If you wait long enough then you don't have to do it

 This week I tackled some of the glory holes in my sewing room that I mentioned in the previous post.  For example, I had about 15 big plastic sacks containing either fabric collections, WIPs or planned projects - none of which were well labelled, everything was jumbled together and it was all in a relatively inaccessible corner cupboard.  I dragged it all out bag by bag to evaluate.  The fabric collections were pretty easy - I printed A4 labels to slip into the bags to identify them.  The purchased kits were similarly labelled.  Planned projects were more of a minefield, and I made some decisions.  I am no longer going to make the Piece O'Cake designs 'Aunt Millie's Garden' applique quilt that I've been collecting red fabrics for over 10 or more years - I've done my one enormous needleturn applique quilt and I think now that I don't want to make another.  So all those red fabrics got re-homed.  The big lengths of yardage I bought for two Stack N Whack quilts around 1998 went into the backings pile - it's been years since my Stack N Whack phase and I don't even like those fabrics much any more.  I put for recycling the massive binder of handouts from my first ever sampler quilt c. 1994, I don't even have that quilt now and there are much better sources for accurate block patterns nowadays should I ever want to make another.  So now I have a corner cupboard with well-labelled distinct project bags and I have updated my quilt queue list accordingly - it felt good to cross off some ancient unwanted projects.  I made new labelled bags for the four or five newer project accumulations that were on the floor in boxes or trays and cleared them off the floor.  I put away the massive block holder I made for the Australian BOM because those blocks are all sewn into sashed rows now.  I have pulled out the teetering tower of 'FQs waiting to be put away' which was constantly falling over, and have put them on my ironing surface so that I really will put them away (I haven't yet though).  It's a start, there is still of stuff that would benefit from being sorted out.

I finished the dresden plates for the corners of the Australian BOM and sewed them into the corners.  I can't do much more without finding a replacement fabric for the inner and outer border.  The drab tonal that came with the kit doesn't appeal to me at all.  I've spent quite a while searching online and got DH to take me to the local quilt shop, but I haven't found anything that goes with these faded sugary pastels.  Next time we go to check on the caravan, we will stop into Bramble Patch in Daventry which is a much bigger quilt shop with a lot more fabric, hopefully I can find something there.

At the sewing retreat, I pieced two small panels of Tilda squares for the Tilda Club Sewing tool organiser that arrived recently.  I carefully pieced the panels so that the fabrics featuring ladies all had their heads facing upwards.  This week I sewed on the contrast fabrics and cut out the pouch shapes.  Did I sew the contrast fabric onto the side of the panel so that the heads would face upwards? No I did not.  I don't feel like piecing and quilting more panels so I am just going to live with upside down ladies. There are some sideways ladies on the back panel but at least they are hidden.

An acquaintance was celebrating her diamond wedding anniversary, and I made her a card on my Brother Scan'n'Cut using one of the downloadable projects and a printed paper I got in the Colemans closing down sale.

I went to a Lace Day where I finished off the first Bruges Lace flower from the Sutton book. It's okay but not great: I had some tension issues both with my passives and with the filling (too many twists) and made a mess of some of the sewings (I hate sewings).  I've made a start on Flower 2 which is fairly similar to 1, hopefully it will come out better.

And I finished the cross stitch bookmark which I started during caravan holidays this summer and only worked on occasionally because I found the narrow band physically hard to hold - I posted earlier the crude frame I made to stretch it out.  Plus I found the counting hard.  So some of my cross stitches are not well formed.  But overall I'm pleased with the effect, the colours are quite striking. The kit came with blue felt to finish off the back, and the tassel.

We're allowed to reveal our recent test bag makes now - this is a pattern by Mrs H designs for her upcoming bag retreat.  It was a straightforward sew once the beta bugs were identified in the pattern - one of those has resulted in my handle being much too long so I need to shorten it.  The fabric is fun - I got it in Nippori fabric town in Tokyo on our 2019 trip.  I wasn't planning to visit Nippori this time but now I feel like I want to get more cute bag fabric. And it was a joy to use my new industrial on this - on the final top stitching around the upper edge, it chomped through multiple layers even where almost half an inch thick (where the strap tabs are in the seam) without even changing sound, no straining whatsoever. I'm still keeping my fingers well away from the needle.

