Finishing up a few things

 I finished up a few things this week that I started on the retreat.

I had cut out and started stitching this cute teapot pincushion kit that I think I bought in New Zealand. So this week I turned through the various pieces, stuffed them, assembled lids etc. to finish it off.  So cute!  And quite relaxing to make something small just for fun.

Another kit I had started was this mini clasp purse that I bought at Crib Quilts in Tokyo.  A bit fiddly to sew it into the clasp when it is so small, but again very cute.  I think it's intended as a necklace accessory.

I seamed a backing for the Vintage Linens quilt, cut some binding, and added the whole thing to the 'to be quilted' queue upstairs in the long arm room.

I finally made up my Welsh quilted cushion into a cushion with piping and a zip (thank you Youtube).  I'm pleased it's finished but I'm not entirely pleased with it.  I drew my pencil lines for the quilting design too dark so the resulting necessary scrubbing to get rid of them left the fabric looking a bit scruffy and the sateen has lost most of its shine. Also the 2 oz polyester wadding that I used (recommended by the teacher) doesn't give it much loft so the quilting looks a bit flat to me. I think wool wadding would have been better but I didn't have enough.  And despite having drawn a square design, somehow the cushion looks a little oblong to me - perhaps the cotton sateen shrunk more in one direction?  Regardless, it's finished and it's a nice souvenir of a long weekend in Wales.

I gathered my courage this week and refinished the top of the antique sewing table.  When I originally bought the table,  the top was ruined by a big white streak running through the finish, and the finish itself was virtually coming off by itself.  So I scraped off the old finish on the top surface a while ago but put it to one side while I refitted the interior of the table.  Following some videos on Youtube, I filled in some fissures and cracks with melted coloured wax filler and then started painting coats of French Polish (shellac), sanding in between.  Ideally you apply French Polish with a special cloth pad called a rubber, but that looked hard and a lot riskier with the irregular shape, so I went with brushed coats.  The resulting finish isn't as smooth because it's harder to avoid brush marks, drips etc.  I did 9 brushed coats over two days, rubbing back in between each coat, which hopefully will be enough protection.  I will rub down the final coat and then wax both sides of the top before adding it back onto the table.

I've started knitting my Icelandic Lettlopi hat this week.  It's reminded me how much I don't really like this yarn, it's scratchy and has wiry hairs in it.  I used it a few years ago to knit up slippers that I subsequently felted down to fit.  Glad I didn't buy a sweater's worth!  The pattern calls for a 100st cast on with 4.5mm needles, continuing in 2x2 rib on 3.5 needles for 10 rows.  That was enormous on my head even though I went down a half size due to being a loose knitter.  I tried again with 80 stitches which was a bit tight, so started a third time with 86 stitches which seems about right.  Also 10 rows seemed really mean, I like my ears to be warm.  So I knit enough rows to cover my ears with a turned up rib before increasing to 90 stitches to start the pattern.  Nice to be knitting again, I haven't had a knitting project for a while.

We went out and did a bunch of gardening jobs today.  I bought us a cheap pressure washer recently.  We've never had one before.  So we fired that up today and it was so helpful.  Cleaned out the fountain before we wrapped that up for winter protection, cleaned down a lot of the big pots, and then we cleaned off our brick-laid patios - getting all the muck and moss out from between the bricks and cleaning off a lot of algae and dirt build up.  We'd kind of forgotten that the patio was meant to be brick-coloured, it's been dirt-coloured for a few years now. And the inclined side alley was getting a bit treacherous with algae and moss, so that's all cleaned off now.  There was a learning curve - like not spraying towards the house because I inadvertently managed to blanket the back wall with mud spray and had to hose that off.  We became pretty mud-sprayed ourselves.  We also pulled out the leaf blower and tidied up the first wave of leaf fall from our trees out the front, there will be many more.Tiring but good to get some jobs done.  Are you getting ready for winter?

On retreat

 I'm just back from a two-night weekend sewing retreat at a hotel.  It's so nice to just sew and make things all weekend with no other responsibilities.  Obviously I could do sewing all day at home, but I don't - I either get bored and go do something else, or I get interrupted or distracted or feel obligated to go do something useful like making dinner or laundry.  I didn't even do that much socialising because there was a big noisy class in the same room all running big embroidery machines so it was too noisy for chitchat with neighbours a lot of the time.  It was still nice to be surrounded by all the creativity and kit and people enjoying making things.

