Recording memories

 I have spent a great deal of this week on the long-procrastinated-about job of creating a scrapbook for my trip to Japan almost a year ago. While I took over 4,000 photos, blogged some aspects, and kept a brief diary (I went here, I went there) as I travelled - there was no overall narrative of my itinerary.  What finally got me started was discovering the Japanese stationery company Notebook Therapy (thanks Youtube) and their wonderful sets of journals, stickers and stamps. So I reinvested some of my decluttering profits into a travel journal set. Since that arrived, I've been laboriously going through day by day, matching up my photos with my itinerary with my diary with my blog with my trip planning research, writing a narrative and choosing some photos to illustrate it, then printing out the pages at high quality on my inkjet printer, then cutting and pasting them into the travel journal, and finally adding some decoration with stickers, washi tape and stamps. In some ways, leaving it for so long has given me perspective and the ability to summarise. In other ways, I've had to look up a lot of places to remember why I chose to go there or what the history was, because it's so long ago now.  At least I'm doing it before the New Zealand memories push all the Japan memories out of my ageing brain. It has been incredibly time consuming but I've reached the final travel week. I think it's also taught me some lessons about how better to record the upcoming trip.

This week my longarm machine and I went to visit the Handiquilter dealership for a day - DH drove me as a belated Christmas present.  He went off to explore the local area while I had a day of basic training with a bunch of other new owners. My machine meantime was there to have a few issues resolved - it needed the timing adjusted and a couple of the handlebar buttons replaced.  While I don't think I received any huge revelations, there were several useful nuggets of information throughout the day so I took a lot of notes. I also took the opportunity to do some shopping without having to pay postage: picking up thread for the remaining projects in my quilting queue, a couple of straight rulers and a new pantograph.  Hopefully the machine is now all sorted out but I probably won't try it before I leave, there's not much point loading up a quilt onto the frame just to have it sit there for a couple of months.

So that day was an early start, and a few days later we had to get up even earlier at 5:45am to take the car in to the company that installed our tow hitch who are an hour's drive away. We are currently caught in the middle of a blaming war between the dealer we bought our secondhand car from (who claim that the ongoing issues we are experiencing with error messages on the car are caused by our post-purchase installation of a tow hitch), and the tow hitch installers who say they always get blamed for everything and that the tow hitch is working fine and shouldn't be causing any problems.  I had naively thought that with a new car, all the car issues we've experienced while caravanning were in the past.  The ball is currently back with the dealer and I hope I'm not going to have to take it to the ombudsman, especially when I'm going to be away.  Why can't things just work?????

I finished appliquing the Week Seven block for the Lori Holt My Happy Place Quilt.  The design wall is slowly filling up.

I also finished the little magazine kit cross stitch bird that I started in Malta.  It was designed as a bookmark but I turned it into a houseplant decoration instead.

And I did a few hours work on my Japanese dollshouse kitchen, mainly placing the ceramic accessories I bought in 2019 from the Tokyo dollshouse shop, and creating some food platters. Some of my 1:12 fimo fruit and veg that I made 10 years ago now don't look too out of scale for the 1:20 accessories.

DH also very kindly painted up the four metal charms I bought in Tokyo last year, using some painting references I found  online for him. So I have two demon masks and two samurai helmets that look really authentic, to go on display in the dollshouse.  He's a really good painter, very useful.

Short week

 It's only a few days since we got back from Malta, so not much to report.  I have spent several hours working on week seven of the Lori Holt My Happy Place Quilt which is a large 20" applique block with several components to prepare using the turn-through method.  This is a picture of it all glue-basted down, and currently I am hand stitching the applique.  Very cheerful.

I took a little magazine cross stitch kit to stitch a little bird with me to Malta, where I started it. So I've also worked on that a bit since getting back.  And I've done some more rows on the Latvian mitten.

I've booked a week to Iceland in late summer so I've been doing some research and prebooking for that.

And that's it for this week.  Lots of laundry after the trip and just life stuff, like our kitchen tap has started leaking so we've had to get the plumber in.  There's always something with an old house.

A week in Malta

 We just got back from a winter sun break in Malta, my first visit there. It wasn't entirely sunny- it was warmer than the UK at 16-20C in the daytime but quite chilly at night, and always fairly breezy because it's an island.  But we had a good week and liked Malta a lot better than our previous winter destination of Cyprus.  People were friendlier and it just felt safer and better kept/cleaner, and there is history everywhere you look so really interesting.  The walled fortifications are just stunning. And the world class megalithic temples made us wonder why Stonehenge is so famous. We were staying in Valletta and the views in every direction made us feel like we were walking through a Canaletto painting.

