Retreat! (and Happy Halloween)

 I got back from my four-day sewing retreat yesterday.  It was pretty good. Everyone (c. 35-40 people) was really friendly, the hotel was nice (way better than the Wales retreat), lovely big sewing room, and I enjoyed learning some new things on the overlocker class.  

I was borrowing a fancy air threading Husqvarna overlocker which chomped through everything with no tension problems at all, a far cry from my 25 year old Janome overlocker (serger) but apparently this one lists at £1,000.  In fact I was rather boggled at the equipment people had brought to the retreat, more than half the attendees had massive top of the line sewing and/or embroidery machines. I was talking to one woman whose machine was the size of a desk - she said it cost £13,000!!!!!!!!!!!  That's more than our car cost.  I wouldn't dare take it out of the house.  That's one of the reasons I have a Singer Featherweight because my previous computerised sewing machine didn't like riding in the car once a month to quilt group and kept going wrong.  Attendees were very taken with my FW - even though many of them have made quilts, it wasn't like a quilt group where a lot of people will have an FW as a workshop machine. Many of them had never seen an FW so they all thought it was adorable. Which it is of course.

On the overlocking course, we made a flatlocked patchwork totebag, a Quilt As You Go cot quilt (I haven't stitched the binding down yet), an heirloom stitched lingerie bag (I used some old Tana Lawn from my stash) and a puzzle shopper bag.  All done with the overlocker, no sewing machines. I used Aldi FQs for the two bags.

Before and inbetween, I was working on the Edyta Sitar 'Winter Village' quilt using her 'Little Sweetheart' fabric line.  I am making both the bed size blocks and the bonus mini blocks, so I cut them both out at the same time.  The cutting out is the most fiddly part, lots of small squares and rectangles, but the sewing up is quite straightforward.  It was a bit cramped to fit my patchwork onto the same table as my overlocker once the course started, and consequently a few later blocks are a bit wonky so I may need to do some remedial adjustment. I got as far as house 11 so that's 11 big houses and 11 small ones.  There are 23 house blocks in total.  The mini quilt also includes some trees.

So it was a pretty good retreat and I might go again.  I feel a bit uneasy about the cost when I could just stay home and sew in my sewing room for free.  But I find after a maximum of four hours down there, I am getting bored and claustrophic and feeling like I should be getting on with other jobs.  The beauty of the retreat is that there is nothing else to be getting on with: no cooking, no cleaning, nobody asking when supper is, no doorbells, and best of all no cats starting to beg loudly for dinner 2.5 hours before their actual dinner time. And there are other people.

I didn't start on quilt 11 on the quilt frame before I went because there didn't seem much point starting to build up muscle memory on the new panto when I was going to be away for four days.  I did however make up the second cartonnage box from the free tutorials by Colourway Arts before I went.  It's turned out fairly well - it's quite sturdy and the lid fits snugly.  I used some Japanese themed fabrics for it.

Facebook pimped me this year's Christmas decoration acquisition, and it was delivered from Fortnum & Mason while I was away (in a ridiculously over-sized box).  I think it is painted metal as it is quite heavy.  The painting is fairly good but there are a few overlaps here and there - DH might have a go at tidying it up. I will tell myself that those are gluten free treats on the tray.

