Shropshire

 We were away in our little caravan this week, to a site just outside Shrewsbury.  We really liked the bits of Shropshire that we were driving around:  very green and rolling countryside, loads of period buildings, cute villages, lots of history etc.  We had a day in Shrewsbury which included a visit to  'The Parade', a converted Georgian hospital which now houses a number of independent boutiques and shops.  I really liked the knitting shop there 'Ewe & Ply' which had a great selection of various wool yarns and some nifty accessories, and a really friendly and helpful owner.  I picked up some 3.5mm dpns since all of mine seem to have disappeared when I needed some to knit the cat, some more stitch markers, and this very squishable skein of fingering weight Blue-Faced Leicester 'LegEnds'.

Also in The Parade was a modelling shop that was closing down - I picked up a few sale bags of trees and shrubs since I used most of mine putting together the Christmas porch vignette last winter, and a bag of curious wooden shapes. I don't know what they were meant to be, but I am seeing storage jars, bun feet for furniture, ceiling lights for smaller scales etc.

As usual we visited many secondhand bookstores, where as well as some fiction choices, I found a couple of craft books that came home with me.  The Shaker dollhouse furniture book has pages of measured drawings for furniture but not many instructions as such.  The Japanese inspired quilting book is full of sumptuous creations in silks and Asian-style prints, including this Kimono quilt very reminiscent of the wallhanging kit I made up a few months ago.

Also in Shrewsbury is a branch of Abakhan, the discount fabric and haberdashery warehouse.  They had some shelves of quilting fabric sold by weight - this very cute 'Quilt Fair' fabric came home with me for a good price.

And today I sewed some of it into a replacement for my ageing and dye-run stained sewing pincushion/rubbish bag.  I used the old one as a pattern then re-used its stiffening tape for the bag portion, and its sand for the new pincushion.

While we were away, I was knitting on the Latvian mitten although I found the light in the caravan wasn't really strong enough for knitting with black yarn so it worked best knitting in the afternoons. I was also working on the magazine gift seaside houses cross stitch that I started a few holidays ago.

Still painting dozens of pieces of trim for the dollshouse I'm building, very tedious but I'm just about there on the first batch of window trim.

I often watch/listen to Youtube videos while I'm sewing and lately I've been watching a lot of laser cutter videos.  After looking into the price and lack of availability of Arts & Crafts style furniture for my current dollshouse, I'm vaguely wondering if cutting my own would be feasible.  I could cut .svg files on my Brother Scan N Cut but only in card or matboard as it doesn't cut wood.  I'm getting the impression that although there are several cheaper laser cutters on the market, most of them aren't very good unless you add on a lot of accessories.  It doesn't seem very sensible to spend hundreds of pounds on a laser cutter just to avoid spending hundreds of pounds on furniture. Also I would have to source .svg cutting files for furniture, or design my own, which is a whole nother time suck on my retirement.  Still tempted though, I do like a gadget.

Replacing old electronics

 Some changes to our electronics this week, partly prompted by our broadband bill increasing beyond the acceptable, and partly due to Prime Day. I have ended up under my desk more times than seems reasonable, crawling around trying to figure out just what the heck I was doing when I created the old-fashioned mess of wiring 10 years ago that connects my tower PC, accessories and telephone to each other and to various power points.  So many identical black cables -why didn't I label them??!  Snaking through various holes in my desk and its vertical shelving, most of them inaccessible behind books or filing cabinets.  And the telephone cable similarly snaking through bookshelves and various drilled access holes to join the mess of wiring behind the desk.  Then when the new stuff arrived, having to work out how to feed it all back through the holes to where it needed to connect.

On the plus side, I found an extra power point (plug socket) I had forgotten about, hidden behind my desk. And I found £61 in an envelope left over from when I was selling off machine knitting stuff a few years ago.  Anyway, after a visit from an engineer and an excruciating 20 hours without broadband on Wednesday, we now have:

• full fibre broadband, which does seem a bit faster than our old phone line broadband, and it's cheaper.
  