I'm enjoying making bags but have a new issue of an ever-growing collection which I don't actually use.  I haven't carried a handbag for decades apart from the occasional business trip or funeral.  Everything goes in my fairly smart Mia Tui backpack which is much better for my back.  I prefer to sew organisers or tote bags because I might at least use those.  But I'm learning a lot from sewing bags even though I don't use them much. People will probably think 'why don't you sell them?' but in my experience selling handmades is a total PITB, people barely want to pay the cost of materials much less labour, and if you are selling it then you feel like it has to be perfect which mine rarely are, and I would worry about how they will stand up in use etc.  I sometimes give them as gifts, such as to my m-i-l who appreciates them.

I tried out one of the UK Quilt Guild's new virtual lecture series today: a talk by American quilter Lori Dickman on speedy solutions for cutting and organising your scrap stash - tickets were £8.  It took the form of a Zoom call with almost 300 participants. They made the strange decision to open the room 30 minutes early, resulting in a constant arrival of people many of whom were having problems with their camera, or their mike, or both, and telling their husband all about it without muting, we heard one husband reading out their wifi password, somebody else was listening to the radio or TV...I gave up and turned everyone down until the speaker arrived. Being American (sorry to Americans) we had the inevitable 15 minutes of self-promotion of her website, books and courses before getting to the actual talk.  Very much like Bonnie Hunter's scrap system so I don't know who came up with it first, or perhaps minds just think alike.  It's funny what different ideas people have about what constitutes a scrap.  Lori will cut out anything leftover from a project including cutting squares as big as 12.5 inches - if I had that much fabric left then it would get folded and stored in my FQ collection.  Unlike me, she actually uses all her cut out squares for projects which is what her books are about.  One suggestion she made which I had never thought of was to use our collection of speciality rulers to cut scraps: cut out hexies, Dresden plate segments, tumblers etc.  I might actually use those whereas I rarely seem to use my scrappy squares. Food for thought.  She sorts and stores her squares by size, but tries to organise them into darks, mediums and lights within each size box.  I've been storing mine by size and colour and hadn't worried about value apart from keeping very lights separate.  If you quilt - do you keep your scraps? How do you organise them?  Do you use them?

 

A sewing week

 I haven't touched the dollshouse project this week as I have spent a lot of my time sewing, and then I was away Friday-Sunday for a sewing retreat.

I spent most of a couple of days sewing up another bag test, this time for a medium-sized handbag with strap. I can't show that one (it turned out fine though), but I can now show the tote bag I tested a few weeks ago since that pattern has since been released. It's a straightforward box-corner tote with mesh pockets inside.  I used some of the vinyl I bought from Manmade Fabrics at the October retreat, which sewed up beautifully on my new industrial machine.

My eyesight is distinctly middleaged nowadays, but I did notice on this week's test bag that my seams looked a bit fuzzy like chenille.  Finding and putting on my 3.5x magnification readers revealed that every stitch puncture had forced out a little tuft of fabric thread or stabiliser.  So that seemed a bit odd, so I took the needle out of the industrial for the first time and had a look at it with the same magnifiers - size 26!!!!  you could probably sew leather boots with a needle that thick.  I have swapped it for a considerably smaller needle which is behaving much better.  I had sort of vaguely thought that the dealer had left the machine all set up ready for me to sew with, it had never occurred to me to check the needle he had put in.  Or perhaps left in, if that is the needle the factory installed.

I finished the little cross stitched pincushion  I was working on last week.  It's cute but probably not incredibly useful. Nice to finish something small in cross stitch though instead of the larger projects that drag on for years. I had the little pair of vintage scissors in my stash, I don't remember where I got them.