I put in some hard graft in the knitting machine room last week.  It took 5-6 hours but I finally managed to scrounge together all the accessories and parts for the electronic knitting  machine as listed in the manuals (it was like a scavenger hunt, all over the room in drawers and boxes looking for obscure bits of metal and fittings because it's all in a huge jumble after all the house moves), cleaned up and oiled both beds, dealt with the sticky buttons on the knitting carriage, and knitted a test sample to make sure it still worked at all.  Then I listed it at a rock bottom price to get it out of the house quickly, and almost had my hand bitten off by a woman who was very pleased to drive down and collect the bargain bundle complete with knitting table.  So one down, and out of the room. I don't regret not trying to get more money for it - these machines are so old now that they could break or blow up at any moment and I haven't used them for years so I'm in no position to warranty them.  I'm thinking I'm probably going to keep the Brother 260 chunky machine because it will knit handknitting yarn weight.  But the Brother 881 will go, although I feel a pang as it was my favourite machine.  Before I sell it though, I need to collect together and test various accessories that fit onto it (colour changers, garter carriage etc.) as they will be sold separately.   The current plan is to clear the room apart from the the 260, buy an industrial Jack H2 walking foot sewing machine and install it up there, and maybe even see if I could squeeze in my current machine quilting frame.  There wasn't room to set up a Handiquilter, but my current set up is a lot shallower so possibly there might be enough headroom under the sloping ceiling.  There's still a huge amount to clear out though first.

I'm away again next weekend to a cross-stitch retreat - it's all happening this autumn. I didn't purposefully book things back to back, it's just how it has worked out. There weren't so many events last winter due to COVID then we were busy over the summer with the caravan, so my retirement experiments all seem to have ended up happening at the same time.

I've decorated our porch for Halloween and we will be open for business in another hour or so.  We got a decent amount of trick or treaters last year, maybe 15 or 18 groups. I will be dressing as a witch once again. Happy Halloween everyone if you celebrate.  Hopefully I will judge portion control correctly so that we have enough sweets for all attendees with none left over because otherwise DH and I just eat them all - in the old days we used to take them to our respective offices to get rid of them but of course that's no longer an option.

DS home for a visit

 DS came home Friday night for a weekend visit with his girlfriend (who was duly impressed with the redecoration of DS's former room). It's lovely to have him back, although I did need to nip in the bud a joking proposal that if bills became too high then he could always move back home. I said firmly that of course if he really needed to but really that would be a backwards step as he is out in the world now. He's going to come home for Christmas as well which is something to look forward to.  We took them on a tour of three local-ish secondhand furniture places - they found a pair of bedside tables that they were looking for. I unexpectedly came across a TV stand which is made of mid-brown wood which will look less out of place in our front room than the semi-hideous painted-by-me stand that we bought nine years ago as a temporary stopgap when we were renting and waiting for this house to become available.  So a win-win shopping expedition.

Before they came, I finally, finally, finished Block 15 of the Australian BOM.  This sucker took me dozens of hours, possibly even into triple figures, and certainly I could have cut out and sewn a quick quilt top in the same time.  It's the feature block of the quilt, so the remaining embroidered blocks (four more I think?) should be smaller and less work. It's turned out fairly well. There will be buttons sewn on to the green 'button card' at the left. I think the block is about 15 inches wide from memory.

I also finished Quilt number 10 on the frame, the Cottage Stars, which I quilted with a heart-shaped panto.

Today while they were still asleep (they are both late risers), I loaded on quilt number 11 which is an antique top I bought from the Mary Koval salesroom at the St Marie Aux Mines quilt fair in 2017. It is  labelled as "1870 Hourglass quilt top".  I've now loaded it on to the frame. Having worked with it, I think the reason it was abandoned and not made into a finished quilt is because all of the triangles are cut on the bias (on the diagonal across a square).  So they are all stretchy, which makes the quilt top bubbly and the edges very fluttery.  I have tamed the edges as best I can to get it onto the frame, but inevitably there are going to be some puckers.  The alternative would be a lot of work to gather the edges to a set measurement then stabilise them by attaching borders.  I did that many years ago on another distorted antique top, it was a huge amount of work and I'm just not feeling like doing that again.  I'm using Hobb's Heirloom 80/20 wadding for this one, a change from the Hobbs polyester that I've been using up until now from the roll I bought. But being a vintage top, I think it needs the cotton wadding which will shrink when I gently wash the quilted top.

