Stash-diving

 This week I've been deep diving in the various stashes, pulling out things to work on.

I had this Time for Tea digital panel that I picked up a few years ago after seeing it online.  I love pretty china in real life.  I pinned it up on the design wall and tried out various coordinating fabrics which matched colours from the panel.  But I found that most of them 'shouted' too loudly and overshadowed the delicate colours of the print.  So in the end I've gone with pastels for two borders, and an inner border of a coordinating digital print, that let the print shine as the star.  It's a wallhanging size.

I have a small collection of Dutch repro fabrics that I bought about 20 years ago when they were quite expensive (for me).  I made one small wallhanging then have been sitting on them ever since because they seemed too good to use.  I've been feeling for a while that I need to use them for something, then this free pattern for a Home Sweet Home tablerunner from Primrose Cottage came along.   So today I have sewed up my own version with a slightly modified border.  This will look cheerful on the table.

I've started a Japanese redwork zip pouch embroidery kit that I won in a raffle a few years ago.  I had to translate the directions.  The kit includes all the fabric and even the zipper.

The reason I could start a new embroidery is because I finished the stitching for the French kit for the embroidered houses zip pouch.  After I finished the houses, I tea-dyed some woven stabiliser to knock the white back, then fused it onto the back  of the linen as a stabiliser, before stitching the border.  I'm pleased with the overall effect, quite whimsical.  It's supposed to be sewn onto the front of a zipped pouch - no fabric provided in the kit but there are instructions for how to sew it.  I'm wondering if the stitching might look better though on a tote bag or a pincushion drum.

After tidying up my dollshouse room, I found the little resin food kit that I bought in Tokyo in 2023.  I bought it thinking that the supplied plates looked 1/12th scale, which turned out to be correct.  What I didn't realise was that the resin is UV resin, and needs a UV lamp or a sunny day to harden it. Our sunny weather promptly turned to days of overcast grey but eventually this week there was an afternoon with some intermittent sunny spells.  So I translated the Japanese instructions using Google Translate and sat down to have a go.  It turned out to be exceptionally fiddly, trying to mix resin colours and get them into the tiny silicon molds - and all over my hands and everywhere else. And trying to cut out tiny printed plastic embellishments to add to the resin, without pinging them into space, and having them stick to my resin-y hands.  Every time you added something, it had to go back outside to sit in the sun for 10 minutes or so.  But eventually I achieved three plates of French desserts which I think look fairly impressive.  The macarons were supplied so really you were just sticking them together on the plate with resin.  The hardest one (and the messiest) was the strawberry pudding which required multiple stages of hardening.  The waffle things with the sauce also were fairly elaborate.  But I'm quite pleased with them, I will look out when I'm back in Tokyo in case I can find other variations.

In my quilt shop for scale

And I finished my handmade book.  It has a decorated cover, a ribbon bookmark, and a proper spine that holds the 160 pages.  My page trimming was a bit rough although after taking this photo, I found out from a Youtube video that you can sand the page edges  to smooth them, so I tried that which improved them somewhat.  It was quite fun making an actual real book, I'm quite pleased with it.

More decluttering this week - we took some big bags of books and clothes to the charity shop and also a handmade crochet granny square afghan which I have been feeling guilty about for over 30 years.  It was a wedding present from a cousin-by-marriage and I really appreciated all the work she put into it and she hauled it all the way from Canada to the UK for the wedding.  But it was scratchy and due to the holey nature, never as warm as a nice soft patchwork quilt.  In some houses we displayed it as a throw, but we've never really used it.  So that's gone off to the charity shop and hopefully someone will love it and take it home.