  
• new PC speakers, which sound so much better than my 10 year old previous speakers, and don't need a separate power supply so one less wire behind the desk.
  
  
• a new set of cordless phones to replace our ailing ancient handsets which were all refusing to hold a battery charge any longer even though I'd replaced the batteries a few times.  The fibre broadband has replaced our landline with 'digital voice' so we no longer have a landline which feels a bit strange.  So if there is a power cut then the cordless phones won't have a signal but I suppose that's what mobiles are for.

The new stuff is now all configured and installed so hopefully good for several more years.  The next big wiring and configuration headache will come when Microsoft withdraws support for Windows 10 next year, because my ancient tower PC is not suitable to upgrade to Windows 11.  So I'll either have to get a new PC, or pay for the extended security update subscription for a few years then get a new PC. 

After all the stress on Wednesday, it was nice to have a sewing day on Thursday while DH was away for the day.  I put the borders onto the envelope quilt and moved it up to the 'to be quilted' queue upstairs. It's a fun quilt and a great way to use up some FQs.

I also quilted the sumo cushion with some simple lines and turned it into a zippered cushion.  I'm quite pleased with how it turned out, and it brings back memories of stitching the embroidery while I was staying in Japan.

Last night I finished knitting the knitted cat, but haven't stuffed it yet.  The construction was the strangest affair, I am super impressed that anyone could come up with the pattern.  It was all held stitches, short rows, picking up stitches to knit in a new direction... so that the whole cat is in one piece of knitting apart from two rear paws that are sewn on later.  At the moment, it looks like a cat shed its skin like  a snake.

Last weekend we visited an open private garden in a nearby village, which the owners had opened under the National Open Garden Scheme for charity.  It was immaculate, which made us feel unhappy with the jungle behind our house.  So this week we have done some major hacking back of the bay tree (aspiring to reach 30 feet high and 20 feet wide), the bamboo grove (which surpassed its predicted height of 12 feet a few years ago) and various random limbs of other large shrubs.  This has considerably opened up the garden and we can now see the gazebo again from the kitchen window.  The gazebo itself had turned into a giant bug hotel, so DH bravely scrubbed down the spider colonised ceiling, and I scrubbed the walls and algaed floor then sprayed it all down with the hose.  It looks so much better now and we've actually sat out in the gazebo a few times this week.  I didn't dare go in there before in case some creepycrawly landed on me.

I bought the cancer patient a new cat tree from Amazon, which of course she is mostly ignoring although she is using the scratching post portion of it.  She did have one nap in the top portion but otherwise I haven't seen her using it at all.  The vet is happy with her condition and said she could live for years, or it could be months, impossible to say without a biopsy which it isn't worth putting her through.  But her stomach issues are likely permanent, which seems rough on her and us.  DH jokingly suggested that I knit another 'cat skin' which could be like an allover balaclava for the cat in the winter.

Cat is stable

Our cat has responded to the steroids and is much improved, although still not herself.  The vet has cut her down to one pill a day because two daily would cause health problems in the longer term. She doesn't seem quite as happy as she did on two pills but still has her appetite.  She's going back in for a check up on Tuesday.

I've done a lot of work this week on the dollshouse I'm building. It's starting to look more like an actual house although there is still a long way to go. Still not sure what I will do with it when it's done - it's so much bigger than I imagined when I first bought the kit years ago.   With great trepidation, and keeping my fingers well out of the way, I have even been using the little electric chop saw that I bought on Amazon last year, for trimming up skirting board.  It works really well on wood strip that is narrow enough to fit under the blade.

I posted last week that I had put the envelope blocks onto the design wall.  This week I made up the four remaining blocks which are meant to look like addressed envelopes.

I had some 'stamps' fabric, and I used selvedges for the address portion.  I have since sewed all the blocks into rows, and have started to sew the rows together. It looks good.  Good way to use up odd bits of fabric. The pattern was in an American quilting magazine that I picked up in Paducah a couple of years ago. Although I didn't follow their instructions because their method for cutting and sewing the blocks was incredibly wasteful: sewing big half square triangles together then discarding half the block.  I just cut quarter triangles instead.  My sewing machine is still playing up with its rattling bobbin and bobbin case, but following a tip from online, I have adjusted the bobbin case stopper which has helped a little.

