Four days of skivvying

 We were away in the caravan for a few days down to Suffolk, staying near Woodbridge.  It's a nice area with some very scenic views over the various rivers, we visited a few shingle beaches and did the usual mix of antique stores, stately homes, historical sites, ice creams, town walks, farm shops etc.  The weather was mixed, and we ended up coming home a day early as our last full day was just going to be heavy rain all day. It was also a pain that Suffolk is currently undergoing a perfect storm of roadworks, road closures and diversions as dozens of construction crews prepare infrastructure and level crossings in advance of building a new nuclear reactor, while at the same time the Council is undertaking a huge road resurfacing project.  It made going anywhere on the already sparse rural road network slow and occasionally frustrating.

I took the lace knitted shawl along that I had started in St Kitts, and finished it - but I haven't blocked it yet.  I also took along the seaside cross stitch that I was doing in Norway and got quite a bit done, then finished it once I got home.

Today I sewed it up into a little zip pouch, although I had trouble keeping the end corners neat with the stiff canvas.

I came home with a few secondhand craft books, including an interesting book on sewing with Japanese fabrics, and six of Elly Sienkiewicz's Baltimore album books.  I was thinking the other day that I felt ready for another applique project so maybe I will find something in those.

Once we got home, it was straight into major housecleaning for the upcoming family visit.  It's taken four days but we are finally ready for her visit tomorrow.  Quite apart from wanting the house to look nice for a guest, we found that the more we cleaned, the more we discovered that needed cleaning.  All those places that you don't often look at, like the tops of skirting boards, dirty marks around light switches and door handles, cobwebs in the ceiling corners, marks on the tiled floor etc..  We are now wondering why we live in such a high maintenance old house instead of a featureless modern box like on the television home shows. And I have a form of RSI in my right arm from all the wiping, scrubbing, mopping etc.  We also did a bunch more decluttering - DH is much more amenable to getting rid of things now that he has had to help his elderly parents move out of their cluttered home.  I don't think the house has looked this good since shortly after we finished all the moving-in renovations. It's entirely our own fault that it took so much work, we have been quite lazy about housework for a few years now.  We need to be more diligent.

I used some of my Norway fabric to sew another stand up project bag.  I didn't think it would need interfacing as the Norwegian fabric is like a heavy cotton or very light canvas, but in fact it came out a bit floppy.  I was able to slip a bit of interfacing in after the fact before I sewed the zip on, but it was tricky as I didn't want to melt the vinyl with the iron.  I still have plenty of fabric left, I will have to think of other things to make with it.

Before we went off in the caravan, I finished stitching my Sashiko spools panel from Hobbyra Hobbyre in Tokyo.  I am a novice at sashiko so the stitching is by no means expert.  I'm planning to sew some spool blocks at an upcoming sewing retreat to piece around the panel to make a wallhanging.

As a side effect of cleaning the house, I tidied up my sewing room.  I've been feeling frustrated for a while now that I have too much fabric for the available storage space, resulting in large bins stuffed full of fabric, or big carrier bags, that you can't look through easily or even see what you have. So then I don't use it, and forget what I bought.  I pulled out a few bins and discovered a whole stash of solids that I didn't even know I had, I have no recollection of why I put them all into a bin but it explains why my shelf of solids seemed a bit sparse when I was piecing the St Kitts quilt (which I have now loaded onto my longarm frame but haven't started quilting on yet).  I folded all the big pieces onto cardboard so they will stand up inside the bins and be visible, and I folded up all the smaller pieces and put them in a rectangular basket.  So that's an improvement but not really addressing the overall problem.  I bought a few more plastic baskets today with the plan to excavate the two big carrier bags of reproduction fabric next.  Similarly, my attic room where I keep my knitting, lacemaking and now junk journalling stashes is a complete disaster.  In fact, we are just shutting the door to the attic while our guest is here and we are going to pretend that floor doesn't exist.  That room also needs a major overhaul.  I think what I really need is a new craft room the size of a small aircraft hanger...