Trying to remember how to retreat

 I'm off to a sewing retreat tomorrow so I've been trying to pack.  I haven't been away for an actual sewing/quilting retreat for a couple of years now, so it's hard trying to remember what I need to take.  I spent over 30 minutes looking for the legs to my extension table (which normally sits legless, flat on my sewing desk).  I did eventually find them in a place I'd already looked three times.  I also came across a sewing machine I'd completely forgotten I had: a Janome Gem that I ironically bought to take to retreats.  But I haven't used it for a couple of years either and I'd already packed up my big one, so I've decided to stick with the devil I know.  I'm a bit worried as I looked up reviews on TripAdvisor for the hotel where we are staying, and the reviews were really bad.  Lots of maintenance issues, complaints about the food etc.  I've bought a big bag of gluten free snacks to take with me just in case the food is inadequate.  Hopefully it will be fine.

I finally overcame my procrastination about selling my four good antique quilts (3 American and 1 British) and contacted an auction house last week.  They are happy to put them into an upcoming specialist textile auction in February, so I posted those off this week.  I'm hoping the proceeds will pay for the air conditioner.  I actually unpacked the air conditioner this week and tested it out.  It seems to work fine, although it is a lot louder than I expected considering it is supposed to be a quieter model. I ordered a longer exhaust hose and fitted that to it, so it should reach up to our stupidly high casement windows next summer.

This week's declutter was my sagging bookcase of knitting books, dating back to my years of passionate knitting interest about 15 years ago.

It took a long time but I went through them all.  The vast majority came downstairs to be donated.  I've been taking an armful with me every day to various charity shops around town.  I like to think that some local knitters will feel like they've gotten lucky finding so many nice books.

Most of them were either originally charity shop finds anyway, or cheap buys from a discount book warehouse that used to have a branch near my office.  I have kept back about 8 or 10 that are actually worth some money, so I'll be selling them.  I've kept some reference books, and several books where I think I will actually make something from them.  But the bookcase is much emptier now which opens up storage for the journalling stuff.

I finished weaving the 3 yard length of backstrap loom narrow braid.  The first couple of feet weren't useable as they were terrible. After I had built the braid clamp to hold the tension on the braid, it got better and you could see visible improvement.  But I still struggled to keep a consistent width and tidy edges.  It was an interesting experiment so I've decided to invest in a little inkle loom instead which maintains an even tension on the warp so it's supposed to be easier to have neater edges.  Also easier on your back.  I was finding it hard on my back to sit with tension on the weaving and sway back and forth as you need to.

I took a few of the more decent lengths and made a bookmark, a bag pull (which I clipped onto the christmas project bag I made last week) and a key fob - it is fobless in the photo because I didn't have any hardware narrow enough at the time, but I've since ordered some online and turned it into a fob.  I'm still weaving the grey placemats on my table loom, I've finished two and started the third of four mats.

I cleared my long arm frame and have loaded on the St Kitts batik scraps lap quilt ready for quilting.  I think I am just going to do a flower and vine pantograph on that one.  The main sewing this week was sewing up the Mini Poppins Bag, a pattern from Aunties Too which I bought at Festival of Quilts a few years ago.  I had stalled on making it because the frames you need to use to achieve the doctor's bag wide open function are really expensive.  They seem to be a proprietary size which isn't a standard size here in the UK, about 9" long I think (it doesn't say on the pattern).  Instead I bought a pack of cheap 10" frames online and bent two of them to be 9" long and cut off the excess with a hacksaw.  The bag turned out fairly well although it was quite time consuming to make.  Some of the directions are a bit opaque, and there is at least one minor error, but I got there in the end.  The fabric is from the Moda Flea Market range in two prints. The handles I picked up in Tokyo. It's very cute.

In knitting, I finished the second Norwegian houses ankle warmer so they are ready to wear when the cold winter hits.  I picked up the Shawl Neve by Tone Mette again.  It has been having a time out for several months because no matter what I tried, I couldn't get chart 5 to work.  In the end, I used Google Image Search to identify the lace pattern in that section, found another free pattern for the same lace pattern to see what their instructions said, and made my own replacement chart for the first part of the section.  So far it is going fine, although it's going to be a roulette wheel whether I get to the correct number of stitches by the end of the section to move smoothly on to chart 6.  I've also started knitting the Strata Beanie  by Nici Griffin, using up a bunch of odd balls of DK yarn.  It's a hat of protruding ridges, like those old teacosies, achieved by slipping every second stitch for 8 rows to gather the knitting vertically.  A fun knit once I managed to get started (not only can I apparently not count to 2, but I also managed to twist the round knitting into a moebius  several rows AFTER my start).  It should be really warm because of all the layers.

the heating is on

 It has definitely turned autumnal now.  We were resisting putting the heating on despite cold evenings, because the afternoons were still warm.  But that seems to have gone away now so we put the heat on a few nights ago.  The winter clothes have come out from under the bed, and I've brought down a few winter coats from the spare closet.  The government is warning that we could have some severe storms this winter due to climate change and El Nino.  They've recommended that British people lay in emergency supplies to cope with up to three days without power and/or water.  Everyone I've spoken to is just ignoring this as very unlikely to happen.  I have compromised by stocking up some water and buying a little campstove (so we can still have tea, one of life's necessities) but I think typically we would have 3 days of food on hand already. Also due to the chilly evenings, I've put a quilt back on the bed.  This is one I made many years ago out of vintage Dresden Plate blocks that I purchased from an antiques dealer at the Houston International Quilt show.  I had seen them but left them, but elsewhere in the enormous show was a sample quilt with this layout in modern fabrics.  I counted the plates then went back to the antique dealer and counted the vintage blocks - there were exactly the right number.  So it was meant to be.  A friend gave me some antique muslin to use as matching background fabric, another friend drew the quilting pattern, and a Mennonite friend of theirs did the handquilting.  So it was a real group project.  I added the icecream cone border in modern repro fabrics.

