Giving myself permission

 I don't know if you are like this as well, but I often feel like I don't have permission from myself to go and do something fun until I have cleared certain hurdles.  This can result in several days on the trot without getting more than a few hours of evening crafting in front of the telly in terms of fun.  Meanwhile I am trudging through the daily chores, crossing  longer term jobs off the job list, or clearing projects that are ahead in the craft queue.

This week I finally made it to the Australian BOM  month one instalment!  (this is at a point where month three will show up any day now).  First of all, I had to tidy up my sewing room from that last dressmaking project, and repair a few things and do a bunch of ironing that had piled up on my sewing room ironing surface. I even hoovered up the considerable debris that had accumulated on the floor from the last several projects.

Then I sewed a Block Keeper Album out of all my bigger scraps of wadding using an orphan Moda block as the cover, that I made from a Moda Tin Box Sampler tin many years ago.  A block keeper is a place to stash the blocks you are making for a quilt project - it keeps them flat and safe.  The wadding grips the block and holds it in place.  The few examples I could find online were a lot smaller, but I calculated that I needed about 14 doublesided pages for the Australian BOM quilt.  I was able to cut several 'pages' out of wadding scraps and then started piecing bigger scraps together to make pages, and ended up with 11 pages before I ran out of big scraps so that will have to be enough.  I stiffened the cover with some ancient heavy interfacing and bag liner that I had lying around.  The whole album is a bit of a frankenstein effort, but it does the job and used up a bunch of scraps.  Then I could fish out the project background fabrics and stabilisers I had precut, and store them safely  in the album  while I start the blocks.

I spent some time sorting out the supplied embroidery threads into colours/number groups, and assembled my supplies to tackle the first month's instalment.  I have rarely tried embroidery in the past and know little about it, so I also included some scrap fabric  hooped up and scrap threads, for practicing with.  It's all gone into the handsewing basket I made a few months ago.  So I settled down in front of the telly and put Youtube onto the Firestick to watch video tutorials for the various stitches.  So far I have learned stem stitch, french knots (properly) and bullion roses. It feels quite exciting to finally be started on this project although I now realise it is going to be much more of an embroidery project than a quilting project.  Each month is mostly hand work so it will take a lot of time. 

Another project I tackled this week was to make a caddy for the passenger car door of our car.  We've had several long drives lately related to the caravan, and I was getting very tired of my water bottle constantly toppling over and not being able to find things in the door cubby.  I stiffened the caddy with Bosal foam interfacing, added an inner gusset to hold the water bottle upright, and an external little pocket to hold a pen and in future spare knitting needles perhaps. The main part of the caddy is open for holding snacks, maps etc.  I made the pattern by pressing lining paper into the bottom of the door cubby and running my fingernail around the edge to crease a line, as the door cubby is an oddly shaped cavity that is fat at the front and tapering towards the back.

I had some more stash turn up this week:  the Singer site that I bought the sewing-machine-shaped pincushion from was having a sale on Tilda fabrics, so I bought a pack of Woodland fat eighths. Then I bought some Tilda blue solid fabric from Empress Mills for background.  Tilda have a bunch of free patterns on their website and I am going to see if I can eke out my fabric enough to make the Flower Wreath quilt.  I will have to have a trawl through my stash for some toning solids to use for the leaves. Aren't they pretty?

One of the best things that happened this week was the heat wave finally breaking on Thursday night.  Friday was literally 10 or 12 degrees cooler and I actually put on a half-remembered object called a 'cardigan' for a while.  Last night I was finally able to sleep without having to have all the windows open (street noise) and my door open (cat invasion) and actually get some sleep.  Hurrah!

I forgot to mention last week that I had intended on returning from the caravan holiday to pick all the numerous cherries on our little edible cherry tree, as they were just about ready before we set off.  I think I posted a few weeks ago that the tree is too big to net properly now, but I was willing to let the birds have a few.  Well, on our return when I headed out to have a look, the bluddy birds had eaten every single cherry off the tree apart from one very low-hanging lone cherry - nothing but pips left.  So no cherry pie for us this year.