I made up a cushion front from the sashiko sumo embroidery that I stitched last year in Japan, using some sumo prints that I also bought in Japan as a simple frame.  The blue fabric, featuring sumo techniques, will be the back of the cushion. Not sure how I will quilt the front.  I'm excited for Sunday - not because of the England football final like most of the country, but because the Nagoya sumo tournament starts. DH however will be commandeering the television from 8pm, and I'll tape the sumo.

Still plugging away on the Di Ford quilt on the long arm, I'm getting better at simple ruler work.  In the centre I am meandering around the broderie perse appliques.

I've started knitting a cat as an additional housewarming gift for DS - I came across the pattern 'The Scullery Cat' on Facebook and then bought the download through Ravelry.  It has some very complex shaping so I'm having to pay close attention to the instructions row by row.  I'm knitting mine in some cream aran yarn to resemble a white cat.  He and his girlfriends both love cats but she is allergic so they can't have one.

And it's autumn again

 Very strange cold snap this week, the high was only 13C today and it's been cold enough at night that I am sleeping under my newly-bound Lone Star quilt.  I've started the quilting on the Di Ford Giggleswick Mill quilt, doing stitch in the ditch around the various frames to start, and now the tedious repetition of the continuous curve quilting on the half-triangle squares.  And I also got the binding onto the Red Houses quilt - shown here on a double bed but it was actually made for a queen-size where the overhang wouldn't be so deep.

I had a big tidy up in the sewing room and made quilt backs for the Tilda tablecloth, Little Kimono wallhanging, and Japanese tea cup wallhanging - so they are all moved upstairs to the to-be-quilted queue.  I've also put all the blocks I made for the Envelope lap quilt onto the design wall to see where I'm at.  I need to sew four more focal blocks then I can start assembly.

We've been over to Milton Keynes to visit DS twice, because they have just bought their first house and got the keys yesterday.  So today we took a bunch of cleaning supplies over and gave it all a good clean although it wasn't too bad. But last weekend when we visited, it was just for lunch and to take them to IKEA to look at stuff for the new house. And I was able to pick up this Vattenkar clamp-on shelf which I saw on FB as the perfect storage accessory for my Jack H2 industrial machine. Only £15 and it holds all my threads and accessories so I won't keep knocking them off the table like I have been.

As well as sewing on lots of quilt binding, I've done a bit of knitting on the second Latvian mitten and also some more work on the bobbin lace border that I started a while ago.  The bobbin lace has been a learning curve because I didn't realise that the pricking pattern differs a fair bit from the worked sample in the photo.  At first I thought it was just me going wrong, but eventually I realised that the pinholes are in different places and in different numbers than what was worked in the sample.  Perhaps I am just supposed to be experienced enough to know that.

In other news, the Barbie dolls that I sent off to the auction house back in November, FINALLY went into a sale and to my surprise, they achieved £900 at auction!  That's the hammer price - after commission and VAT, I think I will get about £650 but it's still a nice reward for hanging on to them all these years.  And they were in 'played with' condition, in no way mint, no boxes or anything.  I guess for the buyers it's nostalgia. And perhaps having come from Canada, those dolls weren't as common here in the UK.

I've spent a fair bit of time working on the Mckinley Dollshouse this week, it's coming along very slowly.  You are literally waiting for paint to dry a lot of the time.  So far it's going ok I think, although as usual I am struggling with decorating decisions.

And some sad news this week as well - our cat Oreo hasn't been very well for several weeks and after various trips to the vets, blood tests and an abdominal scan, it appears she has large cancerous tumours in her abdomen.  She's too old for chemotherapy so they've put her on steroids to see if that will have a positive effect.  I hate this part about owning a cat, we've had three cats in the past that developed various serious illnesses and had to be put down.  It's too soon to know what will happen with Oreo, the vet wants to give it two weeks and see what effect the steroids have. She seems to be getting her appetite back a little.