Where did the week go?

Only a few photos this week, sorry, because I just seem to be running to stay in place lately.  My 'days off' are spent mostly at my desk catching up on paperwork, finances, christmas online gift ordering, Japanese studies and conversation practice (using Skype), or catching up on household chores. On top of that the cat needed to go to the vet for the fourth time for her sensitive stomach (they are now wondering if she has IBS - oh yay); I discovered the study wallpaper that fell down during the leak couldn't be reglued so I had to be replace it (the previously damp paper had dried all out of shape like warped leather) in the area of the leak damage, etc etc.  And we put up some christmas lights outside today.

I did get a few sessions in on handquilting the 25 block applique quilt which will have to be moved out the living room pretty soon to make way for Christmas. I also did an hour or so on my bobbin lace butterfly mat yesterday, making a right old bodge of the transition between the first and next segments unfortunately.

And this week I finally ventured back into the cave of chaos that is the dollshouse room, frozen in time since the end of the 18 month build on the Japanese house.  I hadn't really been in there since.  Eighteen months of construction had left every available surface littered with bits for the Japanese house, bits for other houses that I couldn't put away because I couldn't get into the cupboards or said houses, much construction debris, tools and clamps, assorted useful containers for glue/stain etc. and of course there is a fine dusting of sawdust and dust-dust over everything in sight.  It was so depressing that I would just stand in the doorway frozen in indecision as to where to even start.  So I applied the 'I'll just do 20 minutes and then stop' methodology, and gradually things started to clear up. I've decided to keep the little table I was using for the build, so I moved a couple of the open-backed dollshouses onto that so that you can see both the front and the inside view. That opened up a gap on the central counter that I could move the Japanese house into, and so on, until eventually I had retrieved most of the room boxes that have spent the last year and a half piled out of sight on windowsills and behind other houses. 

The problem with keeping the table was that it was in the place that my big four-storey house used to sit on its stand.  I couldn't work out anywhere else to put the big house until I realised that if the filing cabinet by the door was moved out of the room, the house could squeeze in there.  It's not ideal because there is a railing that stops the side door of the house from opening fully, and I'm a bit worried about spiders getting into the house since it's now near the back door where they like to come in, but there really isn't anywhere else.  The house is too tall to fit on the main counter.  So we had to move the filing cabinet up three flights of stairs to the attic which took multiple trips, most of them done by DH as a sort of stairmaster workout.  When I eventually retire I really will need to go through all the paper I am hoarding and try to cut down.

As I am tidying up, I keep finding old projects and kits and thinking 'oooo' but then thinking 'no! you have to finish the Japanese house first!'.

I did get a few hours sewing on the Let's Bake quilt.  I made some oven gloves, three spatulas and a red cookie sheet which is waiting for 16 round yellow cookies to be appliqued on to it.  On a recommendation on Facebook, I've sent off for some Karen Buckley Perfect Circles which are basically circular templates that you gather your fabric around. So I'm waiting for those to arrive before I tackle the cookies.

In the evenings I've been stitching the cross-stitched cake recipe block, which looks ok from a distance but up close has terribly wobbly cross stitches because I find it difficult to consistently split each gingham square into four equal parts. Perhaps it will add to the homemade charm...  I wonder if anyone has actually tried baking this recipe?  I don't think it would work here in the UK because our baking powder is different and you wouldn't put two teaspoons of our stuff in with that amount of ingredients, I think it might taste bad.

I've finally worked through all the books and magazines I bought at the quilt show last month. It was very enjoyable to have so many craft books and magazines to read through, I found lots of nice things in them.  Today I took the 'giveaway' pile to a local charity shop, after taking a few previous giveaways to a lace day.  A few magazines went in the recycling because I had ripped too much out of them for them to be saleable.  So for the price of a couple of cinema tickets, I had hours and hours of entertainment and now some other people are going to enjoy some of them as well as some money going to charity.

Hope you've had more time for crafts than I have had this week!

Hamsta-bear and other crafty pastimes

My machine knitting club has set a mini-challenge which is to make a toy using punchcard techniques.  I didn't know what to do until one of the committee members suggested that you could knit 'fabric' on the machine, felt it, then cut out and sew a toy from the felted fabric.  This struck a chord since YouTube had recently pimped me this video interview  by the Fruity Knitting podcast team with the creator of Burra Bears in Shetland, which are teddy bears sewn out of felted Shetland sweaters (the interview is at 40:07). As it happens, I have a goodly stash of Jamieson & Smith jumperweight 100% wool from previous fair isle projects.  So I wound off a few cakes of red, white, pink and burgundy and chose a fair isle punchcard, and knit about a 50cm square of fair isle knitting on my Brother 881 punchcard machine on tension 8.  I was changing colours a bit at random so the resultant patterning is not optimal.  Also I think I probably need a new spongebar because the machine kept dropping stitches so it's a good thing I was felting the knitting.

I ran the knitting through the washing machine on a 40 degree C wash with a bathmat for company to give it a good thumping, and it felted beautifully.  I also threw in a small square of hand-knit 1x1 ribbing to use for the feet and ears like the Burra Bears.  I spent some time online looking for a pattern which had joined on arms and legs to make it easier to match up the knitted patterning - I didn't want to deal with the challenge of jointed arms and legs.  I eventually landed on this pattern from Canadian Living magazine from 2011 for Beau Bear which I enlarged from the PDF file to be a bit bigger, keeping in mind I only had a limited amount of felted fabric.

So today I spent several hours making this little guy, who stands 8 inches high.  It was harder than you might think to try to match the patterning around his body and head, and he's not perfect. In particular his muzzle is a bit lop-sided which, together with his chunky head and smallish eyes, makes him look a bit more like a hamster to me than a teddy bear.  He's mostly sewn on the machine with a 1/4inch seam allowance using a normal straight stitch, the felted fabric doesn't fray.  I pressed seams flat as I went, using a damp press cloth and the wool setting on my iron.  I didn't have any safety eyes the right size so his eyes are little black flower buttons.  I positioned the pattern piece on the fabric to produce an effect of socks and shoes, or boots, which was fun.

So not nearly as cute as a Burra Bear, but I like him and he is all made out of existing stash. I'll enter him in the club competition and see how he does.

I've done a few more blocks for the Let's Bake quilt but things have slowed down while I tackle some of the embroidered blocks.  This is the cooking stove and a flour scales, both with embroidered dials. And I'm working on a cross-stitched recipe written out on gingham, which is taking a while.

Another finish this week is my Japanese applique snap purse, made from some of the fabrics I bought in Japan and using an applique design for a handbag in one of the Japanese quilting books I bought there. I love how detailed the Japanese aesthetic  is.  My quilting stitches aren't very small because of the bulk of fabric I was stitching through but they still give a nice effect.  The picture on the table with the vase is more true to the actual colours.  For something that's not very big, this was a huge amount of work but fun to do and I'm pleased with how it's turned out.

And I called time on a big knitting project which has been cluttering up the living room for the last three months.    This is a knitted jacket from a pattern in the May 2015 issue of Knit Today magazine designed by Rico.  I chose it from my pattern stash because I was trying to use up some Colinette Zanziba chunky yarn that I bought several bargain skeins of from a Yorkshire mill on one of the knitting weekends I attended.  It had sat in my stash for years because I didn't have enough for a full sweater and because it is so chunky and boucle even though I really like the colours.   Here's the jacket, although it looks a lot better on a person with arms to fill out the sleeves than it does on this dressmaking dummy.

I had enough yarn to knit the fronts, backs (two joined together) and ribs, but ran out before I could knit the sleeves.  I do have some of the same yarn in the blue colourway, and started knitting a sleeve in that, but it just looked silly with the pink body.  I was gloomily wondering if I could still get more of this long-discontinued yarn when I tried the jacket on and realised that it actually looked quite nice as it is.  The sideways knit means that the drop shoulders hang someway down the arms, like a short-sleeved effect.  So I've decided to stop as it is, and wear it as a sort of over-cardigan, sloppy shrug sort of thing.  I'm pleased it's turned out as well as it has, since I had to re-write the pattern to match my own gauge and found it difficult to understand the very strange construction as there is no assembly diagram.  The fronts and backs are knit sideways in a twisted rib, then the two back pieces are joined along the cast-on edge up the centre back and the fronts are joined to the back at the shoulders.  You pick stitches up from the inside of the resultant U-shape to knit the collar, then sew the side seams. Finally you pick up along the bottom edges (which were the sides of the knit pieces) to knit the bottom rib.

I've stepped away from textiles to dabble in furniture repair this week.  We have a Victorian oak extending dining table (we live in an old house so old brown furniture looks good in it) which I thought was solid as a rock.  That was until DS tried to cross his legs on his dining chair, kicking the trim in the process, and knocked off a five-inch chunk  of trim like it was polystyrene.  It turns out to be a patch of historic woodworm (not active) which we hadn't even noticed but which runs along the piece of trim under the table for about three feet.  I don't think it affects the main structure so the table is not in danger of collapsing. The bit he kicked off was riddled with holes and incredibly fragile, instantly devaluing the table by several hundred pounds I should think although I didn't tell him that during my lecture on inappropriate table sitting positions.

We still had some wood hardener from treating the rot on the outside windows a few months ago, so I treated the bit of trim, and the cavity it had broken off from, with the hardener.  Then I glued the trim back on with wood glue, using dollshouse clamps to hold it in place until the glue dried.  Some careful filling with wood filler and some sanding with the fine papers I use for dollshousing, followed by a touch up with some dollshouse oak stain, and the repair is pretty unobtrusive.  I finished it off with some buffing wax.  DS has to sit on the opposite side of the table now away from the woodworm danger zone.

Still baking

More blocks made this week for the Let's Bake quilt that I'm working on. I sewed together the top panel now (there are still some mini-apron blocks to make for the right hand side).  I embellished the gingham blocks with some machine embroidery stitches because I don't want to do the hand-stitched chicken scratch embroidery the designer did on the the original quilt, but I'm not loving my end result.  I will leave them as placeholders for now but might switch them out later.  I also made the egg carton, cocoa jar and milk bottle this week.  The cocoa and milk labels are hand embroidered, not my strong point so a bit wobbly but they look ok.

