What DO I do all day now that I am retired?

 From time to time, I get asked what I am doing with my days now that I am retired.  My mind always blanks and I feebly reply something like  "I'm trying to travel more, and I'm doing lots of crafts", and I can tell I have disappointed the listener who is probably expecting to hear that I am now a powerhouse in the Women's Institute while volunteering in the afternoons helping elementary school children learn to read, or something along those lines.  And I have friends like that, who are out putting together meals at the food bank or have been ordained as lay preachers at their church.  It's not for me, or at least not yet. But then I start wondering myself, what am I doing all day?

And yet I feel like I am always busy, almost every day.  DH has many times suggested I could just sit back and relax (which I think is his idea of an ideal retirement) but I don't enjoy doing nothing and I find that really hard.  I remember watching a TED talk on retirement back when I was getting ready to retire, which suggested that there are phases of retirement.  I think I am currently in Stage Three, where you just enjoy doing all the things you never had time to do.  Apparently Stage Four is when you start to get a bit bored and start questioning what is next, I don't think I'm there yet.  And anyway, life goes on even though you are retired, there are still the normal chores to do like laundry and gardening, house maintenance etc. It's not like you can just loll around all day sipping margaritas. Our ceramic hob abruptly died last weekend, so I had to spend several hours this week on researching and ordering a replacement, booking the electrician, getting the electrician in to install it etc.  And a few weeks ago I discovered that one of our garden gates had completely rotted along the bottom, so I've spent some time bodging together a repair using some decking boards, held together with lots of preservative and wood hardener, and then repainting.  Not the most proper job but hopefully enough to hold it all together for our remaining years in this house.

So one of the reasons I try to blog regularly is to create a record of what I am doing each week craft wise.  I can look back and see that I am actually achieving things, learning things, creating things, going places, doing things.  And sometimes I even think "wow! I actually did that!" :)

So what are this week's activities? 

I finally got around to appliqueing my Fat Dresden Plates onto their backgrounds, using a straight stitch.  This was very tedious due to having to go around 24 points on each plate, so I did it in stages of 2 or 3 blocks a day.  All 12 are done now, and I've started to trim the squares down to 20.5".  This is larger than all my rulers, so I had to experiment with ruler combinations trying to determine the easiest yet still accurate method. I have settled on folding the block in half (which is easy as my placement creases are still there) and trimming to 10.25" using my biggest square ruler.

I have a small friend group that exchanges little christmas gifts each year, and this year I decided to make a 'quick and easy' card holder from one of those Asian videos that are all music and just miming the pattern.  The demonstrator makes hers in four minutes, so it seemed like a great choice.  Well, three hours later.... lol.  I think there is something wrong with the measurements given in the video because they didn't work for me. I sewed up a mock case in scrap fabric and discovered that it didn't work, then spent some time with my math challenged brain trying to alter the pattern, then tried again, still didn't work.  In the end, I sewed the altered pattern then manually shortened the flaps until they fit the wallet.  This was my first time trying out Kam Snaps, little plastic button snaps that you squeeze on with a pair of pliers.  I got the kit pretty cheaply on Amazon, and they were so easy to apply!  They have a very satisfying 'snap' on closing, and the back plate is nice and big so not going to pull through the fabric. Will definitely be using them again on things.

I am still pottering away on long arm quilting the digital teapot panel.  I stitched piano key divisions around the outside borders but by the time I got to the bottom (several days after doing the top), I had forgotten that I had managed to get the stitch lines to align with the corners.  So the bottom looks different from the top.  I don't know if that is going to bug me or not until I see it off the frame.  I may have to unpick and re-stitch some of the keys to sort it out.

After hemming the Christmas handtowels, I looked around for my next weaving project and have chosen a checked towel using the same spools of 8/2 cotton.  The spools don't stand up as they are not a cone, and were really awkward to wind from on the first set of towels, when I propped them up in a box.  I have been watching a Brisbane weaving expert and she was using a repurposed ribbon holder for her spools.  So I headed into the basement workroom and managed to bodge together something similar out of some scrap wood and dowels that DH brought back from his parents after emptying out their shed. It's a bit wonky as I can neither handsaw nor drill very straight, but it works and made a big difference warping up the next project. I'm going to weave this towel more densely to make a firmer texture.

I finished up the little kits for cleaning supplies by making  up two wicker carpet beater kits from Model Village Miniatures.  The instructions were a bit skimpy - the kits came with a long length of small diameter cane and a diagram of the knot to weave (but no measurements given).  I managed the one on the right sort of ok, apart from a couple of cracks in the wicker (even though I soaked it) but for some reason I could not repeat the knot on the left hand one to save my life.  After a few goes and the wicker starting to break apart, I gave up and settled on what you see.  Still need to glue and trim the binding threads.

I have also spent more time this week on my new hobby of Junk Journalling, which has turned out to be a vaster world than I had any idea of.  There are all sorts of FB groups for it, hundreds of Youtube videos, all sorts of digital designers selling journal kits and printables.  I gather that the 1980s hobby of scrapbooking evolved into a smaller format of albums and journals, which evolved again into junk journalling about 8 or 10 years ago.  I'd never heard of it as a hobby until Youtube started showing me videos last year.  I've still been working on my current journal but as I keep discovering more free printables, and more ideas to try, my journal identity is getting a bit confused. I had started out with cool greens and vintage browns, but then fell into temptation with vintage pink roses and faded French country blues.  So my journal theme doesn't look very cohesive, but I'm having fun and that's the main thing. I'm kind of regretting how many pages I chose to include at the beginning, it's a lot to go through and decorate, so I'm not finished yet.

I had previously tried tea dying papers to use in the journal, and you can see some of those in the above pictures. But last night I tried onion skin dying.  I had been patiently collecting the brown skins of onions but we don't use that many so it was taking a while.  Then it occurred to me that the supermarket loose onion bins are full of handfuls of shed skins. So when we were at Tescos yesterday, I gathered several handfuls into a spare box and asked at the till, the clerk was quite happy for me to take them.  After simmering in water for an hour, and letting the resultant liquid cool, I added a bunch of paper sheets and let them soak overnight.  The result was a fairly dark colour, very much the reddy brown of onion skins.

 

So this morning, after laying out the first batch of papers, I added some more sheets to the cold liquid and let them soak for just 2.5 hours.  This has resulted in a much lighter batch which I think would be better for writing on.

One morning when I was feeling fairly alert, I undertook the tricky task of cutting a mat to fit my poster from the London sumo event. My starting point was a cheap frame from IKEA but their mat was designed for an A3 poster.  My sumo poster was a weird size, wider and taller than A3. I've had issues cutting mats before, the slightest wobble in the cut, or the smallest overcut at a corner, really shows up.  But this time it went fairly well, so the main challenge was achieving a fluff-free plexiglas sheet before laying down the black "shows everything up" poster.  It took a few tries, removing tiny threads and fuzz.  The end result looks pretty good, although DH says it looks scary.  This is the Yokozuna Onosato, the current top wrestler in the senior division. 

We've been surrounded by fireworks going off for several weeks now, first for Diwali, then for Halloween, and this week for Guy Fawkes night.  Fireworks are pretty freely available in the UK and are popular. It all seems incredibly dangerous to me, and I've never bought any. But it's fun to see them going off around the town.  On Guy Fawkes night there was a big organised display, and by poking my head up through the skylight in our roof, I could watch it off in the distance which was fun.