At the sewing retreat, I spent Friday working through Months 19 and 20 of the Australian BOM - which was basically cutting sashing strips and stitching them to all the blocks, and then cutting the in-between patches that join the blocks together.  It needed a lot of concentration as there are multiple sashing colours and block sizes, and being a kit meant I only had just enough fabric and hardly any left over so I didn't want to make a mistake. So it was a good thing to do at the retreat - apart from a large stream of admirers who caught sight of the embroidered blocks and wanted to see them, and then brought their friends to see them, who brought their friends etc.  None of them had ever seen anything like the style of this design and were amazed that it was all done by hand and not by a fancy embroidery machine (oh, and there was a group of about 10 ladies who had all brought their £15,000 sewing/ embroidery  machines for a class so about £150,000 in one corner of the room which made it look like the NASA control room for shuttle launches).  Two of  the admirers were so enamoured that they are going to sign up for the BOM as well because it's still available.  I pieced the centre of the quilt and the borders but didn't join them together yet as I want to find a substitute fabric for the rather dull one in the kit. Also I haven't finished my Dresden plates yet which will go in the corners. It's so wonderful to have this project finally turning into a quilt and not just a pile of untrimmed embroidered blocks.

Friday night I sewed a quick cover for my Featherweight as I had completely failed to find the nice patchwork cover I made for it several years ago, despite combing through my sewing room twice (although I found lots of other glory holes - that room definitely needs a tidy up).  My Featherweight was once again much more popular than me amongst the retreatees, many people came to coo over it and tell me how their mother/grandmother/auntie etc. used to have one and how they are worth £600 now in America. Many threats were made about disappearing the machine off to a new home but disappointingly noone offered me £600 for it.

Saturday morning I sewed together some simple patchwork panels cut from a Tilda 'Hometown' charm pack for a tool caddy but couldn't go any further because I need more supplies.  That left me with the Edyta Sitar Winter Village blocks that I have worked on at a few retreats.  While cute, they are a bit tedious because each house takes about three times longer to cut out all the squares and rectangles in the listed sizes than to actually sew.  I got bored with that pretty quickly and decided to turn the remainder of the Tilda charm pack into pinwheels with the help of some linen-print tonals I bought from the on-site supplier. I don't know what I'll do with them, but I have more Tilda fabric I could sash them with. I was able to make 16 x 8inch pinwheels.

I also bought some one-metre cuts of tone-on -tone solids in pretty colours because it was only £5 a metre and they will be useful for lots of things.

Then it was back to the House blocks.  I laid them out on the floor of an adjacent conference room on both Saturday and Sunday to choose fabric for subsequent blocks, and was able to finish  as far as 21 of the 23 houses, and to cut block kits for the remaining two houses.  And that is in both the large size blocks and the miniature house blocks I am also making. So 42 out of 46 houses done.

The designer used the mini blocks for a separate wall quilt but I would kind of like to work them into the main quilt somehow, perhaps as a border.  The main quilt itself isn't very big, so there is room to add the little houses on as a border.  I'll have to have a play on my design wall.

I took my usual two travel knitting projects with me to the hotel to work on in the evenings - the Paducah lace shawl and the Lace scarf.  It was the final weekend of the new year's sumo tournament in Tokyo so I was watching the matches on my tablet while I was knitting. Exciting to think I will be there myself soon, and I'm hoping to get a ticket for the May tournament in Tokyo as well as touring around the sumo district.

I don't think I said that I finally finished the Elden Ring video game a few days before Christmas.  228 hours of gameplay following a 100% walkthrough as my guide.  Although the last 20 or so hours were just switching up my build and grinding levels trying to beat the gimmicky final boss fight which was an annoying finish to an otherwise excellent gaming experience. It's an unbelievably huge game, I never would have found several of the areas on my own without the walkthrough to help me.  It kept me busy from March until December and was something I could share with my son (although he 'finished' the game in about 45 hours - so he missed a lot of the optional areas).  So I don't regret the time spent although I can't help thinking what else I could have done in 228 hours.  That's like 9.5 days, or almost 20 if you only count waking hours.  I've now moved on to another souls-like game called 'Prey' which is set in a space station devastated by an alien invasion but it's not nearly as good and the visuals are quite monotonous apart from the occasional space vista out the windows.