Hard to believe that I was sweltering in 31C humidity in St Kitts back in the spring.  I finished quilting the wallhanging but have yet to trim it up and bind it.  I ended up using it as a practice piece for mostly ruler work.  It's a bit wonky, I didn't manage symetry very well in several places, but it was good practice. And done is better than perfect.

I had some fun pulling out my Christmas fabrics, and sewing a Christmas project bag in preparation for my christmas cross stitch project which I will start on 1 December.

Still no sign of the replacement artwork for my 1:48 Bliss dollshouse, hopefully it will turn up soon.  In the meantime, I completed another kit from my stash.  This is a 1:150 model of a traditional Japanese farmhouse which I think I picked up in a museum gift shop in Japan.  It was a flatpack of laser cut thin fibre board with paper details.  I felt it needed a base so I printed one on the 3D printer.  I explored several similar old farmhouses on visits to open air museums in Japan.

So this turned up today:

I've been occasionally checking the UK stocks of portable air conditioning units, which sold out almost completely during our summer of heatwaves, and haven't recovered yet.  When I checked on Friday, the AI said everything was still sold out, but it directed me to another page which said that Meaco were taking pre-orders for when stock would come back in.  So I went to the Meaco site and ordered one, expecting to get an email telling me to expect one in the spring.  Instead I got an email saying it would be delivered today!  I must have just hit the sweet spot of a re-stock.  So maybe next summer's heat waves will be more bearable and I won't have to sleep in the livingroom or the basement.

We drove up to the caravan today and emptied most of it, bringing home a full carload to stash away in the attic.  We'll make another trip to pick up the last few things.  Normally we would give it a good wash for the winter, but all the hosepipe bans from the summer's drought are still in effect and our storage yard has closed their caravan washing area.  Many people caravan all winter but we don't see the point if it is miserable and cold outside.

Time is relative

 This week seems to have flown by - it feels like only a few days since I wrote last weekend's post.  I read somewhere that this phenomenon is exaggerated for retired people who have generally moved on from time-defining frameworks such as paid employment or higher education.  So there aren't so many milestones in your week to give you an anchor in time.  I go to Aquafit twice a week and that's about it for weekly appointments.  Although I did go to Specsavers to order some replacement sewing glasses (the lost ones still haven't turned up).

My knitting/lace/journalling room is finally in a useable state, although not everything has been put away yet.  I even printed off some digitals and have been cutting them out.

I fired up the 3D printer and printed four of these boxes for storing washi tape - they have an insert with shaped rows to hold the tapes, and they stack on top of each other, and I printed a lid for the top of the stack.  A big improvement over my previous jumble of tapes.

One of the retreats I am going to later in the month, issued a challenge for us to make a soft cover for an A5 booklet using a random combination - mine was 'four blue circles'.  So this week I sewed up this junk journal style cover using up some of my fabric stash.  It's mostly fusible applique with some 3D elements added.  It came out a little smaller than I had planned but still fits my A5 booklet.

I'm getting near the end of longarming the St Kitts wallhanging.  I've mostly been doing ruler work on it for practice.  There are a number of imperfections and wobbles, including one square where I need to unpick the sky because I didn't notice my tension was off and the top thread was pulling up the darker coloured bobbin thread (I could do with better lighting in my attic room).

I started weaving my grey fabric placemats, using some torn strips from some leftover quilt backing.  They look a bit dull, but we need some grey placemats to use with a particular tablecloth so they will be useful.  They could do with some pops of colour really.

I'm close to finishing another of my cross stitched Houses of Britain.  This is the 7th one of 13, I am beginning to regret starting this stitchalong as I am such a slow stitcher.  I still have the back stitching to do on this one. I've also done a bit more on my fancy French monogram but it's not finished yet.

We have a yukka plant which we attempted to murder when we moved in 12 years ago, as it was so wizened and ugly.  It proved impossible to dig up so we just cut it down right to the ground.  A few years later it started growing again, surprisingly, and has gradually turned into a small shrub.  It must have liked the very hot summer because it has amazed us by suddenly throwing up this tall flower stem for the first time ever since the attempted homicide.  I'm looking forward to seeing what it will look like.

And in other organisational news, I grew tired of the jumble of tea boxes in the kitchen cupboard, constantly falling down and out and making it hard to see what we actually had.  So I have invested in this fancy organiser which makes me feel like I'm in a hotel conference room.  Now I feel like I need to buy three more kinds of tea to fill up all the slots.

We drove over to the town of Stamford today.  We have been before but were now looking at it as a possible retirement destination for when we downsize.  It seemed nice but I don't know that we can afford anything there.  After walking around, we had a cup of tea in a nice tearoom that had these charming character dolls of c. 1:6 scale set up in their front window, really well made including the appropriate furniture.

DH asked me which of the depicted retired tea room denizens would be me, I think it would be this one with her knititng and her slippers: