairmaster workout.  When I eventually retire I really will need to go through all the paper I am hoarding and try to cut down.

As I am tidying up, I keep finding old projects and kits and thinking 'oooo' but then thinking 'no! you have to finish the Japanese house first!'.

I did get a few hours sewing on the Let's Bake quilt.  I made some oven gloves, three spatulas and a red cookie sheet which is waiting for 16 round yellow cookies to be appliqued on to it.  On a recommendation on Facebook, I've sent off for some Karen Buckley Perfect Circles which are basically circular templates that you gather your fabric around. So I'm waiting for those to arrive before I tackle the cookies.

In the evenings I've been stitching the cross-stitched cake recipe block, which looks ok from a distance but up close has terribly wobbly cross stitches because I find it difficult to consistently split each gingham square into four equal parts. Perhaps it will add to the homemade charm...  I wonder if anyone has actually tried baking this recipe?  I don't think it would work here in the UK because our baking powder is different and you wouldn't put two teaspoons of our stuff in with that amount of ingredients, I think it might taste bad.

I've finally worked through all the books and magazines I bought at the quilt show last month. It was very enjoyable to have so many craft books and magazines to read through, I found lots of nice things in them.  Today I took the 'giveaway' pile to a local charity shop, after taking a few previous giveaways to a lace day.  A few magazines went in the recycling because I had ripped too much out of them for them to be saleable.  So for the price of a couple of cinema tickets, I had hours and hours of entertainment and now some other people are going to enjoy some of them as well as some money going to charity.

Hope you've had more time for crafts than I have had this week!

Hamsta-bear and other crafty pastimes

My machine knitting club has set a mini-challenge which is to make a toy using punchcard techniques.  I didn't know what to do until one of the committee members suggested that you could knit 'fabric' on the machine, felt it, then cut out and sew a toy from the felted fabric.  This struck a chord since YouTube had recently pimped me this video interview  by the Fruity Knitting podcast team with the creator of Burra Bears in Shetland, which are teddy bears sewn out of felted Shetland sweaters (the interview is at 40:07). As it happens, I have a goodly stash of Jamieson & Smith jumperweight 100% wool from previous fair isle projects.  So I wound off a few cakes of red, white, pink and burgundy and chose a fair isle punchcard, and knit about a 50cm square of fair isle knitting on my Brother 881 punchcard machine on tension 8.  I was changing colours a bit at random so the resultant patterning is not optimal.  Also I think I probably need a new spongebar because the machine kept dropping stitches so it's a good thing I was felting the knitting.

I ran the knitting through the washing machine on a 40 degree C wash with a bathmat for company to give it a good thumping, and it felted beautifully.  I also threw in a small square of hand-knit 1x1 ribbing to use for the feet and ears like the Burra Bears.  I spent some time online looking for a pattern which had joined on arms and legs to make it easier to match up the knitted patterning - I didn't want to deal with the challenge of jointed arms and legs.  I eventually landed on this pattern from Canadian Living magazine from 2011 for Beau Bear which I enlarged from the PDF file to be a bit bigger, keeping in mind I only had a limited amount of felted fabric.

So today I spent several hours making this little guy, who stands 8 inches high.  It was harder than you might think to try to match the patterning around his body and head, and he's not perfect. In particular his muzzle is a bit lop-sided which, together with his chunky head and smallish eyes, makes him look a bit more like a hamster to me than a teddy bear.  He's mostly sewn on the machine with a 1/4inch seam allowance using a normal straight stitch, the felted fabric doesn't fray.  I pressed seams flat as I went, using a damp press cloth and the wool setting on my iron.  I didn't have any safety eyes the right size so his eyes are little black flower buttons.  I positioned the pattern piece on the fabric to produce an effect of socks and shoes, or boots, which was fun.

So not nearly as cute as a Burra Bear, but I like him and he is all made out of existing stash. I'll enter him in the club competition and see how he does.

I've done a few more blocks for the Let's Bake quilt but things have slowed down while I tackle some of the embroidered blocks.  This is the cooking stove and a flour scales, both with embroidered dials. And I'm working on a cross-stitched recipe written out on gingham, which is taking a while.

