Today we went over to visit DS to help him and his partner demolish the derelict garden shed that they inherited. I had the pleasure of taking my turn at bashing the sides of it apart with our massive sledgehammer and prizing apart plank walls with our equally massive crowbar. I also got to jump on rotten wood sheets to snap them in half so they would fit in the car. It was all quite satisfying - apart from the massive amount of insect life that we disturbed, some of which has now taken up residence in our car after we took a couple of loads of ex-shed to their dump.
In more genteel pursuits, I am almost finished assembling the final block of my Double Wedding Ring quilt then I can start sewing the blocks together. I highly doubt they are all the same size so the result could be interestingly wonky - but hopefully it will all quilt out. I don't really want to have to custom quilt every arc so I am thinking maybe a Baptist Fan design using rulers. The two popular Baptist Fan ruler sets (Michaels and Amanda Murphy) are of course American, Amanda doesn't ship to the UK and Michaels might but then I would get hit for customs duty. One sole UK shop sells the Amanda rulers at a big mark up of course, but I had a customer service issue with that shop in the past and don't really want to order from them again. Sigh.
After watching a few videos on 'organising your WIPs', I headed down to make a UFO list in my sewing room. Things I have actually started wasn't a long list, but I kept getting sidetracked into additional lists like 'Waiting projects I really want to do', 'Kits I have bought but not started', 'Fabric I want to use up', 'Quilt patterns I thought I would make (but haven't), 'Bag patterns ditto', 'Rulers and gadgets I haven't used yet'..... I gave up at that point, as the exercise was starting to feel quite pointless. And that's only one hobby.
But I did discover a Corinne Lapierre kit for a wool felt sewing roll that I had completely forgotten I had started at last year's Coventry retreat - cutting out all the pieces ready for embroidery. So I brought that upstairs and completed the embroidery and assembly this week and was able to cross it off the WIP list. It's a cute little thing, I'm not sure how useful it actually will be though. I added a bit of woven interfacing to give the felt a bit more stability. The pincushion is detachable and held on by velcro.
I finished weaving the Log Cabin Table Runner, hemstitched the ends and gave it a wet finish. It's turned out fairly well - slightly narrower at one end than the other but my edges are definitely getting better.
I've now warped up for my Red & White tea towel using the cotton yarn I bought last week on holiday. I used a free site called Plaidmaker to come up with the checked design for the towel.
Now that the knitted doll is finished, I've gone back to embroidering the Gail Pan quilt blocks. They are very cute but taking ages to do. I've got one more block to stitch on panel 3 of 6. I like how they are turning out but feel impatient to get to the quilt assembly part.
I finished going through File Cabinet Mountain and it is all organised and dispersed now. It feels like a big achievement and did take days. I sorted out the 'keep' pile into the various hobbies and put the piles (sometimes subdivided into plastic folders by topic) into bankers boxes. We now have so much paper recycling piled up that it wouldn't all fit into the recycling bin and has to wait two weeks until the bin gets collected again. So hopefully going forward, I will be much pickier about what patterns I keep from magazines (and buy) and also will continue to file them in the bankers boxes.
I've been occasionally folding more tiny fat quarters for my 1:48 scale quilt shop, having finished the 100+ tiny bolts of fabric. I think I have to make all the accessories first, and then can pick and choose what to use to fill up the shelves and cabinets artistically. I finally managed to sell my Lego halloween house so that's opened up some room on my dollshouse shelves. Still haven't tackled my big house that I want to sell but I need to stop procrastinating and get it on the market to hopefully catch someone looking for a christmas present.
Youtube has started showing me 3D printer videos, and I watched a few out of curiosity, then of course it showed me even more. It is somewhat tempting, I am a gadget girl and 3D printers have come down so much in price and become much simpler to use. But I'm not sure if I would really use it when I am not doing much dollshousing any more. DH says if I get one, then he wants to use it for his hobby of painting military miniatures. Have you got a 3D printer? what do you use it for?
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