On retreat

 I was away this weekend at a two day cross stitching retreat up in Sheffield, the same one I attended a year ago.  The ladies I sat with last year have all stayed in touch on WhatsApp so it was like meeting up with friends.  They and most of the other attendees are serious stitchers, buying all the things and tools and enough charts and kits to keep them going for 200 years.  I remember being like that when I was younger, lol.  Now I am fully aware that I already have enough projects in waiting at home to keep me going for at least a few decades, so my shopping impulses are much milder.  I'm also just a dilettante with cross stitch, I enjoy dabbling at it but I'm not particularly good and I'm very slow.  Still fun to be away and with like minded people, and to see what everyone is working on.  I was working on my hand towel cross stitched border, and I took along a few other small kits that I've started such as the Houses of Great Britain series.  I've come home with lots of goodies: table gifts, a few patterns, a few free things off the swaps table. 

The handstitching of quilting binding continued this week - I finished off the poison green checkered Dresden quilt, and have almost finished the final pink doiley scalloped quilt.  Meanwhile I have done a bit more work on the Gail Pan embroidered blocks quilt.  I did sash the blocks in the end, but with a subtle half-inch wide strip, just enough to give the eye somewhere to rest. Then I started pulling out possible border fabrics from my stash, trying out a lot of possibilities.  I think I have settled on this reproduction print and I'm probably going to insert a second narrow sashing of green just to give some definition. The colours aren't showing well in this photo taken in artificial light.

I finished up the final little American Country panel oval basket that I was working on last week.

I have a plastic tub of these little containers now, made up from the two panels I bought in Tokyo.  They are all cute and all seem like they should be useful, and yet I have not as yet been using many of them.  I may need to go to another craft fair in the future and unload some of my production.

On small dollshouse kits this week, I made up an old club project for a hatbox and shopping bags in printed cardstock.

I also found my notes, and shaped formers, from a class I took at Hove dollshouse week back in 1995, to make fabric covered containers.  I had always meant to get back to this and make some more, and like so many things, 'one day' never came.  So I had a go at making a few containers, which involves cutting pieces of thin cardstock to fit the wooden shapes, covering those in fabric, and assembling the liner and outer using the wooden shape as a temporary former.  It sounds simple but in fact I found it difficult to get a neat result.  I tried a little oval box, a rectangular casket and an open box. Also you need fabric with a very small print to be in scale, and I don't have so much of that type of print.  Needs more practice I think.

The next kit in the queue (my basket of small projects is almost empty now!) is a kit for making a dollshouse rug using bunka trim, from Little Trimmings.  Bunka is a Japanese? braided cord that can be teased out into a curly spiral of thread.  When glued down to a flat surface, it looks like carpet texture.  I've prepared the base, and coloured in the pattern with pencil crayons to help prevent white showing through, and prepared the pieces of bunka.  So now it will be lots of fiddly gluing, going to take a while I think.

I saw another retirement clock - I'm not going to get this one but it made me smile: