and this week I'm pretending to be a furniture restorer

 Do you remember this little needlework table I picked up for a bargain price a few years ago? I was sitting on it for a while because I was warned the green Victorian paper inside could contain arsenic.  I eventually found a domestic arsenic test but had to wait until the external temperatures reached over 20C to conduct the test.  I did the test at the beginning of the summer and the results suggested there were traces of arsenic.

The inside was pretty knocked about, with a lot of loose pieces and flaking paper.

Anyway, I realised my window for scraping off poisonous paper outside in the garden while the weather wasn't too bad, was shrinking.  So this week I hauled it out and commenced the clean up.  A lot of the paper came off easily but after that I had to spray it with water to soften the (probably wheat) paste it had been applied with.  A lot of the partitions were loose so I just took everything out.  Eventually it looked liked this.  Hopefully I didn't onboard much arsenic during the process, I wore gloves.  I feel fine :)

There wasn't any feasible way to label things as I took them out, so it's going to be a bit of a puzzle to reassemble.  I've bought some lovely Italian replacement paper to recover the pieces - wish me luck.

Meanwhile I've taken the rest of the stand apart and given it a good clean in preparation for re-waxing.  There are some missing bits of veneer around the edge of the top, not sure if I will attempt to repair those or not.

I ended up stripping the top of the table because it had some really bad marks on it (one of the reasons it was a bargain I think).  I've not re-finished anything before  other than with wax, so let's hope I don't ruin it.

I dug out my collection of vintage linens and had a go at laying out the pink lace quilt design inspired by the art hanging I saw at Festival of Quilts.  They are all different shapes so it was hard to come up with a balanced design using the linens that are white in colour and in better shape. I started out trying to be symetrical but that didn't work.

Eventually I ignored symetry and just focused on filling in spaces evenly, which is more like how the artist did hers.  The final design is more like this although I don't think this was the final layout.

I pinned everything roughly in place and now it's in the sewing room waiting for the tedious part of stitching down all the linens so they don't shift, and don't wrinkle up horribly if I ever wash the quilt.  My linens collection is another thing that I want to downsize so it feels good to use up so many of the smaller pieces.

I finished knitting my own Scullery Cat this week, after giving away the first one to DS for his new house.  It is a bit bittersweet to have a knitted cat when we just lost our real one, but it's comforting to see it sitting there.

I have also finally knit the main body of the second Latvian mitten and have now started on the thumbs.

This week I sewed on the binding to my Giggleswick Mill quilt.  I don't think I blogged it, but when I washed the quilt, some of the fabrics ran and there are some bad stains.  Luckily they aren't too big, and they kind of blend in with the busy quilt top for the most part.  I've bought some Dylon colour run remover which I will test on some scrap fabric first but I suspect the stains will not shift as they are fairly deep.  Annoying after all the work I put into that quilt.

I've done a bit more on my Mckinley Dollshouse after not working on it for a few weeks due to travel and stuff.  It's slowly coming along.