A week in Malta

 We just got back from a winter sun break in Malta, my first visit there. It wasn't entirely sunny- it was warmer than the UK at 16-20C in the daytime but quite chilly at night, and always fairly breezy because it's an island.  But we had a good week and liked Malta a lot better than our previous winter destination of Cyprus.  People were friendlier and it just felt safer and better kept/cleaner, and there is history everywhere you look so really interesting.  The walled fortifications are just stunning. And the world class megalithic temples made us wonder why Stonehenge is so famous. We were staying in Valletta and the views in every direction made us feel like we were walking through a Canaletto painting.

I couldn't find any craft or fabric shops but I was on the lookout for Maltese lace and found one lace store open in Valletta.  In the window were some disappointingly coarse and even crude modern examples in shiny synthetic thread, and I saw a few more of this type in a tourist tat shop in Mdina (another walled city).  The Mdina shopkeeper said only old ladies make the lace now, no young people, and she said I would have to go to the sister island of Gozo to see anyone making it.  But I went into the Valletta shop another day and found he had some vintage pieces which were of much better quality. When I showed my interest, he got out a bunch of vintage pieces from under the counter which he said he had from his grandfather, who kept the shop before him.  I ended up purchasing a little mat from c. 1960s and admired several others.

The mat I purchased

We saw some antique lace in museums and also an example of the upright bolster pillow that was used.

By coincidence not design, we were in Valletta during the Carnival weekend which was a lot of fun. Total chaos - there was a parade route but the parade and floats was completely mixed up with the audience and performers in the narrow streets, turning it all into a huge street party that spilled into multiple streets with lots of the audience also dressed up.  And the carnival costumes weren't just DIY attempts - these were hugely elaborate themed creations encrusted with trims and embellishments and even electric lights.  The floats were a miracle of engineering - at first glance they are huge gaudy mobile platforms being towed along the streets by tractors, all lit up and blaring earsplitting music.  But when they got to a more open space, they would park up and unfold like a child's Transformer toy in every direction, with arms coming out and towers going up, and everything moving and rotating, with the added excitement of dry ice jets and confetti cannons.

It was also a good opportunity to test out some of the clothing I plan to take on my longer New Zealand trip, and to expose some flaws such as not having all the right charging cables with me. As usual I am obsessing over what to take with me, I went through this all last year with Japan. I think I have a bit of a anxiety issue about not having the right kit, I am definitely not a laidback traveller.  If I ever wrote a travel book, it would have to be called 'The Apprehensive Traveller'. Anyway, Malta was great and we may return another year because there is still lots to see.

A lack of memories

 More downsizing this week: going through various photo albums mostly of old holidays - including several hundred colour slides from trips in 1982 and 1985.  Obviously it was difficult to see the slides clearly without a projector - I put them on my light table so I could make out the subject of most of them, and I have a little magnifier to look at individual slides.  I pulled out the few slides and photos that depict me or a family member. But the vast majority of the photos were of scenery, architecture, antiquities etc.  which I don't even remember seeing, apart from a vague 'I was there' memory. At least I have learned over the years to take more pictures with people in them, particularly myself.  There were also photos of roommates, chance-met travelling companions of a few days etc, and I don't remember hardly any of them either.  In the end, I threw almost everything out.  It seems a bit pointless to save photos of, say, what the Acropolis looked like in 1985. If I want a picture of the Acropolis, I can look on the internet. It was a bit depressing though - not just the waste of money and time, and dragging all these photos/slides around from house to house over the years - but also the fact that I can't remember much of what I saw 40 years ago.  Makes you wonder what is the point of travel, but I know it shaped me as a person and ultimately resulted in me emigrating to the UK. Anyhow, the photo cupboard is a lot emptier now.

I finished the quilting on the Red House quilt.  It mostly went fairly well - there were a few errors in rolling on which resulted in the occasional overlap, but these aren't too noticeable.  This is a photo on a double bed but really it's a queen size quilt (but I couldn't be bothered to tidy my own room). I chose a modern pantograph of stylised feathers in a fairly close texture so as to quilt down all the seams from windows and doors.

I've been working on week six of the Lori Holt My Happy Place quilt, which includes three pieced blocks and this appliqued block featuring an actual cross stitch design. Luckily I had a dot grid fabric to use as the  embroidery background (since I haven't bought her specified fabric).

I've been knitting a bit on the Latvian mitten that I started a while ago, and have done a bit on the Little Houses cross stitch.  

Just a month until my New Zealand trip now, so as part of my preparations I have kitted up some craft projects to take along: a small cross stitch design, the sumo design sashiko I bought in Japan, and an embroidered panel for a French quilted zippered pouch kit.  I may not have room to take all three.