I've spent some time this week preparing projects for another sewing retreat that I'm trying, this one's a little closer to home but DH is going to drive me so  I can take my sewing machine this time.  I'm going to be taking an overlocking course on 2.5 of the four days, and the other 1.5 days I can work on my own project.  I've decided to tackle a project in my queue which is the Edyta Sitar pattern 'Winter Village', only I'm going to make it in her 'Little Sweetheart' line of red and pink fabrics which came out a few years ago. So I won't add the snowflakes and I may not add the branches either, we'll see.

This week I sewed the binding onto the Mennonite top, the one I added the tree border to, so that it will be ready to use as a Christmas decoration.  I did some of the stitching while listening to Chookyblue's zoom party from Australia. I do more listening than talking as neither of my webcam microphones seem strong enough to give me priority in the zoom conversation, quite often I am halfway through a sentence before Zoom starts transmitting my words and by then someone else has usually started talking.  Back in my Citizen Band radio-using teenage years, some of the male users had booster mikes which made them 10 times louder on air than anyone else, maybe I need one of those :)

Just in time for winter, I finished (again) the re-knit of the Aldi boucle t-shirt, sewed it up (again) and tried it on (again).  The body fits now, but the sleeves were still too full.  So I've pulled out just the sleeves and am reknitting them 10 stitches narrower.  Sure getting my money's worth out of this cheap yet nice yarn!  That's the nice thing about knitting though, you can generally get a do-over.

Hard drives are surprisingly robust

 I've been trying to get my head around how I will go about clearing my machine knitting room, and have obtained some good advice from Steelbreeze (who is an expert on all things MK) for which I am very grateful. As step one in the seemingly insurmountable programme, I tackled the ancient computer tower block dating back to at least the late 90s which I used to use to run Designaknit on, to connect to my 950i machine. We're talking the original chunky cream metal early PC here (until recently, I also had the matching enormous CRT monitor).  It's going to the recycling centre at the tip, but first I wanted to remove and destroy the hard drive.  And since I was doing that, I decided to tackle my collection of tower PCs that had succeeded it (two more) and a fourth one that my f-i-l had wanted to get rid of.

Thanks to the recent shenanigans with the failed hard drive on my current tower PC, I at least knew what a hard drive looks like and how it is connected/removed. It took me a while to work out how to get the early PC box open (I don't think it was intended for user modification) but the hard drive was easy to find and remove. It went downhill after that: this hard drive was in a vastly over-engineered cast metal case with a steel lid fastened on with multiple immovable screws.  The whole exercise turned into a crowbar and metal mallet bashfest until I could eventually pry off the steel lid.  The hard drive itself turned out to be two very robust metal disks which absolutely refused to break.  The best I could do in the end was to extremely mangle them with the mallet, bend them over etc.  Moving onto PC number two from the early 2000s was pretty much a repeat, although only one metal disk to mangle.  PC number three again featured a puzzle box from which I removed every visible screw (about 20) but which still refused to open, so we were back to bashing it with a mallet and crowbar until it popped open to reveal the inevitable unbreakable metal disk.  I was pretty mad at it by then so enjoyed bashing that one into oblivion.  The fourth hard drive I am actually keeping as it's pretty recent, so I only had to figure out how to open the box, and how to unscrew the drive.  The whole thing was exhausting but at least there is a pile of four PCs by the back door ready to go to the tip. Why is downsizing so hard....

My replacement Grace speed control arrived this week so I swapped it onto the quilting frame.  It's much better and I'm getting a much more consistent speed now - instead of it slowing down for no reason or suddenly dropping a gear in speed after a pause.  I'm trying to do three passes a day on the Cottage Stars quilt but it's tedious, I would have liked to have got the frame out of the dining room by Christmas but I don't think that's going to happen now.

Just before I went to Italy, it was National Cartonnage Day and Colourway Arts ran a free cartonnage workshop to make a storage basket and a lidded box.  I had got all the pieces cut out of chipboard and posterboard with the help of my Scan N Cut (it won't cut the chipboard through but it marks the pieces then I can cut them). This week I made up the storage basket using some Japanese-themed fabric: sumo wrestlers on the inside and the Wave on the outside.  I'm still not finding the recommended glue, Elmer's GlueAll, very good but I managed to finish the project and it's turned out fairly well.  I went around the house looking for something to store in it, and I've decided to keep my Bruges lace bobbins in it.