I spent a lot of the first day sewing down the rest of the crochet mats and doileys  on my Vintage Linens quilt.  I must have had half a dozen women come up and exclaim over the idea because they also have a collection of mum's/grannie's/auntie's old embroideries and linens and didn't know what to do with them.  It was a job getting the old linens attached fairly flat, a lot of them are a bit loosey-goosey with age but I managed with a few judicious tucks here and there.  I'm planning to quilt this with an allover design to hold everything down evenly.

Then I pulled out my prepared pieces for the Double Wedding Ring quilt and pieced together eight arcs, then puzzled through the not very clear directions on how to join it all together into a block.    I got there in the end, although it still seems like witchcraft to be sewing two completely opposing curves and end up with something that is sort of flat. This block is my total nemesis as I am not a very accurate sewer and generally find repetitive piecing pretty tedious, but it's been on my bucket list for about 30 years. Having produced my 'proof of concept' block, I started churning out pieced arcs - I need 120 more each composed of six pieces.  By the next day I had produced almost 100 but I've run out of some colours so I need to cut some more 'teeth'.  I'm chain-piecing them in sets of six arcs at a time.  I need to starch, press them flat, then cut them all into the final arc shape using the template.

Then I cut out a Fat Cat Dresden Plate quilt, using the Fat Cat Zimmermann ruler that makes a plate with only 12 wedges in it, and using up a Tilda Chic Escape layer cake and some Tilda FQs from my stash.  After that it was a lot of playing - I cut out and partially sewed a little kit for a teapot-shaped pincushion that I bought in New Zealand I think. And I pieced together and started embellishing a kit for a tiny hanging snap-clasp purse that I bought in Tokyo at Crib Quilts - the kit comes with the sweetest little buttons for decoration.

I won a raffle prize - someone had handpieced a little christmas themed bag which holds a large handmade christmas bauble, all beautifully made.

Earlier in the week, I finished my renovation of the sewing table apart from I still need to refinish the tabletop and screw the hinges back on.  But the padded lids for the tray are all done and covered underneath with matching paper.  I'm really pleased with it.  DH asked what I was going to use it for and I realised that I don't want to use it or put anything into it that could scratch or mark the paper!  So I don't know.  After all the work I've put into it, it seems too good to actually use :)  I just want it to stay pristine forever.

Lots of gluing

 Having finished cutting out (hopefully) all the pieces for my Double Wedding Ring, I turned my attention to my sewing table renovation project.  You may remember that it came like this:

Then I stripped it back to this:

An audit of the pieces that came with it revealed that I was missing about 8 small partitions, and a corner lid.  I found some scrap wood that was the same thickness as the existing partitions, and cut out 6 new pieces.  I decided that it would be more useful to have a longer, non-partitioned tray for tools so I am omitting two partitions.  The audit was also the time to reverse engineer how the top tray had been constructed and papered.  It was clear that most of the pieces were slightly different sizes even when they were the same type - I think everything had been hand-cut to go in a specific place.  I have of course lost the original order due to the poor state it arrived in followed by my stripping of the old paper.  I decided not to worry about it and just play it by eye as I went.

So this week I started carefully cutting my lovely Italian paper and covering all the main partitions.

The next big job was to cover the interior of the hanging workbasket which is in a trilobed shape with a flat front and back, so that was tricky and required lots of pattern making with scrap paper.  It was also a chance to get to know how the new Italian paper was going to behave: very well actually. It's strong enough that it doesn't tear easily even when wet with glue.  I'm using cartonnage techniques and the same PVA glue that I use for making boxes.  I don't seem to have taken any photos of the table at this point.  I also covered the base of the top tray.

Once all that was dry, I could start gluing in the partitions, starting with the outer walls and using the inner frame walls to judge where the partitions should be glued.

Then it was time for the corner partitions, then the inner beveled frame, and then finally the internal corners.  It's turned out pretty well, I quite pleased with it so far.

