Easter weekend

 We have a four day weekend for Easter here in the UK - something that used to be a much anticipated holiday but now as a retired person, Friday seemed much like any other day, lol.  DH went down to see his parents so I got to do some uninterrupted crafting which was nice.

The 3D printer continues to be run every day.  This week I've been trying out furniture files, starting with some free ones for chairs.  I tried out these three files - it was a mixed bag.  The chair on the left seems larger than 1:12 and was quite chunky.  The chair at the back, which looked lovely, is poorly designed and the side struts have been falling off because they aren't connected properly in the design.  The chair on the left printed beautifully but is smaller than 1:12 scale.

So I made the left chair a bit bigger and printed it again, I think it will be ok with some bun feet added.  I paid £1.41 for the nice Arts and Crafts style dining table on the left in the photo below (not glued together yet).  Then I adapted the file to make a smaller version with a round table (also not glued together yet, on the right in the photo).  I printed a free file for the little end table, then adapted the file to make two smaller but taller occasional tables.  Then I bought a chair file for .44p to match the dining table (not glued together, leaning against the round table).  The first one printed fine, so I printed 8 more (6 for around the table and a couple of spares just in case).  I printed all of these in brown PLA filament but they will need overpainting to look more like wood.

I also designed and printed a couple of small signs for the outside of our front door, to assist in our never-ending struggle to have delivery people actually ring the doorbell rather than knocking inaudibly then fleeing the property, leaving our parcel to be stolen from the front step.

Before I did all the furniture, I bumbled my way through 3D designing a copy of a Japanese lidded wooden tub that I photographed in several old Japanese house kitchens.  It came out fairly well so I printed two of them.

Then I painted up the jars and half-jars, and the tub.  I was trying to make the jars look like old ceramic jars like I saw in the museums.

When they were dry, I installed them in various places inside and outside the kitchen of my Japanese 1950s ryokan inn.

The other thing I 3D printed this week was some eyes for my Mandalorian foundling.  They could have come out with a smoother finish but from a distance they look fine.

I finished the backstitching on the thatched cottage from the Houses of Britain SAL so I'm halfway now as this was house 7 out of 14.

I cut up some more vintage linens for blocks for my Vintage Linens wallhanging and decided not to use a couple of others.  So I probably have all my raw material now, I just need to work on how to assemble it into a collaged top.  And I've continued weaving the middle of the table runner on my little loom.

I finished the baptist fan quilting on my Double Wedding Ring.  While not perfect, the quilting has flattened out and improved the wonky piecing.  After I took this photo, I ran the quilt through a rinse cycle to wash out the starch I used in piecing and to shrink the 80/20 Hobbs wadding for a softer more vintage look, it's currently drying.  I'm looking forward to seeing how it turns out.

Today we had an outing over to Foxton Locks, a Victorian complex of a series of ten canal locks consisting of two staircases of five locks each, carrying the Leicester line of the Grand Union Canal up a steep hill in Leicestershire, about three miles west of Market Harborough. They are named after the nearby village of Foxton.  Very picturesque, and quite busy with people out enjoying the long weekend.  There was also a floating craft market of vendors trading from about 15 narrowboats moored along one leg of the canal, very colourful with various examples of canal art traditional painting.  The lower part of the locks is impossibly twee, like something out of a cross stitch heritage design, with the old lock keepers cottage and an old inn, and various bridges and moored boats.  We had a fairly mediocre lunch in the inn then visited the Canal Museum which tells the story of the adjacent ruins of the Victorian engineering marvel that was the Foxton Inclined Plane: basically a giant elevator that carried canal boats up the hill so they didn't have to queue to go through the locks.  A nice morning out.  All my photos came out rather grey as it was overcast, in real life it was nicer.