After doing some research into rolling suitcases (to replace the backpack), I eventually realised that I already knew the answer.  We've been very pleased with our Eastpak soft rolling bags that I bought for our first trip to Japan in 2016. They're really robust, the wheels are virtually silent in use even on rough ground, they open clam-shell style so it's easy to get at everything.  It turns out they do a carry-on size of the same Transverz bag that we already had.  It comes in various colours, I eventually chose one that isn't too wild but still stands out for easy retrieval on the security conveyor belt - and the hot pink interior makes me smile.  It's incredibly lightweight as well, I think it is lighter than my backpack even though they are both around 40litres in capacity. I look forward to testing it out on my next trip.

I finished sewing the binding onto the London quilt so DH is enjoying using that now. I've been doing a lot of work on Block 15 of the Australian BOM this week, making a big push to get it done.  There are so many elements crusted on top of each other, filling the appliqued needlework box, that I have officially abandoned hope of ever quilting this on my frame because that kind of bulk is just not going to roll onto the take up roll.  So it will have to be a sit down quilting job.  I've been avoiding attaching the various hard elements over the months, such as buttons, thinking that I might get the quilt onto the frame but no. Also because of all the bulk and hard elements, I think this is going to be a wall hanging quilt and not a bed quilt.

We had a nice autumnal walk yesterday along a section of the Grand Union canal near Stockton in Warwickshire, and stumbled across a narrowboat cafe open for business.  So we enjoyed a hot cup of tea and admired their canal art painted accessories. Last night was our last night of the season in the caravan.  After it goes in for one more bit of warranty work, we'll put it to bed for the winter and bring everything home.  

Home again

 I'm back after a few days in Wales attending a sewing retreat at a hotel.  The retreat itself was quite fun, held in a large bright room with about 30 attendees.  We all had our own 6-foot table to work on, pushed into groups of six so you had tablemates to chat to.  Everyone was really friendly and I learned a lot just by seeing what other people were making and how they were tackling their projects. The event was really well organised and well run, and it was great being able to sew all day with no interruptions.  Unfortunately the hotel itself was pretty tired and shabby and the room wasn't comfortable at all, so it's nice to get home to my own comfy bed. As previously mentioned, the train strike had interfered with my return trip but luckily I was able to get a lift back with a fellow retreater who was driving north past my town.  

My main project, a messenger bag in strange cat fabric I got in Japan

The 'Bento Bag' from the pattern that I bought at the Quilt Guild AGM in May, it collapses flat if you untie the cords. Also in fabric I bought in Japan.

Another wallet from the same pattern I used before, this time configured

as a sewing wallet.

 I was hiring a machine since I didn't want to attempt taking a machine on the train and Underground. They rented me a Janome HD9 which is the heavy-duty machine I was considering purchasing.  It's straight stitch only but sewed like a dream through all kinds of thick bulky layers and only balked at piercing a chunky plastic zipper.  But there was a lot of talk at the retreat about what kinds of machines everyone was using for bagmaking, which tends to demand a more powerful machine that can sew through multiple layers.  Several ladies have industrial machines, which as it turns out are a lot cheaper than buying the £1300 HD9. For example the Jack H2 industrial is about £600. I'm thinking that if I can clear the machine knitting room, I could put an industrial in the room instead.  Apparently they are staggeringly heavy since they come built into an industrial metal table, so it may be a job to get it up two flights of stairs.

I took my lace knitting with me to Wales but it was too dark in the bedroom to knit if you can believe it, so I didn't do much.  Since I've been back, I've been sewing the binding onto the London quilt for DH, it's gotten cold enough now at night that we need quilts on the beds again.  I've also loaded the next quilt onto the frame, number 10, the Cottage Stars quilt.