DS and his girlfriend have decided it's time to stop renting and buy their first house. After viewing only a handful, they have gone ahead and offered on one.  We did tell them that there will be a lot more selection on the market in the spring, but I think they just want to get it over with and get settled.  They are both busy professionals, and their tastes are quite different than ours anyway, so fair enough. Also there was some pressure from the other in-laws to get on the housing ladder sooner rather than later. So now they are furiously adulting as the buying process picks up steam. I hope it all turns out for them.  Mortgage rate trends into the future are anyone's guess. And I think they will have a lot to learn about being responsible for keeping up a home, but I guess we all went through that ourselves and we survived.  As someone who used to hide the dirty dishes in the oven in my twenties, up until that time I put the oven onto preheat, thereby transforming the lid of my food processor into modern art, I remember the learning curve. In my defense, I was living alone in a rented small flat.

Another retreat

 I was back at the three-day hotel retreat again this weekend, with DH kindly driving me over there Friday morning then picking me up today.  I took my new-to-me Janome Gem machine which I bought at the last retreat, and it performed really well - I powered my way through piecing all three quilts that I had kitted up after Christmas.

Nine Chequered Dresden Plates from the Missouri Star tutorial on Youtube. This is from one of a pair of bargain Moda jelly rolls.  You are supposed to be able to make nine plates from one roll, but I ended up one wedge short somehow, so I'm going to have to break into the second roll.    Not loving the colours but they are ok and it's good to use the roll up.

I pieced all the blocks for a stashbusting 'envelope' quilt (just a few shown here) that was in an American magazine I bought while I was in Paducah. I bought the blue fabric in Paducah, and then had fun pulling a variety of envelope fabrics from my stash.

I assembled the Tilda pinwheels quilt - tablecloth size.  Love these soft colours.

I finished the quilt kits by Saturday teatime, so Saturday evening I started in on a hexagon box kit that I was given on the box course at the previous retreat in October.  For the lid, I used the goldwork embroidery that I did on the taster course through the Royal School of Needlework last winter.  I had actually given the embroidery kit away to a friend who does goldwork, once it got to the stage of a kazillion french knots, because I wasn't very interested in it.  However, she worked on it over Christmas and enjoyed stitching all the french knots for me, and then presented it back to me because she has no use for it either.  It's like a boomerang.  I didn't know what I was going to do with it, until I was panic-project-packing before the retreat and found the hexagon box kit.  The end result looks okay I think. I used some cherry blossom fabric for the outside and some Japanese fabric on the inside.  Maybe I can give it back to my friend :)

I finished the box Sunday morning so then cut out some pieces for a felt sewing caddy kit before packing up my stuff.  My portable ironing table that I made a few months ago worked well, it's slightly wobbly but provides valuable additional real estate, freeing up room on my table.

And there was some shopping - there was a popup fabric shop on Friday with an eclectic selection. I picked up some global map home dec fabric, a Liberty-lookalike cotton, some useful green and a few fat quarters that were only 50p each.

Before I went off to the retreat, I was working on week five of the Lori Holt My Happy Place quilt - the scissors block and the fat quarters block, both hand appliqued.

And I got the binding onto the Sewing Panel quilt.  This photo is at a weird angle - the bottom is completely level and not dipping the way it looks in the photo. I quilted the wallhanging with a heart panto on the frame.

The Red Houses quilt is almost finished quilting, I think two or maybe three passes and I'll be done. Once it's off the frame, I might have another go at trying to level the frame better

Off to bed early, I'm exhausted by all the retreat creativity!

New things become old things

 I am trying something new this weekend, joining a ticketed online two-day retreat hosted by the Quilter's Guild of the UK. I think it's the first one they've done.  Tickets were £40 which seemed like a lot, especially when no programme details had yet been released when tickets went on sale. But I took a punt and it has actually been a good first day.  Unlike other retreats I've taken part in, this one was back- to-back speakers all day with only short coffee breaks, and an hour for lunch and supper. So no sewing time as such, and no making workshops today - it looks like there is a short make tomorrow.  Most of the talks were interesting and the organisers managed to keep people's inevitable Zoom issues to a relative minimum, and there has been good timekeeping. It just felt a bit relentless not having many breaks.

The first talk was about modern quilts that reimagine traditional themes. As part of that talk, the speaker recounted some of the history of the modern quilt movement. I have to confess that minimalist modern quilts are rather the antithesis of the scrappy, busy traditional quilts that I like. I realised today that somewhere in the back of my mind, I still considered the modern quilting movement as a new-fangled fad for people new to quilting who needed easy big patterns that they didn't need to buy many fabrics to make- spawning the regrettable byproduct of the current trend for incredibly dense quilting to fill up all the big empty spaces.  As the speaker made clear, the movement has actually been around for about 25 years now - which just makes me feel old. How did the year 2000 get to be 25 years ago?  Obviously: math - but in my brain it just doesn't seem 25 years have passed.