Next I need to install the lid supports - there are covered sections in all four corners, centre front and back, and of course the workbasket cover in the middle.  I need to cut out a replacement lid for the missing one, and the existing lids may need tweaking if my newly created compartments aren't quite the same size as the old ones.  All the lids need recovering: the lids are padded fabric on top and papered underneath.

So all of this gluing and cutting has been taking up most of my sewing room surfaces, but I did shove things to one side to finish off the Hatched and Patched Pincushion pattern that I bought in New Zealand and worked on at the last retreat back in January.  I've stuffed it with crushed walnut shells, it's quite large so it's like a fabric hockey puck.

I've been trying to put in some time on the longarm project every day, quilting the Australian BOM.  I'm on the last lap now, adding quilting to each individual block, which requires a lot of concentration so is quite tiring.  Plus the anxiety of not wanting to ruin it at this stage.

The border is a pantograph in the background, and ruler quilting in the scallops

A different narrow panto of rosebuds in the wider sashing segments

On individual blocks, I am stitching carefully around all 

the elements and then adding quilting to the background as it needs it.

In the evenings, I am finally working the final house in my Little Houses cross stitch sampler.  This has spent so much time parked at the sidelines while I work on other things, it will be good to finish it.

While I was looking for some autumnal quilts to hang up downstairs, I came across this old cushion cover that I made for my son about 15 years ago.  I used templates from a book of applique quilt designs and styled them to look like our two cats that we owned at the time.  Sadly both cats died from various health issues within a few years so this cushion turned into a sad reminder that had to be hidden away.  Now I'm wondering if DS might like it for his new house, if enough time has passed for it to just be a cute cat cushion.  I'll take it over there and see what he says.

Repetitive crafting

 I've spent some time most days this week cutting out quilt pieces for my Double Wedding Ring project.    I needed 128 corners, 80 melons, and now I'm cutting 768 'teeth' for the arcs.  It is quite tedious.  Also I ran out of background fabric that I bought in Wales, so my quilt will be 16 rings instead of 20, which is probably a good thing because it's going to be a lot of sewing.  I'm trying to split up the 768 teeth evenly across the colour families, so I've been pulling my stash of 30s repros and cutting 4-5 teeth from each print.  Mostly by cutting a 3x10" strip, then stacking those in six layers to subcut into teeth.  Lots of unfolding and refolding.

At least while I am cutting up fabric, I am putting my time to good use by re-listening to Youtube videos teaching Japanese from the Genki textbooks.  Because I'm going to Japan and also Korea next year as it turns out.  It came about rather suddenly, I came across one cultural tour that I liked the look of in Japan and put my name down for it, then I came across a second workshop course to sew a yukata in Tokyo.  The time period between the two tours spans Golden Week which is a long holiday period in Japan when it can be difficult to travel, so I am avoiding Golden Week by flying to South Korea where I am taking a third tour as well as doing a few days of independent travel.  So I've been trying to re-learn some Japanese as well as spending a lot of time researching and making travel bookings.  I'll be away for about 8 weeks again, DH is stoic and encouraged me to book up the tours.  I think we are both conscious of the physical wrecks that his elderly parents have become so I want to do it while I still can. And DH knows he can survive perfectly well on his own because he's already done it twice. In fact, it has encouraged him to learn to cook which he never wanted to do when he was younger, so that's good.

I finished another stitching project this week which is a gift so I can't discuss details.  And I've been putting in some time most days on the longarm frame where I am still quilting the Australian BOM quilt.  I've done all the borders and sashing now so am just starting to tackle the actual blocks which is the hardest part because it's a blank canvas.  I will stitch around the applique elements but then I need to come up with stuff to fill in the block backgrounds and I'm not much good at freehand quilting.  I'm loving using rulers though.  My Handiquilter Simply Sixteen is behaving very well, I'm very happy with my secondhand purchase and I feel like I am getting more confident with the machine.

Still downsizing - I've sold quite a few of my vintage needlework magazines this past week and have been to the post office three or four times with boxes.  Still quite a few to get rid of though.  I also sold and posted a set of quilt templates with accompanying patterns that I bought in 2012 and had never used.  It feels good to be getting stuff out of the house, it will be wonderful when all the big collections are gone but there is still a lot of work to do.