Porto pics, and some WIPs

 I've been through my Porto pics now, unfortunately all the outdoor ones are pretty uniformly grey and wet, lol. After weeding out duplicates and duds, there are still 647 photos.  So here are just a few.

The riverside district, looking towards the doubledecker bridge

View over the river Douro, from the bridge

Inside one of the Taylor's port warehouses

The knitting shop

DH's yarn in his favourite colour

Inside the Livraria Lello, which bills itself as the 

most beautiful bookstore in the world

The Grande Museu Das Casinhas De Bonecas dollshouse museum foyer, 

looking towards the exhibit hall

One of the houses on exhibit, in Brazilian style

The absolutely stunning Arabian ballroom, inside the

Palácio da Bolsa

These are the Christmas socks now finished, knitted in yarn I bought in Salzburg and finished off on the trip to Porto. They are vanilla socks but the primary challenge with self striping yarn is ending up with two socks that match - and I feel I did fairly well on this pair.

I've added a green border and have started on the final outer border for my Gail Pan embroidered blocks quilt - this pic is taken under artificial light so the colours look a bit off.

I've started a kit for a little appliqued basket that I bought at Mother's Dream quilt shop in Tokyo  (Reiko Kato).  It is a lot tinier than I expected, the basket itself will only be 5.5" long so the applique is quite fiddly.

I finished sewing the binding on the final quilt which was the pink doiley quilt.  It's a bit narrow on my bed. The scallops look nice apart from the 'valley' between them hasn't come out as neatly as it would have done with bias binding.  I've slept under it for a few nights now, it has a nice weight to it due to the doileys.

I've been toiling away on the second baptist fan quilting job which is the Fat Cat Dresden Quilt, I'm getting near the end of it now.

Before we went to Porto, I made my first project with the woven plaid cloth that I created on my little loom.  It's just a simple tray, but it was still a bit heartstopping to cut into the weaving.  It did not instantly fall apart and in fact behaved fairly well, with only a couple of the grey strands wanting to pop free.

I finished the cross stitch towel border on one end of the towel I bought in Prague, and have started on the opposite end now.

When I was at the retreat, several of my tablemates had a tool box converted from a small jewellery case available on Amazon, so I ordered one as well.  You can remove internal sections to your preference - I just ripped out the lefthand ring storage section, and moved the right hand partitions, then blinged it up a bit with scrapbook paper.

I've started a new weaving project using some cotton yarn from my old machine knitting stash - this will be three small mats in a houndstooth pattern.

I refolded all the quilts that had been relaxing on the guest bed, planning to put them back into their storage cupboards.  As you can see, the pile is higher than the door knobs. I realised as I refolded them all, that there are a few that I don't really want that could be donated or gifted.  There are also several decent vintage or antique quilts, which could be sold.  And there are several frankenstein rescues that I don't need to keep either, although I'm not sure what to do with them.  They were unloved vintage tops, many with severe problems, that I rescued from thrift stores on trips to America in the late 90s/early 00s.  I dealt with their issues as much as I could, sometimes resetting the blocks or adding modern borders, then turned them into quilts that I machine quilted (not very well) on my old domestic machine frame set up.  So they aren't suitable for donation to charities or charity shops as they would probably fall apart if machine washed (and I remember at least one of them, the dyes were running when it got wet). I don't really think they are suitable for sale either as the original workmanship wasn't great and my dodgy machine quilting has not helped, lol. Anyway, by removing all of the above, it reduced the stack to a much more manageable dimension.  I need to stop defaulting to making Queen-size bed quilts and try to re-train into making wallhangings.  Or maybe even minis.