I have been spending some time since Christmas trying to rescue a quilt I made for my son maybe 12 years ago.  He uses it a lot and had taken it to his new apartment, but mentioned that it had some loose threads and maybe I should take a look at it.  When I got my hands on it, I was amazed to see almost the entire back of the quilt covered in big loops of thread detached from the quilting.  At first I thought perhaps he had just popped a few stitches with use, but it's the entire quilt. I think what has happened is that the Bottom Line polyester thread I used in the bobbin, which is a very strong thread, has just sawn through the top cotton thread on all the broader parts of the motif where the stitches were a bit longer.  I normally use King Tut as my top thread, which is a high quality thread, but I can't remember what I used on this particular quilt.  It's rather alarming, as I quilt all my quilts on the frame with Bottom Line in the bobbin, it's recommended because it's a fine thread and you get more on the bobbin and it beds into the stitches well.  I haven't noticed anything like this happening on any of my other quilts but then none of them have had the hard use and washes that my son's quilt has received.  So I'm trying to unpick the existing all-over quilting design to remove all the loops, and then I will re-quilt it at the sitdown machine.  It's quite a pain to do, the hanging loops are obviously easy but then the stitches get smaller into the points of the design motif and those have remained firm and are hard to unpick. It's going to be a long job I think.

Mild panic ensues

 I'd been sort of vaguely thinking I had four months before I go to Japan, since it's January and I'm going in April.  But I realised today that in fact it is less than 3 months until I go.  Cue mild panicking.  So today I've made a shopping list of bits I want to pick up beforehand, like ordering new socks for when I have to remove my shoes indoors, and I've spent a few hours looking at destinations around Tokyo.  There is just so much that you could see, it's difficult to narrow it down to a short list that isn't going to burn me out by the end of the first week.  Plus Tokyo is so huge, you can potentially spend an awful lot of time on the train.

I've been working on the four Dresden plates for the corners of my Australian BOM quilt.  They are fussy cut from floral fabric so that a secondary pattern (of your choice) will emerge when the petals are sewn together.  After consulting my Australian expert Chooky, I created a couple of see-thru plastic templates with match marks and set to tracing petals onto my fabric.

Then I spent quite a lot of time gluing the fabric onto card plate templates, and assembling those into four plates glued to the fabric background.  I've just started stitching by machine to join the plates to each other and to the background. I also took my courage to the sticking point and trimmed all my embroidered blocks down to size - doublechecking all the measurements. Hopefully I've done it right.

I've spent some time this week getting the dollshouse porch ready for its roof  by fitting more clapboard, sizing up supports etc. But I want to install the lights before the porch is in the way.  When I looked at porch lights, they were ridiculously expensive at over £15 each.  So what I actually ordered was a cheap pack of plastic lamp posts intended for christmas villages which turned up yesterday.  I've already got some lightbulbs, so I'm going to make my own porch lights.

The Bruge Lace flower number 1 is coming along fine apart from a mistake early on, for which I had to compensate by skipping a pin on the first petal.

I've been working a small bit of cross stitch (supposed to resemble sashiko embroidery) to make into a pincushion using a free kit from CrossStitcher magazine. This has proven a challenge to my inability to count, and there has been a fair bit of ripping back. I'm very slow at cross stitch so this little scrap has taken me several hours of TV time.