I haven't done anything on the Australian BOM project for quite a while, I'm a couple of months behind now which paradoxically reduces my motivation to work on it.  

I've done a scary thing: now that Japan has finally opened its borders to individual tourism, I've booked myself onto a four-week language course next spring in northern Japan.  Scary for multiple reasons: I will likely be the oldest student, it's a long time to be in a foreign country, my Japanese isn't very good, I will have to live in a shared house with likely much younger housemates (and no central heating), I'm not good in groups of people for any length of time etc etc etc.  Definitely going to be outside my comfort zone.  But it could be an amazing experience. Or I could end up hating everyone and the country, let's hope not. DH is being incredibly supportive even though he is going to miss me as I will likely be away for about a month and a half altogether.  Luckily with modern technology it's easy to stay in touch nowadays - not like the good old days when the only news from home came by 'Poste Restante' which meant queueing up at some random foreign post office in Cairo or Kathmandu and hoping they were holding mail for you. It was like Christmas when they were, and very sad when you left empty handed.  When I worked in London in 1988, I could get my mail sent to Canada House in Trafalgar Square and collect it from there, bet they don't do that any more. But I digress. So yes, Japan here we come unless they have another COVID wave and shut their borders again.

I'm back (for a couple of days)

 I got back late Friday night in the rain, having left Varenna on Lake Como that morning - also in the rain. I'm here for the weekend - unpacking, doing laundry, catching up, saying hi to DH and repacking - before I'm off to a sewing retreat in Wales.

My itinerary was to fly into Pisa where I made a one-night pitstop and strolled around the Piazza, dodging all the tourists pretending to hold up the Leaning Tower in photographs. Then by train to Levanto for 4 nights while I explored the Cinque Terres villages by boat and train. Then train to Milan for a one night stopover and a walk around the Duomo and some other sights, and a visit to the big Naviglio open-air antiques fair the next day along the canal.  Then train up to Varenna on Lake Como for five nights where I lake-hopped by boat to Bellagio, Menaggio, Tremezza, and Lenno, before flying out of Milan.  Everything went fine, I had a great time and saw many beautiful things. The weather worked out just how I'd hoped when I booked an end-of-season holiday to Italy: after a blistering 26 degrees the first day, it gradually cooled off over the next 10 days - transiting through pleasantly warm for several days to cooler in Lake Como and finally grey cloudy days just at the end.  Which was perfect for me, being fair-skinned, prone to skin cancer and easily overheated.

Part of the reason for this trip was to test out 'solo travel in retirement': will I enjoy it? can I still do it? how to do it? How would DH get on? etc. So in a way it was all one big experiment. The first 24 hours or so felt extremely odd and disorientating, I didn't feel happy at all. I've been travelling with DH for so long now that to be on a gratuitous holiday (as opposed to attending a course, or something with a purpose like visiting Paducah) without him, while he was working, just seemed wrong.  And I missed his support and company, and having someone to eat with and talk to.  But gradually my 30 year old memories of backpacking around Europe and Asia resurfaced and some of my previous knowledge as well.  It helped that all my destinations were solid first-world holiday destinations so I was surrounded by tourists from all over the world, it wasn't exactly roughing it. Gradually I relaxed and ended up feeling really content and happy. I did loads of walking, made of point of having a daily gelato (ice cream) or even two, went wherever I felt like, took breaks when I felt like it, and ended up taking over 800 photos because there were so many beautiful sights - don't worry, I won't post them all here.

