Caravan = stash acquisition

 We went away this week to North Lincolnshire with the caravan, to a pretty little site on a farm near Louth.  The weather was fairly variable, and we actually ended up coming home a day early yesterday after waking up to rain and a forecast of it lasting all day. But it was very relaxing and we really feel we are starting to get the hang of caravan life.  We still haven't got our hands on an awning so I dug out our 25 year old tent (bought cheaply at Walmart in America on a quilting holiday and brought back on the plane, much to the amusement of my fellow tour members) and we used that for storage.  It did leak a little.

We had two visits to the antiques mecca which is Hemswell Antiques Centre, sprawling across an old RAF airbase; and also spent a day trawling the many antique and junk shops of the town of Horncastle.  We weren't familiar with Horncastle, and were a bit put off by the first 'shop' that we visited which felt like an episode of Hoarders, room after room after courtyard piled high with complete junk.  

Happily most of the other shops were much better, some of them fairly interesting.  There was this one in a converted church for example, where I bought a damask tablecloth for our dining table.

We had a lot of fun looking.  There weren't any big ticket items that jumped out at me, but I did manage to come away with a ragtag accumulation of stash acquisition.

A decoration for the caravan (DH insists this is 'tat')

A vintage needlework storage box

From a stall of vintage textiles, three groupings of someone's bobbin lace samples - only £3 each for hundreds of hours of work.

some random fabric purchases from two different fabric/craft shops

various packets of laces and ribbons (many from the same vintage stall as the lace above)

and a 'kit' of coordinating remnants and ribbons for doing collages or scrapbooking

A beautiful crochet edging, finely worked, just needs a fabric centre.  Again, hundreds of hours of work for a few pounds.

some bag clasps, some big needles that looked useful, some stitch markers

A random 3-D scene of Venice which is crying out for some paint effects and improvements

A pretty little teapot, which the stamp on the base says is a reproduction of a creamware pot in the Victoria and Albert museum

Between the two of us, we somehow also managed to acquire a large crate's worth of secondhand books.  I am very much enjoying reading through this compendium of antique needlework tools and coveting almost everything in the illustrations.  Why can't anyone make such wonderfully clever sewing tool kits today? I'm sure there would be a market for them.

We saw a lot of different birds and other wildlife during the week, including a peacock who was determined that he was going to share DH's sandwich.

We passed this adorable little cottage several times going to and from various places.

We saw some yarn bombing here and there, including this postbox-top seaside scene, in the seaside town of Sutton-on-Sea.

I took a few craft projects to work on: a cross-stitch birthday card, my fairisle socks and the felt teapot mat. The teapot mat was a good caravan project because it's just blanket stitch so you don't need particularly good light to do it with.

All in all, a very relaxing week.  We did some walks, drank a lot of tea, had good fish & chips by the seaside, some icecreams, and were pretty comfortable in our little box on wheels.  When we got back, I had a bit more stash acquisition waiting for me: three enamelled metal needlekeepers from a FB bobbin lace supplier. Very cute.

Now you see it, now you don't

 Our garden has been looking splendidly lush with all the roses out, the delphiniums, last of the irises, the salvias etc.

And then it started raining.  Cue showers of rose petals and a lot of bedraggled blooms:

Oh well, the garden certainly needs the rain after so many hot days.

I finished the knitted lace doiley which looked pretty sorry for itself after casting off.

I wet-blocked it with a bit of cornstarch mixture as recommended by the book, and a magic transformation has taken place!  It's now about 12cm (5 inches) wide.

Not perfect as I struggled to pin all the crochet cast-off chains out evenly, and not symmetrical as there are a few dodgy decreases in the final rows, but it looks like a doiley.  Now that I understand the pattern better, I may try again.

This week I took over the living room for a few days and laid out all the pieces for my strip-pieced star quilt, which took quite a while particularly as I found I had not cut sufficient background hexagon pieces somehow.

I'm quite pleased with it, it looks very cottagey and Brambly-Hedge-like.  As it stands, I don't think it is going to be very big, I might consider adding borders.  Then I had to think what to do next.  With no time considerations, I would have been tempted to set up a sewing machine in the living room and piece the rows right off the floor.  But DS's girlfriend is coming next week so instead I had to think of how to transport the layout down to my sewing room.  In the end I stacked up the 36 individual rows and pinned them with numbered slips of paper.  Hopefully it will make sense at the sewing machine and I won't get too many pieces in the wrong place.