And I made a book.  This is a result of falling down an internet rabbithole which started with me wondering if there was a journal where you could move the pages, but which wasn't a ring binder.  Which led me to the discovery of the hitherto unknown world of disc binding, which led to various Youtube videos on making your own disc bound journal, which led to me ordering some A5 disc-punched pages and a set of discs.  I spray painted one of the pages black, and scanned it into my Brother Scan N Cut to create a cutting template for a disc-punched page - you can buy your own mushroom punch but they are about £70, so no thank you.  I used the Brother Canvas Workspace design software to design a cover and divider pages, and cut them out on the machine from scrapbook cardstock.  And I invested in a cheap laminator off Amazon to laminate the cover/dividers but avoiding the punched out area.  Then I assembled it with the purchased pages and discs into a little booklet.  I'm experimenting with tracking some of the many things I am trying to get done like decluttering, quilt binding etc. and some of those regular jobs like backing up your PC, hoovering, and so forth. I don't know if the experiment will be a success, but I enjoyed making the little book.

My little laminator

My friend Anita sent me a picture of her Chinese bed with the cushions I made for her - doesn't it look amazing? She's doing a roombox.

Did I mention I had joined the local U3A (University of the Third Age - an international educational organisation for seniors)?  I joined to see if any of the special interest groups would be appealing.  There is a Monday afternoon zoom call for crafters that I am going to try, it alternates between needlework and card crafting.  There are also some walking groups that might be good when the weather gets better.

Treasures from the attic

 Decluttering continues. With the christmas decoration boxes and suitcases all temporarily out of the way, I took the opportunity to sort through the immense collection of boxes and bags tucked inconveniently under the slanting ceiling of the attic storage room.  Having a lot of DS's possessions up there isn't helping, but it will probably be some years until he gets his own house and has room to take his stuff away.  But I re-stacked it all more tidily (only banging my head a few times on the ceiling), jettisoned a bunch of un-needed empty boxes from purchases (I tend to hang on to them 'just in case' then forget about them), threw out some old rubbish, and transferred some items to be decluttered downstairs to be dealt with.

First of these was my own wedding dress from back in the early 90s - a full on Princess Diana confection in fake silk (polyester) with multiple ruffles and skirt tiers all filled out by an actual hooped petticoat.  What can I say, I was at an impressionable age when she got married. I did look very nice in it on my big day.

So I've kept the dress for decades even though I haven't fit into it for almost as long.  It still had actual wedding dirt on the hem from the day because I had never cleaned it afterwards.  Despite being stored in acid free tissue paper inside an old suitcase, it had acquired a couple of brown marks where it was accidentally touching the suitcase.  I googled what to do with old wedding dresses. Apparently you can sell more recent ones, and really old dresses made from silk etc. you can re-make into christening gowns or cushions  or memory bears.  But polyester late 20thC dresses? the only suggestion was to donate them to a charity store to see if they can raise funds with it.  So I washed the petticoat, and very carefully spot washed the brown marks on the dress away (all gone, hurrah) and dipped the hem into the water to wash away wedding-day dirt.  Once it was all dry and clean, I packed it up in an old clear duvet bag with a label 'size 14 wedding dress' etc. [omg, size 14 I miss you] and took it in to the Red Cross shop to enquire if they would like it.  They were pleased to have it although they said that it can take a while to sell wedding dresses, but she was keen to try.  I just hope it doesn't end up getting thrown out.  Meanwhile the wedding shoes, which I had also kept, had self-destructed over the decades, with one heel disintegrating and various brown stains appearing, so they went to the dump.

Next was a plastic tupperware containing two china headed reproduction dolls that I bought in the 1970s in my early teens, together with a fitted trunk I had made for them, and a collection of hand-sewn clothes.  I was mad for antique dolls in my youth, and particularly lusted after the antique Parisian dolls who had  been sold with their own trunks full of exquisite miniature clothes.  So I had a go at making my own. I used to mail order my doll kits from America, they came with just the ceramic parts and a pattern for the body.  The trunk I made when I was about 14 I think, from scraps of wood in my dad's workshop, and painted with house paint. It's not finished very well, I don't think I had discovered sandpaper, but it's quite clever really considering I didn't have a pattern.  The clothes are clumsy and it doesn't help that they are made mostly in poly-cotton, but the handsewing is quite neat and I obviously put a lot of time into them.  There are the undergarments including a corset, some night dresses and a silk pegnoir, and I had sewn the skirt for a walking dress but hadn't finished the bodice. I kept the collection all these years, probably initially with the vague idea that I would finish it one day and later just for sentimental reasons.  But it's time to clear it out.

