Cold snap

 It's been really cold this week (for the Midlands anyway), down to minus 3C one night, and a heavy frost yesterday.  I've been doing my daily walk all bundled up against the 1C and 2C daytime temperatures.  Sadly it hasn't been a lot warmer in parts of our indoors as one-third of our radiators went cold mid-week, and no amount of bleeding or valve checking produced any improvement.  Until suddenly today, two of the bedrooms came back online today which is a relief.  The heating engineer is coming on Monday and hopefully will sort out whatever the blockage is.

The coordinating fabrics I ordered for the unicorn quilt showed up so I have made a start.  I looked online for simple quilts others have made with a rectangular panel, and found one with a simple frame border to model mine upon.  I'm not sure what I'm doing yet with the outer border, I want something quick and easy. I pulled stash fabrics that match the mane and tail and cut out rectangles, but I'm not happy with the current look.  DH has suggested I try to mimic the rainbow order of colours, so I might try that tomorrow.

I pulled the digital teapot panel off the quilting frame and hung it up in the hall to have a proper look at it.  I immediately hated the mismatch in the piano keys so I have unpicked most of those in the bottom half.  There was obviously not enough quilting in the lower part of the quilt either - you can see how it is puffing and wrinkling.  So I re-loaded it onto the frame and have added some more quilting in the lower part, and I am re-doing the piano keys. I purposefully did not want to have to custom quilt around every single plate and pot, which is why I did the keys at 2 inches wide to set an open texture for the panel. I want to get this project done so I can clear the frame ready to load the unicorn quilt once it's done.

I finished weaving the checked handtowel, washed and tumbledryed it to shrink it, and hemmed the ends.  It's a better density and feel than the christmas towels, but I still prefer the first towel I made in the thicker yarn.  It's a very cheerful pattern though.

Mini dollshouse kits: This week I put together a World of Miniatures kit for a tapestry frame, and a Cynthia Howe kit for an antique thread stand.  The tapestry frame came out ok, it's a little wonky as it's a difficult shape to clamp while gluing.  The thread reels and pincushion on the thread stand were really difficult - the pincushion because it has to glue flat onto the top of the stand yet the fabric is gathered to the underneath of the pincushion (and it's tiny, the base is a circle that has been holepunched out of cardstock with a normal hole puncher).  The thread reels because they are made out of two incredibly tiny disks and a middle post that had to be glued together, then I had to wind thread onto each one.  The disks were inadequately laser cut from splintery plywood and did not want to pop out cleanly.  My fingers felt like sausages and it was hard not to get glue all over things. But at least I managed to find the spools both times I dropped one on the floor.  DH says it looks fine.

After having already tried tea-dyeing and onion skin dyeing of papers for journal making, this week I tried avocado dyeing - once DH had managed to eat up 4 avocadoes so I could have their skins and their pits.  Avocados produce an unexpected pink dye, a bit like diluted red wine.  I probably didn't have enough avocadoes as my pink is more of a blush, whereas in the video it was definitely more of a red wine colour. I wanted to include a picture contrasting the brown paper of tea-dyeing, the yellow-orange paper of onion skin dyeing, with the pink of avocado dye.  But as it turned out, I have used up all my initial batch of teadyed paper.  So today I tea-dyed another batch, since we always have loads of used teabags. This is a picture of the avocado batch though.

I've been focusing on the next Houses of Britain cross-stitch house and have unexpectedly zipped through about 3/4s of it already, I think because there are longer colour runs in this one so it's easier.  I've also knit a couple of the sections of the Dirty Lace pattern shawl - I bought the pattern in New Zealand and it's a way to use up some of my sock yarn stash. Nice to be knitting again, I find it much more relaxing than doing embroidery or cross stitch.