One of those days

 I have been in the habit of booking one day off a month as a 'treat day' and that fell on a Wednesday this week.  I headed down to my sewing room in pleasant anticipation of some relaxing sewing.  I had cut out pieces for some more of the zip pouches that I made one of a few weeks ago and pieced some cute lining panels.  But it turned out to just be one of those days:  you know, where lots of little things go wrong and it starts to feel like you are going backwards more than you are going forwards. Perhaps I was too relaxed on my second time with the pattern, thinking I knew how to do it.  Perhaps I shouldn't have tried to make three at the same time.  In addition to lots of unpicking resulting from sewing the wrong things together, or too messily when the stitching would show; I also managed to cut two of the vinyl pieces too short and only noticed when one vinyl panel was already irrevocably sewn in (that's the pouch that has the extra piece of vinyl sewn at the bottom).  I'm upcycling old duvet packaging, so had to resort to cutting a replacement piece out of a part of the packaging marred by marks from the former label (that's the blue pouch).  I then managed to accidentally catch the vinyl in some stitching, resulting in visible perforations across one panel.  Sigh, perhaps I should just order some actual vinyl.  The icing on the cake was when I discovered that I have been threading my bobbin winder wrong for god knows how long, possibly since I got the machine.  I had been vaguely wondering why the bobbins on the new machine seemed so spongy.  They were getting so bad that I actually resorted to getting the manual out (shock, I know) to look at the diagram.  That's when I realised that I had been misthreading the thread path to the bobbin winder.  It still didn't seem right though, so I partially took apart the area to try to see what's happening.  It turns out there is a hidden little tension finger in the thread path that the thread is meant to slide into, to put tension on the thread. However it is extremely difficult to get the thread into the finger, even now that I know it's there.  I have to push down on the thread in the right place and sort of work it until it goes into the finger.  Which doesn't seem right, usually threading a bobbin winder is quick and easy.  One day when my new machine goes for a service, I will try to remember to query this.  Anyway, I eventually produced three functioning pouches which look okay from a distance.  These are only for my own use thankfully, so nobody else has to be subjected to all the flaws.

A more relaxed backtracking has occurred once again with the Autumnal socks.  Having ripped out the first cable pattern and restarted using the Faceted Rib pattern, I again achieved 4 inches or so of knitting then tried the sock on.  I should have remembered from my machine knitting days that a slipstitch pattern is always less elastic than normal knitting.  The sock was far too tight.  So I pulled back (again) to the ribbing and increased 12 stitches, from 60 to 72, and have restarted.  I've just tried them on again and I think they are okay now.  Although the stitch pattern doesn't look as nice in actual wear, because the natural tension of shaping to the leg tends to flatten the slipped-stitch effect.

The big finish this week is the Bucks point lace edged mat at long last.  I finished the three-corner stitching then very very carefully, with my heart in my mouth a bit, trimmed the raw fabric edge close to the stitching on the reverse, desperately trying not to snip any lace or main fabric by accident.  It's turned out fairly well and the mat looks great on my dressing table under the similarly-shaped vintage glass dressing set I use.  The pattern isn't incredibly complicated, so this is a triumph of perseverance as much as it is of skill.  I don't know that I would ever make such a large mat again, been there done that now.

So I should go back to working on the Bucks Lace butterfly mat that has been parked for several months now, but when I got the pillow down and looked at it, I realised I don't really remember what I was doing.  I think it would behoove me to work a bit of Bucks lace sampling to get my hand back in, before I go back to the complicated project.

My little cross stitch christmas ornament is taking shape.  It will make a 3-D angel cone-shaped ornament when it is done.  The white area is meant to be stitched with white cross stitch but life is too short so I'm just leaving it empty.

I've been looking through the three volumes of patchwork patterns by Yoko Saito that I bought in the new year's sale from Quiltmania.  It's been an interesting refresh on my limited French, plus I've learned a few sewing-related vocabulary words.  There are some interesting construction methods using the Japanese method of seaming finished panels together then concealing the seam allowances with bias binding.  I was quite taken with this little hinged house-shaped box and thought it would be fun to try.

The designer pieces everything by hand but I will adapt this to machine sewing for the most part.  I spent some time drawing out the pattern (the book only gives outline suggestions for the doors and windows, and just measurements for the pattern).  I also had a look online for the Japanese fabrics that are commonly used:  yarn dyed weaves, textured weaves, and of course all the taupes.  It turns out that these imports are incredibly expensive in the UK, about £17 a metre, and nobody seemed to be offering a convenient selection of mixed small pieces.  So instead I turned to my stash and had a trawl to see what I could find.  The fabrics on the left of the picture are ones I bought in Japan, and the ones on the right are normal cotton quilting fabrics.  So the fabrics won't have the same textured look as the original but the colours aren't a bad match. I'll have a go.

In garden news, we now have three daffodils blooming (relics of futile past planting of 50 or so bulbs each autumn), and quite a few crocuses and still lots of snowdrops.  It's been much milder and I was able to dig up and divide the rhubarb.  This turned out to be a hugely difficult and exhausting job, akin to wrestling giant octopuses out of the mud.  Unlike the Youtube videos I subsequently watched, my rhubarb crowns had enormously thick roots the size of an older child's arm reaching deep into the ground.  They absolutely did not want to be dug up and it required a huge and muddy excavation about 18 inches deep before I could finally prise them out of the ground.  Perhaps I should have done this job last year.  The video-pictured crowns had fairly normal roots like medium carrots. Anyway, I divided the two octopuses up with a breadknife into multiple smaller plants and replanted about six of them (that's all the room I had in the patch) so we'll see if that reinvigorates the plants.  I don't even eat rhubarb because I'm allergic to it but DH likes it.