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.