The choice of taking a backpack had mixed success.  Total failure at the airport where almost every other person had wheeled luggage while I lumbered around like an elephant, and had to support all its weight myself through security queues, passport queues etc.  Total win in the mountainside villages I was staying in, where I saw many people trying to yank their recalcitrant wheeled cases over the cobbled streets or tow heavy cases up steep alleyways, or just wake the dead with the noise of their wheels over rough paving slabs. On balance though, I think I will look into getting a well made two-wheeled carry on which has good carrying handles for when you have to carry it yourself up steps etc.  I used or wore almost everything I packed apart from my swimsuit and a pair of dressier sandals, so I felt my packing had been appropriate. The only crucial thing I forgot was my wristwatch, so I bought a cheap one at Gatwick airport.  The travel daypack I sewed for myself continues to be a great success, comfortable and really useful. The hidden security pocket for my passport (on the back between the straps) is great, one less thing to worry about although I generally try to keep my daypack in front of me in crowded places anyway.

In terms of being alone, I would say also mixed success.  I'm quite happy on my own, being quite introverted.  I occasionally chatted to people in queues or on boats but was largely solitary which did feel a bit lonely at times.  Eating out was a big daily challenge, not least because I am gluten intolerant in the land of pizza and pasta.  So I might look at 10 restaurant menus before finding one that had possible gf options and didn't look too scary to sit in on my own. As a result, I ended up doing a lot of picnicking, hoarding gluten free supplies when I could find them. It turns out that larger Italian pharmacies sell gf bread and some other products, as did a supermarket in Levanto. A minority of restaurants indicate which menu items contain gluten, and I even found a gluten free pizza restaurant in cosmopolitan Bellagio so I got to eat a delicious Italian pizza after all.  I had a couple of good seafood meals which were delicious but also very expensive. I tried out the Mcdonald's gluten free cheeseburger in Milan (disgusting, nuked inside a plastic bag and soggy).  In Varenna I was staying in a self catering flat, so was able to cook my own gf pasta and make sandwiches.  The evenings were the times when I most felt the lack of a companion, spending most of them on my own in my room or flat, knitting and watching TV (both TVs had Youtube so I was able to watch the final week of the sumo tournament).  It's a lesson for next time, to plan for some evening activities like a food tour or maybe a show depending on what's available in a locality.

Language wasn't a problem, many Europeans are multi-lingual and anyone dealing regularly with tourists has at least some English.  I learned a handful of useful Italian words before going, although for the first several days I kept accidentally saying 'hai' in Japanese instead of 'si' in Italian which confused several gelato salespeople. There were a lot of French tourists and I was surprised at how much of my schoolgirl French was resurfacing as I listened to them speaking.

Levanto was a great base for the Cinque Terres, connected by boat and train but with

far fewer tourists.  Good amenities, nice beach, nice medieval part of town to

explore and some gorgeous villas dotting the shore.

The Cinque Terres are five small villages clinging to the fringe of the mountain coastline. They are now connected by road and rail but I think they all looked best when approached by the sea. I took the boat from Levanto along all of the coast towns to here, Riomaggiore, then worked my way back along by boat and by train exploring all five villages over a couple of days.

The Cinque Terres villages are beautiful but pretty much completely overwhelmed by tourists unless you could be there early or late in the day. And this was late season, I shudder to think what it must be like in July or August.  As it was, by midday you were literally having to queue to pass through narrow streets or along walkways, every restaurant was packed, facilities such as rubbish bins and the very few public toilets completely overwhelmed. My out-of-date secondhand guidebook described Vernazza as 'the jewel in the crown' but I was there at midday and you could barely see the town for the numbers of people crowding every street and every available sitting-down surface. DH would have hated it.  I didn't do any of the goat-track hiking on the mountain trails connecting the five towns, but I did do a lot of walking around and exploring each town.  As pretty as they were, I think they are the victims of their own success now.  They were all beautiful from the sea, but otherwise I would recommend only going first thing in the day or late afternoon.

Typical tourist choked street in Corniglia

My final day I took the boat all the way to Portevenere, sometimes referred to as the 'sixth Cinque Terre town' and it was lovely. The train doesn't go there, so there are far fewer tourists. The location is stunning and it has all the elements of ruined castle, medieval churches, mountainside staircase-lanes, harbourside restaurants etc.  I also took the boat tour from here around the three nearby islands, all incredibly scenic. It felt like a real holiday destination.