Here's the photo I forgot to put in last week of the Australian BOM 1st instalment kit in progress, with the very romantic soft colours.

And this is some random stash acquisition - there was an alert on Facebook that the American fabric company Connecting Threads was not only having a sale, they were also discounting international shipping.  I had a trawl through what was on offer, and chose a wool felt teapot mat kit, a redwork panel, and some half-yards of neutrals, and three cheerful coordinating fabrics. The package turned up this week. No particular plans, but even with shipping they were still quite reasonably priced compared to UK fabric prices.  I'll probably take the wool felt kit away in the caravan.

And a treat for myself as a happy portent of the future:  a painted lace bobbin with the inscription "Happy Retirement".  I'm keeping it on my work PC unit.

In light of the most recent announcements, DS's London office has said that in about a month they would like to have employees back in the office for at least two days a week, and that they will review that decision later in the summer (the implication being that people will have to go back more than two days).  At least DS has had his first jab, and there's a chance he might get his second one before he has to get back on the train.  It will be strange not to have him as a work colleague down the hall working on the dining table, and hearing him take part in online meetings etc. But at his age, being relatively new in the workforce, I think it is likely better for him to have some office time with real people and learn those  in-person skills. My workplace is planning to implement hybrid working and as far as I know, for the majority of us there are no plans to make us come in unless we want to.  I definitely won't be going in as I belong to a virtual team anyway.  I suppose I'll have to make one last trip to clean out my little locker and perhaps hand in my ID etc. but that won't be until the autumn.

My online Japanese conversation lessons have come to an end as my lovely teacher is now on maternity leave and expecting her first child.  I have been speaking to her once a week for several months now which has really helped my confidence. I'm still talking like a toddler, but I'm much more confident about doing that and filling in the gaps with pantomime etc. I suppose I should find a new online teacher but I'm not incredibly optimistic, it's rare to find someone you can chat with easily. I've tried several other teachers in the past and have had some incredibly stilted and awkward exchanges.  We'll see, I don't want to lose too much ground so I suppose I should make the effort.

It was still really light at 10pm last night, but not long now until the longest day of the year. That day always seems to come too soon, before summer has properly started, especially this year.

Some like it hot...

 ...but I definitely do not!  28 degrees today, although at least it isn't humid.  We were away in the caravan last night (we took it down to Hampshire to show DH's parents who loved it) and got up early this morning so that we could get it back to the storage yard by midday before it got stupidly hot.  It was still pretty hot at the storage yard, I struggle very much with the heat and glare and have to wear factor 50 suncream, a big hat, sunglasses, and try to stay in the shade of other caravans when I can.  It was a quick trip away but it was nice to see the in-laws and there was a lovely view of the rolling Hampshire hills from our campsite. The sun went down behind the hills last night, we were sitting in the chairs with a gin & tonic each and admiring the lovely sunset. Not exactly 'roughing it'!

And for Swooze, some pictures of the inside:

You can see the little wall quilt I made last week, it looks cute in the caravan.

I did some pottering in the sewing room this week.  I added more padding to my cheap ironing board and a new cover made from Tilda fabric.  I bought it mainly to act as additional shelf space when I am cutting a lot of fabric, but have been using it as an ironing surface more since I started sewing garments. The original cover was so thin that the metal mesh of the ironing surface below it was imprinting on my fabrics.  I added two layers of flannel fabric, the original cover and then the new cover, so it is both cuter and more useful now.

To add the binding on the raw edge of the new cover (which also functions as a channel for the drawstring), I finally used my birthday present from last year which is a binding foot for my new Janome.  It worked really well although I found you have to sew slowly and help it along by holding the fabric and binding in position to go into the feeder. I don't know if it would actually help in binding a quilt, I'll have to try it but I think it prefers pre-folded binding.

Also this week I made up a quilted liner for the vintage embroidered teacosy I posted last week.  I traced round the cosy and used that as a pattern, making it a bit shorter and smaller, and adding a double layer of wadding on either side.  In the picture there is a 6-cup teapot inside - this cosy is really tall!  I wonder if that's why it survived, because it was too tall to be useful. Or perhaps it was made for a tall coffee jug, who knows.  The teapot next to the cosy is only a 4-cup pot I think, it's from Burleigh from when I visited their fabulous seconds shop.

I have almost finished the Danish knitted doiley thanks to a Japanese knitter who posted the errata for the pattern on her Ravelry project including the missing row 20 and a correction for the final row of lace.  With much studying of the picture, I am puzzling my way through and am just doing the final crochet edging.  At the moment, it resembles a crumpled small macrame pouch but I am keeping the faith that when blocked, the little snarl of thread will flatten out into a nice coaster-size doiley. Or at least I hope so...