I couldn't find any craft or fabric shops but I was on the lookout for Maltese lace and found one lace store open in Valletta.  In the window were some disappointingly coarse and even crude modern examples in shiny synthetic thread, and I saw a few more of this type in a tourist tat shop in Mdina (another walled city).  The Mdina shopkeeper said only old ladies make the lace now, no young people, and she said I would have to go to the sister island of Gozo to see anyone making it.  But I went into the Valletta shop another day and found he had some vintage pieces which were of much better quality. When I showed my interest, he got out a bunch of vintage pieces from under the counter which he said he had from his grandfather, who kept the shop before him.  I ended up purchasing a little mat from c. 1960s and admired several others.

The mat I purchased

We saw some antique lace in museums and also an example of the upright bolster pillow that was used.

By coincidence not design, we were in Valletta during the Carnival weekend which was a lot of fun. Total chaos - there was a parade route but the parade and floats was completely mixed up with the audience and performers in the narrow streets, turning it all into a huge street party that spilled into multiple streets with lots of the audience also dressed up.  And the carnival costumes weren't just DIY attempts - these were hugely elaborate themed creations encrusted with trims and embellishments and even electric lights.  The floats were a miracle of engineering - at first glance they are huge gaudy mobile platforms being towed along the streets by tractors, all lit up and blaring earsplitting music.  But when they got to a more open space, they would park up and unfold like a child's Transformer toy in every direction, with arms coming out and towers going up, and everything moving and rotating, with the added excitement of dry ice jets and confetti cannons.

It was also a good opportunity to test out some of the clothing I plan to take on my longer New Zealand trip, and to expose some flaws such as not having all the right charging cables with me. As usual I am obsessing over what to take with me, I went through this all last year with Japan. I think I have a bit of a anxiety issue about not having the right kit, I am definitely not a laidback traveller.  If I ever wrote a travel book, it would have to be called 'The Apprehensive Traveller'. Anyway, Malta was great and we may return another year because there is still lots to see.

A lack of memories

 More downsizing this week: going through various photo albums mostly of old holidays - including several hundred colour slides from trips in 1982 and 1985.  Obviously it was difficult to see the slides clearly without a projector - I put them on my light table so I could make out the subject of most of them, and I have a little magnifier to look at individual slides.  I pulled out the few slides and photos that depict me or a family member. But the vast majority of the photos were of scenery, architecture, antiquities etc.  which I don't even remember seeing, apart from a vague 'I was there' memory. At least I have learned over the years to take more pictures with people in them, particularly myself.  There were also photos of roommates, chance-met travelling companions of a few days etc, and I don't remember hardly any of them either.  In the end, I threw almost everything out.  It seems a bit pointless to save photos of, say, what the Acropolis looked like in 1985. If I want a picture of the Acropolis, I can look on the internet. It was a bit depressing though - not just the waste of money and time, and dragging all these photos/slides around from house to house over the years - but also the fact that I can't remember much of what I saw 40 years ago.  Makes you wonder what is the point of travel, but I know it shaped me as a person and ultimately resulted in me emigrating to the UK. Anyhow, the photo cupboard is a lot emptier now.

I finished the quilting on the Red House quilt.  It mostly went fairly well - there were a few errors in rolling on which resulted in the occasional overlap, but these aren't too noticeable.  This is a photo on a double bed but really it's a queen size quilt (but I couldn't be bothered to tidy my own room). I chose a modern pantograph of stylised feathers in a fairly close texture so as to quilt down all the seams from windows and doors.

I've been working on week six of the Lori Holt My Happy Place quilt, which includes three pieced blocks and this appliqued block featuring an actual cross stitch design. Luckily I had a dot grid fabric to use as the  embroidery background (since I haven't bought her specified fabric).

I've been knitting a bit on the Latvian mitten that I started a while ago, and have done a bit on the Little Houses cross stitch.  

Just a month until my New Zealand trip now, so as part of my preparations I have kitted up some craft projects to take along: a small cross stitch design, the sumo design sashiko I bought in Japan, and an embroidered panel for a French quilted zippered pouch kit.  I may not have room to take all three.

DS and his girlfriend have decided it's time to stop renting and buy their first house. After viewing only a handful, they have gone ahead and offered on one.  We did tell them that there will be a lot more selection on the market in the spring, but I think they just want to get it over with and get settled.  They are both busy professionals, and their tastes are quite different than ours anyway, so fair enough. Also there was some pressure from the other in-laws to get on the housing ladder sooner rather than later. So now they are furiously adulting as the buying process picks up steam. I hope it all turns out for them.  Mortgage rate trends into the future are anyone's guess. And I think they will have a lot to learn about being responsible for keeping up a home, but I guess we all went through that ourselves and we survived.  As someone who used to hide the dirty dishes in the oven in my twenties, up until that time I put the oven onto preheat, thereby transforming the lid of my food processor into modern art, I remember the learning curve. In my defense, I was living alone in a rented small flat.