Stuart Hillard (a well known UK quilter) gave a very comprehensive talk on making scrappy quilts and using your scraps - nothing particularly original but a good summary of all the learning from people like Bonnie Hunter and others. I felt very much on the same page when he described his views on quilts that repeat the same identical block multiple times: often of low interest - and if everything about a quilt is contained within one of its blocks, then why would you make more than one block? I would far rather make a quilt where every block is different, I have really struggled in the past with quilts that are just X number of identical blocks and tend to avoid them now.

One of the speakers today, can't remember which one, touched on the mental health aspects of making quilts.  I think it's easy for women, including me, to feel like we're spending too much time and/or money on our hobbies instead of doing something 'worthwhile' or something that's expected of us like housework. One participant told us for comparison that her husband spends a lot of time on his hobby of playing and watching cricket, which no-one ever questions. But as quilters, we get asked so many questions like 'haven't you got enough quilts yet?', 'what do you do with them all?', 'how much fabric????', or my pet peeve ' oh, you should sell those / those are good enough to sell!!' as if it's only worthwhile having a hobby if you can monetise it. And there is a culture of guilt around 'neglecting' the family/household duties by spending time in the sewing room, or women recounting stories of sneaking fabric and craft supplies into the house like they were illicit drugs.  I have made things all my life and have dabbled in multiple hobbies. Making things has always  helped me cope with stress and improved my mental health in so many ways, and it's important for me to remember that.  It's not all about the end product.

Anyway, I was busy in the sewing room through all the talks.  I sewed the binding onto the Autumnal placemats and finished them by machine. Let's hope I remember their existence when next autumn rolls around.

I sewed the binding onto the Sewing panel wallhanging and prepped it for hand finishing.  I shortened the sleeves on two tops that I will take to New Zealand. I sewed an additional pocket into my travelling knapsack to corral my wallet and phone inside the big front pocket. And I prepped some new templates for the My Happy Place Quilt week four.

This week, on the My Happy Place Quilt, I finished the hand applique for Weeks One and Two. However, when I went to trim down the blocks to the final measurements, I realised that my eyeballing of the template shapes had been too generous and my applique shapes are all too big.  I should have done a sense check against the final block size but I didn't, I was too eager to get to the 'good part' of the hand applique. I may have to re-do some blocks but I'll leave them for now.  I've made a note in my diary for when I go to Festival of Quilts this summer, to purposefully fabric shop to try to fill out some of the colour gaps in my stash.  There are usually some show discounts and also bulk sellers like Doughty's with lower prices.

I moved on to Week Three which is the sewing machine block that forms the centrepiece of the quilt.  There were a lot of pieces to cut out and, once assembled, it's enormous!  I'm holding a pair of scissors in the second picture for scale.  I re-did the templates for the Week 3 pincushion so it's more the size it's meant to be.  I was interested to see Lori Holt using wooden clappers in her videos to weight down pressed seams until they cooled, resulting in very flat seams. I've ordered a generic clapper to try it for myself. I'm experimenting with using Glide 60 polyester filament thread for my piecing, as recommended by other quilters at the hotel retreat I sometimes go to.  It's thinner than my usual cotton threads which results in less bulky seams, but I don't know if I feel comfortable with it.  One of the speakers today was a Wonderfil representative, talking us through issues with troublesome threads, and she said she doesn't like using Bottom Line because it is too strong. Because it's a monofilament, it's stronger than the fabric and other threads and she thinks it can cut through with time. This immediately made me think of DS's quilt that I had to repair last year because all the quilting was falling out.  I have always quilted my frame quilts with King Tut on top and Bottom Line on the bottom, and I think the Bottom Line basically severed the King Tut cotton due to excessive wear and use. It makes me scared for all the other quilts I've done using the same combination, but then most of mine only get used or displayed for a few weeks a year and rarely need washing.  The speaker likes Wonderfil Decobob which she said is not a  monofilament, it's spun from chopped up staples instead, so more like a cotton thread.  I'm a bit worried the Glide 60 will be too strong like Bottom Line.

I've got the Red Houses quilt on the long-arm frame and have done several rows of the panto.  Every row feels like eternity but I've timed myself and it's only about 20 minutes if everything goes well. It's going to be a long slog to stitch out the fairly dense panto on this queen size quilt.  I'm having a few issues with the machine that I've been liaising with the dealer about. It appears my timing needs resetting and my handlebars possibly need replacing as a couple of buttons are erratic in function. DH is going to drive me to the dealer to deliver the machine and enable me to take a workshop there, and also do some shopping for threads and rulers. I also need to do more work on levelling my frame.  The installer did his best on our wonky Victorian floorboards but there are some definite humps still which throw out my steering - I think I need to install some shims under a few wheels.