In Milan, in comparison, everything seemed huge: huge station, huge cathedral, huge castle etc.

Inside the Duomo, like a redwood forest of marble columns

The canalside antiques market in Naviglio stretched along

the canal as far as four bridges-worth, selling everything from jewellery to

early 20thC furniture.

I found two little vintage sewing kits which open up to reveal

cotton reels and needle storage.  I also found a vintage Italian model

kit for DH that he is pleased with.

Varenna on Lake Como.

Lake Como is a whole different ballpark from Cinque Terres. The Lakes have been

millionaires' playgrounds for centuries. Everything is more sophisticated, more lavish,

more tamed.  Cosmopolitan Italians and other Europeans fill the cafes, or drift through

the shopping streets in silk dresses and big hats amongst the tourists, and you hear so many different languages.

Each lakeside town follows a similar pattern: there is usually a ruined medieval watchtower, a huge 19thC grand hotel, the ferry dock, the tourist square with souvenir shops and cafes, the gorgeous villas with their exotic gardens running down to the lakeshore and their private boathouses, the lakeside promenades etc.  Several of the villas or their botanic gardens are open to the public, so in Varenna I visited Villa Cipressi and Villa Monastere, in Bellagio it was Villa Melzi, in Tremezzo it was Villa Carlotta, and in Lenno I walked out to Villa Balbianello famously used to film some of the Star Wars prequel scenes. 

Thanks to microclimates around the lake, the botanical gardens were amazing and

filled with exotic plants, sculptures, pavilions etc. They have multiple levels with lots of winding paths to explore.

Villa Carlotta

I took so many pictures of gorgeous lake views like this one.

And lots from the boat

I found a tiny quilt shop in Riomaggiore of all places, stocked with very expensive Moda fabric (6 euros for an FQ). She said it's only tourists that purchase, the locals don't quilt. I bought two autumn placemat panels.

The arrowhead lace scarf I started knitting on the trip. It took me a while but I've eventually memorised the pattern.

I finished quilting the Mennonite top on the frame, the morning I was going to the airport. I wanted to get it done because I knew I would lose the muscle memory for the panto while I was away. I chose a curvy leaf-motif design - I did look at various Christmas designs but I didn't think my skills were up to them.  The semi-rotten antique part of the top tore in a couple of places as I was quilting it, so I need to do some repair work once it's off the frame. This will definitely be a Christmas decoration rather than a daily use quilt.

The day after I got back was the Makit Fenland lace fair, which this year had nearly as many quilting vendors as it did lace vendors.  I had a ticket but was in two minds as to whether to go out on my first day back. But I wanted to support the event and DH was willing to drive me over to St Ives and it was a lovely sunny morning so off we went.  I think it was a bit smaller this year but still lots of nice things to look at.  I picked up some fabric with vintage Simplicity pattern images, a couple of cake-themed FQs, a bird ornament, two charity donation quilting books, and a lace pattern.  All the bobbin suppliers of course had commemorative bobbins for the late Queen Elizabeth - I chose one from my favourite supplier Margaret Walls. Meanwhile DH strolled into town and found a market where he got some tasty lunch food for himself so he was happy.

So today I've been re-packing to get ready for the sewing retreat in Wales.  I had prepared the various sewing projects ahead of time, so it is really just sorting out clothes and what bag to take. Ironically, although it's a shorter trip, I'm having to take a big suitcase just to accommodate all the sewing stuff and my back support cushion (apparently the chairs in the sewing room are a bit low and hard so we've been recommended to bring cushions).  I'm off tomorrow and should be back Friday except that the local train network has decided to join the national train strike on Thursday plus strike additionally on Friday and Saturday as well.  So my pre-booked Friday morning train has been cancelled and I'll have to take my chances with what they are describing as 'extremely limited service - only travel if absolutely necessary'.  Perhaps I will be in Wales longer than I am expecting.... but hey, I'm retired :)