Another finish this week is my Japanese applique snap purse, made from some of the fabrics I bought in Japan and using an applique design for a handbag in one of the Japanese quilting books I bought there. I love how detailed the Japanese aesthetic  is.  My quilting stitches aren't very small because of the bulk of fabric I was stitching through but they still give a nice effect.  The picture on the table with the vase is more true to the actual colours.  For something that's not very big, this was a huge amount of work but fun to do and I'm pleased with how it's turned out.

And I called time on a big knitting project which has been cluttering up the living room for the last three months.    This is a knitted jacket from a pattern in the May 2015 issue of Knit Today magazine designed by Rico.  I chose it from my pattern stash because I was trying to use up some Colinette Zanziba chunky yarn that I bought several bargain skeins of from a Yorkshire mill on one of the knitting weekends I attended.  It had sat in my stash for years because I didn't have enough for a full sweater and because it is so chunky and boucle even though I really like the colours.   Here's the jacket, although it looks a lot better on a person with arms to fill out the sleeves than it does on this dressmaking dummy.

I had enough yarn to knit the fronts, backs (two joined together) and ribs, but ran out before I could knit the sleeves.  I do have some of the same yarn in the blue colourway, and started knitting a sleeve in that, but it just looked silly with the pink body.  I was gloomily wondering if I could still get more of this long-discontinued yarn when I tried the jacket on and realised that it actually looked quite nice as it is.  The sideways knit means that the drop shoulders hang someway down the arms, like a short-sleeved effect.  So I've decided to stop as it is, and wear it as a sort of over-cardigan, sloppy shrug sort of thing.  I'm pleased it's turned out as well as it has, since I had to re-write the pattern to match my own gauge and found it difficult to understand the very strange construction as there is no assembly diagram.  The fronts and backs are knit sideways in a twisted rib, then the two back pieces are joined along the cast-on edge up the centre back and the fronts are joined to the back at the shoulders.  You pick stitches up from the inside of the resultant U-shape to knit the collar, then sew the side seams. Finally you pick up along the bottom edges (which were the sides of the knit pieces) to knit the bottom rib.

I've stepped away from textiles to dabble in furniture repair this week.  We have a Victorian oak extending dining table (we live in an old house so old brown furniture looks good in it) which I thought was solid as a rock.  That was until DS tried to cross his legs on his dining chair, kicking the trim in the process, and knocked off a five-inch chunk  of trim like it was polystyrene.  It turns out to be a patch of historic woodworm (not active) which we hadn't even noticed but which runs along the piece of trim under the table for about three feet.  I don't think it affects the main structure so the table is not in danger of collapsing. The bit he kicked off was riddled with holes and incredibly fragile, instantly devaluing the table by several hundred pounds I should think although I didn't tell him that during my lecture on inappropriate table sitting positions.

We still had some wood hardener from treating the rot on the outside windows a few months ago, so I treated the bit of trim, and the cavity it had broken off from, with the hardener.  Then I glued the trim back on with wood glue, using dollshouse clamps to hold it in place until the glue dried.  Some careful filling with wood filler and some sanding with the fine papers I use for dollshousing, followed by a touch up with some dollshouse oak stain, and the repair is pretty unobtrusive.  I finished it off with some buffing wax.  DS has to sit on the opposite side of the table now away from the woodworm danger zone.

Still baking

More blocks made this week for the Let's Bake quilt that I'm working on. I sewed together the top panel now (there are still some mini-apron blocks to make for the right hand side).  I embellished the gingham blocks with some machine embroidery stitches because I don't want to do the hand-stitched chicken scratch embroidery the designer did on the the original quilt, but I'm not loving my end result.  I will leave them as placeholders for now but might switch them out later.  I also made the egg carton, cocoa jar and milk bottle this week.  The cocoa and milk labels are hand embroidered, not my strong point so a bit wobbly but they look ok.

Today I made a flour sifter, the kind we had when I was a child where you squeezed the handle and it activated an arm swiping across the base.  I don't think I've ever seen one as an adult.  They are probably 'antiques' now, sigh.

And this is the 'Let's Bake' logo drying after I soaked it in warm water to get rid of the basting glue.  There will be a red button on the apostrophe and a blue button beneath the exclamation point eventually.  This was hand-appliqued because the bias tape really doesn't want to fold smoothly around such tight curves.  I'm still not very happy with how mine has turned out but I'm hoping once it dries that it will lie a bit flatter.

I subscribe to Today's Quilter magazine and they are starting a new block of the month by Janet Clare which is coastal themed, I am very tempted and even pulled some fabrics for it, but I don't know where I would find the time to do it.