I've done no dollshousing this week as it's been too cold, but I did spray the little tables for the Japanese house black last weekend, and gave them a coat of gloss varnish.  I've made a typical stack on a cupboard in the kitchen, another stack in the hearth room, and held back a couple to put food onto later.

I've managed to finish the RST block of my longterm Little Houses alphabet cross stitch sampler.  Two more blocks to go.  The whole project on its frame had a protracted time-out of almost two years in the corner of the living room because my evenings were spent embroidering the blocks for the Australian Vintage Needlework BOM - now awaiting quilting.  It would be nice to get the sampler finished and out of the living room - although I certainly have other larger cross-stitch kits waiting for their turn on the frame.

Hope you are staying warm and had a crafty week!

It's cold

 It's been dropping to freezing temperatures at night again, and our old house has felt pretty chilly a lot of the time. I am living almost permanently in shapeless layers of fleeces, scarves and even occasionally a hat.  We do have central heating but it is controlled from a single location on the main floor.  When the thermostat thinks it is 18 degrees on the main floor, it may only be 15 or 16 in the attic.  To get the dollhouse room to a reasonable temperature in the basement, would require the main floor to heat up to about 20 degrees C.  It's easier and cheaper to wear more clothes.

I've been spending a lot more time in the attic than usual, working on the long arm quilting machine.  I washed the Ode to the 1930s quilt, trimmed it, and sewed the binding on, so it is done now.

After practicing with pantographs last weekend, I loaded up the pumpkin placemats I bought in Italy at the unexpected quilt shop on the Cinque Terre. I quilted them with a leaf motif panto which turned out fine.

Then I loaded up the Sewing panel wallhanging I finished a little while ago. I stitched this one in a hearts motif (for my love of sewing).

The next one onto the frame will be the Red Houses quilt. I dithered for a while about whether to quilt it with an edge-2-edge pantograph, or try to get fancy with ruler work on each house.  But it is a really big quilt (queen size) and ruler work is really slow. So I think it's going to be a panto.  I ordered some pink thread for the quilting which turned up today.

The little suitcase from the Japanese panel is finished now, I like it, it's cute. I don't know what I'm going to put in it. I have a growing collection of cute bags and sewing organisers - I had to buy a new plastic crate to store them. In my imagination, I will one day be like the designers in social media, surrounded by cute sewing things and with all my sewing tools in cute containers.  The reality is a lot more cluttered, and if I can't see things then I forget I own them. But I still like making cute containers and organisers.

I haven't done a lot in the dollhouse room, due to the aforementioned chilly temperatures.  I did make a round low table for the Japanese house kitchen, kitbashed from a regular table kit I had in my stash, for the staff to work at.

The magazines that came with each partwork issue for the Japanese house kit occasionally had tutorials in them. There was one for a low individual tray-table which is what meals used to be served on historically.  Lots of the traditional houses I visited in Japan had stacks of these little tables piled in the corner of a room.  However the tutorial requires one to accurately cut out stupidly small bits of card so I didn't try making it at the time.  Now I have a Brother Scan'N-Cut which in theory should cut it for me.  That required scanning in the pattern for the table leg, designing the other components according to the instructions, generating a cutting .svg file, and then a protracted multi-hour argument with the machine (including a big cleaning session and a new blade) before I succeeded.  It eventually cut out the components for 12 tray tables from kraft card.

They are very fiddly to assemble but look pretty good.  I'm going to try spray painting them black which may just result in them being blown to kingdom come - DH has suggested sticking them down onto double-sided tape.

I spent 3 or 4 hours this week pulling fabric from stash for the next quilt in my queue: Lori Holt's 'My Happy Place'.  I really like her design style - I made her 'Let's Bake' quilt a few years ago which is still one of my favourites.

The designer generously posts very detailed instructions online which are based on someone spending hundreds of pounds on her fabrics, templates and tools. Obviously I don't want to do that - the plastic template pack alone is £36 and the fabric is £16 a metre I think, here in the UK.  So I tried to pull from my stash instead, with reference to the values and patterns of her fabrics and what job they are doing in the quilt.  This proved very difficult - I have a relatively big stash but most of it is old, some of it very old.  I just don't have a lot of the modern clear bright colours that are currently popular.  By the time I had pulled out various caches of fabric in my struggle to find adequate substitutes, my sewing room looked like a bomb had gone off.

I eventually arrived at a defined set of fabrics, which differ somewhat from hers - in particular, I have very little aqua so I have substituted an amount of denim blue.

My reference key

Then I could start in on prepping some blocks for applique.  Lori Holt uses what I think of as the 'Eleanor Burns' method of interfaced and turned through applique shapes, stuck down with basting glue then hand-appliqued. These are the blocks I've glue-basted so far.  I will prep them all downstairs then do the applique in front of the telly. I enjoy hand applique.

Hope you are staying warm.