The first instalment of my Australian quilt block of the month (BOM) showed up.  This is the lovely Vintage Haberdashery by Faeries in My Garden which features lots of embroidery and embellishments so I feel like I am really going to learn things. I had thriftily decided I didn't need to order their embroidery threads pack of Olympus and Cosmo threads as I have so many DMC skeins.  So I found some conversion charts online and sat down with the instructions to identify all the equivalent colours.  Literally six hours later (over two days) I threw in the towel and ordered the thread pack.  I think Olympus threads are Japanese and I could only find a couple of conversion charts, which not only omitted half the colours I needed but also disagreed with each other.  I spent a long time looking at online colour charts and trying to decide what might be darker or lighter than another colour and eventually decided life was too short so I threw some money at it.  That means I have to wait until the 2nd instalment to get the threads that I need to do the 1st instalment with.  But I did some of the prep work in cutting out background fabrics and stabilisers, and stitching on some of the trims for the applique shapes.  It's really pretty.

I hope you are staying cool and looking forward to some summer holidays of your own.

and suddenly, summer

 The warm dry weather has continued, and it has even obligingly rained during a few nights so I've only had to water the garden a few times. The abrupt change from cold rainy autumnal weather to hot summer has necessitated much changing of gears: the quilts have had to come off the bed, I've had to excavate my summer clothes and sandals from deep storage, I've turned the heating off and got the fans out of the attic, we've had to start shutting windows during the hottest part of the day and opening them later, the garden pots have to be kept watered etc etc. The cat is in seventh heaven and spending most of her day literally rolling around and lolling on the sunbaked gravel against sun-warmed walls.

This is the best time of year for our garden, when things are growing and green and before all the summer diseases and dieback have commenced on our dry sandy soil.  The banks of irises that I moved from the front garden after all the flowers were stolen one year are just loving it in the back garden, and flowering profusely.

We've got a sort of woodland dell effect going on underneath the pear and magnolia trees.

Even the view from my sewing room window is looking quite nice - although I can only open the blind in the morning and evenings as it faces south.

I was in the sewing room for a tidy up and because I've started to cut out a new quilt from a pattern in Today's Quilter magazine.  It's a supposedly easier method for a star quilt, where you cut a lot of 60-degree polygons so you can piece in horizontal ribbons and avoid Y-seams.  It's going to be a pig to lay out, because you will basically have to lay out hundreds of small pieces to decide what colours are going where, before you can start seaming them altogether.  I may commandeer the living room. I'm using some layer cakes (pre-cut fabric) that I got on sale from Craftsy I think a few years ago, plus some deep stash of beige and cream fabric.

I've made a start on my Lenten Rose Socks. I'm a bit worried they will be too big, as normally I knit a 60-stitch sock and these are 72 stitches - but then the fair isle will pull them in somewhat.

Meanwhile I am running aground again on the Danish knitted doiley pattern, it literally does not make sense.  I think I need to google Danish knitting pattern conventions and see if I can find anything, or perhaps have a look on Ravelry to see if anyone else has knit from the book.  I rarely go on Ravelry any more - I used to be on there a lot about 8 years ago when I had a different job where I could get away with surfing the net during the day. I was also doing a lot more knitting then.

I will pop in a photo of this very cute vintage embroidered teacosy cover that I picked up at that boot sale we stumbled upon in Cambridge last weekend.  I've given it a wash and will probably make an 'inner' for it out of plain cotton and wadding. I like to re-use things that someone like me created many decades ago.

The torrent of new caravan purchases arriving at the door has slowed to a trickle now, just the odd rug or fire extinguisher showing up.  We went over to see the caravan this morning to install our second wheel clamp (a security device), and a tyre pressure monitoring system, and to do a few odd jobs on it.  There were a few other people at the storage yard puttering with their caravans, and occasionally someone departing or arriving towing a caravan or driving a motorhome.  It's like we've joined a whole new tribe.  Or as my m-i-l has put it: "how nice that you have a hobby you can both do together".  DH and I have synchronised our annual leave entitlements and I've made some advance bookings for some short trips here and there during the summer. We're also going to tow the van down to the in-laws for a night to show them our new purchase.  It's very handy having our adult DS living at home - he can both house-sit and look after the cat.

And look what I found at the caravan shop: it's the little things that make us happy.