I've had to retire the Victoria leaf lace shawl from commuter knitting because my eyes just can't cope with the laceweight yarn in the indifferent lighting on the train, I was spending more time fixing errors than I was on knitting.  So that's been moved to the living room queue and my Cumbria mini-skein mitt is now my commuter knitting.  This is the first mitt, almost ready to cast off.  The line of contrast yarn is where you pick up for the afterthought thumb.

I was knitting on the mitten during an interesting talk by Louise West today about her recent experiences as a professional lace maker.  This was at a Lace Day held in Northampton.  I was working on the Bucks point butterfly mat during the day which was going very well until suddenly later in the afternoon it wasn't.  I seem to be out by one pinhole somehow.  I was too tired to work it out, I'll have another go at it tomorrow.\

It's turned properly cold now, down to minus one degree celsius last night.  I've got two handmade quilts on the bed as well as my GAAA Afghan, and I'm wearing handknit socks to bed.  And yet bizarrely the lavender and fuschias are still blooming away in the garden, it's crazy. Is it getting cold where you are?

Baking with fabric

I'm really enjoying the baking-themed applique quilt that I'm working on, even though I haven't had nearly as much time to work on it as I would have liked.  I think I like it because the colours are so cheerful and the shapes are simplistic and charming like a colouring book.  This is how far I've gotten so far, having completed the red mixer block, the rolling pin and the egg beaters this week.  Several of these blocks will be embellished with buttons but I can't sew those on until after  the top is quilted.    It may not look like much progress but the blocks are time-consuming to construct.  Also I had to do the power cord of the mixer twice, because the first time I used wider ric-rac and it didn't look right.

On the topic of ric-rac, rather annoyingly, having just been taken to the wonderful Peterborough store last Sunday where I could have bought all sorts of ric-rac but didn't think of it at the time, I belatedly realised on Monday that I would need ric-rac for the power cord of the mixer and subsequently for several other blocks.  So on Tuesday I diverted from my path to the office to hang about in front of the Button Boutique in Leicester until it opened some time after 9 o'clock, so that I could rush in and buy a yard or two of ric-rac in several colours and widths.  The rest of the day as I toiled (after my rather late start), I had a happy feeling that I had at least accomplished something worthwhile that morning. 

I've also been enjoying reading through some of the books and magazines I bought last weekend, and spent a happy couple of hours sorting through the box of cross-stitch kits while I was watching telly.  That experience was a bit like playing the childhood card game of Snap! because there were duplicates and even triplicates of kits, instructions with no kits, kits with no instructions, and it was a job to marry them all up as best as possible.  There were a few of each (instructions and kits) left over as orphans that got thrown out, but in the end I had two piles:  a pretty large 'keep' pile and a smaller but still substantial 'give away' pile.  I'll let my friends pick over the 'give away' pile and then what's left can go to the charity shop.

Today I was at a Lace Day, a relatively small one with about 30 people attending.  I got quite a lot done on my new Bucks Point butterfly mat and it's going ok.  The light wasn't great and conditions were fairly cramped, so I was glad to come home.  But it was still worth going because I just wouldn't sit and do five hours of lace at home, I would get bored and/or distracted by something else.  I've got a couple of lace events next weekend as well so will get more done then.

I've started a new knitting project which is the five-mini-skein kit for fingerless mitts that I bought from the farm shop in Cumbria.  It's nice 'woolly' yarn and satisfying to knit with.  It was this kit if you remember:




I'm still knitting on the Victorian leaf lace shawl border, now and then on the train and a bit today at the end of the Lace Day when my eyes were tired.  And I've finished quilting diagonal lines on the first row of blocks of the 25-block applique quilt, only four more rows to go. That's going to take forever because I can only hand quilt when I'm not too tired and preferably in the daytime when it's light.The rest of my time has been spent on video games and learning Japanese.  Oh, and work.

Have you put your heat on yet?  We have in the evenings, it's been quite chilly at times.  The plants in the garden are gradually losing their leaves or being cut down by the frosts.  I planted three tubs of tulips and irises in hopes that we will have a nice show next spring, although last year's were a bit of a literal flop with only one tub flowering properly and we missed most of its show when we were in Japan.  Don't know what happened to the other three tubs, I don't have a lot of luck with bulbs.