The third box is full of old Barbies and cothes, which is a whole can of worms I don't feel up to dealing with yet.

This week I finished the final two little embroidered blocks of the Australian BOM. I've been working on this for so long that it feels weird to think that this part, the embroidery, is over, I don't have to hoard every scrap of embroidery floss any more in case I run out (the supplied threads were Olympus and Cosmo brands which aren't common in the UK).  Months 19 and 20 are the fabrics for the sashing and background so I've started to look at those instructions now.  The big buttock-clenching event will be carefully trimming all the heavily embroidered blocks to their correct sizes, let's hope I don't mess that part up.  It's a bit of a puzzle assembly so there are a lot of different sized blocks.  They all have different coloured sashing, so I've been going through and pinning a note on each block as to what size it should be cut, and what sashing it gets, and doublechecking those against the instructions and picture.

I've been working on the dollshouse porch kit.  The porch posts only showed up yesterday so until then I could only paint things and start the siding.  At that point I hadn't noticed the glaring error I had made.  It wasn't until I started cutting the porch support posts and railings to size that I began to realise something wasn't quite right.

Although the instructions do not mention it, the wider area on one side of the window cut-outs should be positioned to the left.  Basically I have assembled the kit with the window wall flipped around the wrong way. I didn't realise there was a right and a wrong way, although now that I have found the mistake, I can see that in the illustrations it is just clear that the wall is assembled with the narrower bit into the corner.  The result is that when I put in the side railing and post, they are hard up against the lefthand window and the windows are not centred over the porch.  It's too late to do anything about it now, everything is glued and screwed together.  I am just going to tell myself that the porch was added on later in a remodel.

nothing is glued in yet, just propped up to give an idea of what it will look like.

painting 3D objects is hard, every time you turn them to a different angle, you 

spot the bit you missed.

I sewed the binding onto the Tannenbaum quilt - a bit late for Christmas but I'm going to hang it in the hall for a few weeks anyway.

I've spent several hours this week taking down christmas decorations and putting them away in the various containers, and tonight we de-decorated the tree apart from the lights.  It's lasted quite well, it's been up since the beginning of December.

I'm not normally into journalling or keeping anything other than a basic planner (I have appallingly bad handwriting so anything I write in just looks like a mess) but I started thinking that I need some kind of travel journal for Japan.  Because it's going to be 7 weeks long and I'll have forgotten what I've done by the end of it.  So I was looking around online at travel journals and diaries and stumbled across a European company called PersonalPlanner, who let you customise your own journal from a huge number of cover designs and page templates, pick your own format and number of months etc. I was intrigued so designed a 3-month diary for Japan and it turned up this week, and I'm so pleased with it.  No commercial affiliation - but the quality is excellent, the colours I chose are just beautiful, and I ordered a bunch of different templates so I'll be able to keep a record of what I do in the days as well as record a whole bunch of other stuff from my language progress through to addresses of classmates. My only criticism would be that the minimum number of pages is rather thick so the book is a bit heavy, but I could always remove some pages.

I have made a start on the first Bruges lace flower from the Edna Sutton book I'm using.  With no embroidery required during TV time, I've gone back to the cross-stitch bookmark I started back on my summer caravan holidays. And I've booked a quick trip to Paris on the Eurostar in March to attend Aiguille en fete (which I think translates as 'needle party'?), a big needlework show at the Paris Expo centre.  It covers a number of my hobbies such as knitting, lacemaking, quilting, cross stitch, etc. so I anticipate much fondling, drooling and likely some acquisition.   I've never been before but I've watched a few Youtube videos and it looks good. I wonder if I will remember any of my ancient French language skills or if it has all been displaced by Japanese. I'm also going to do a day trip to Versailles because I haven't been there since 1982 and it wasn't in great shape back then, I think they've done a huge amount of restoration over the years plus there is more to see in the surrounding park.