Today I made a flour sifter, the kind we had when I was a child where you squeezed the handle and it activated an arm swiping across the base.  I don't think I've ever seen one as an adult.  They are probably 'antiques' now, sigh.

And this is the 'Let's Bake' logo drying after I soaked it in warm water to get rid of the basting glue.  There will be a red button on the apostrophe and a blue button beneath the exclamation point eventually.  This was hand-appliqued because the bias tape really doesn't want to fold smoothly around such tight curves.  I'm still not very happy with how mine has turned out but I'm hoping once it dries that it will lie a bit flatter.

I subscribe to Today's Quilter magazine and they are starting a new block of the month by Janet Clare which is coastal themed, I am very tempted and even pulled some fabrics for it, but I don't know where I would find the time to do it.

I've had to retire the Victoria leaf lace shawl from commuter knitting because my eyes just can't cope with the laceweight yarn in the indifferent lighting on the train, I was spending more time fixing errors than I was on knitting.  So that's been moved to the living room queue and my Cumbria mini-skein mitt is now my commuter knitting.  This is the first mitt, almost ready to cast off.  The line of contrast yarn is where you pick up for the afterthought thumb.

I was knitting on the mitten during an interesting talk by Louise West today about her recent experiences as a professional lace maker.  This was at a Lace Day held in Northampton.  I was working on the Bucks point butterfly mat during the day which was going very well until suddenly later in the afternoon it wasn't.  I seem to be out by one pinhole somehow.  I was too tired to work it out, I'll have another go at it tomorrow.\

It's turned properly cold now, down to minus one degree celsius last night.  I've got two handmade quilts on the bed as well as my GAAA Afghan, and I'm wearing handknit socks to bed.  And yet bizarrely the lavender and fuschias are still blooming away in the garden, it's crazy. Is it getting cold where you are?

Baking with fabric

I'm really enjoying the baking-themed applique quilt that I'm working on, even though I haven't had nearly as much time to work on it as I would have liked.  I think I like it because the colours are so cheerful and the shapes are simplistic and charming like a colouring book.  This is how far I've gotten so far, having completed the red mixer block, the rolling pin and the egg beaters this week.  Several of these blocks will be embellished with buttons but I can't sew those on until after  the top is quilted.    It may not look like much progress but the blocks are time-consuming to construct.  Also I had to do the power cord of the mixer twice, because the first time I used wider ric-rac and it didn't look right.

On the topic of ric-rac, rather annoyingly, having just been taken to the wonderful Peterborough store last Sunday where I could have bought all sorts of ric-rac but didn't think of it at the time, I belatedly realised on Monday that I would need ric-rac for the power cord of the mixer and subsequently for several other blocks.  So on Tuesday I diverted from my path to the office to hang about in front of the Button Boutique in Leicester until it opened some time after 9 o'clock, so that I could rush in and buy a yard or two of ric-rac in several colours and widths.  The rest of the day as I toiled (after my rather late start), I had a happy feeling that I had at least accomplished something worthwhile that morning. 

I've also been enjoying reading through some of the books and magazines I bought last weekend, and spent a happy couple of hours sorting through the box of cross-stitch kits while I was watching telly.  That experience was a bit like playing the childhood card game of Snap! because there were duplicates and even triplicates of kits, instructions with no kits, kits with no instructions, and it was a job to marry them all up as best as possible.  There were a few of each (instructions and kits) left over as orphans that got thrown out, but in the end I had two piles:  a pretty large 'keep' pile and a smaller but still substantial 'give away' pile.  I'll let my friends pick over the 'give away' pile and then what's left can go to the charity shop.

Today I was at a Lace Day, a relatively small one with about 30 people attending.  I got quite a lot done on my new Bucks Point butterfly mat and it's going ok.  The light wasn't great and conditions were fairly cramped, so I was glad to come home.  But it was still worth going because I just wouldn't sit and do five hours of lace at home, I would get bored and/or distracted by something else.  I've got a couple of lace events next weekend as well so will get more done then.

I've started a new knitting project which is the five-mini-skein kit for fingerless mitts that I bought from the farm shop in Cumbria.  It's nice 'woolly' yarn and satisfying to knit with.  It was this kit if you remember:




I'm still knitting on the Victorian leaf lace shawl border, now and then on the train and a bit today at the end of the Lace Day when my eyes were tired.  And I've finished quilting diagonal lines on the first row of blocks of the 25-block applique quilt, only four more rows to go. That's going to take forever because I can only hand quilt when I'm not too tired and preferably in the daytime when it's light.The rest of my time has been spent on video games and learning Japanese.  Oh, and work.

Have you put your heat on yet?  We have in the evenings, it's been quite chilly at times.  The plants in the garden are gradually losing their leaves or being cut down by the frosts.  I planted three tubs of tulips and irises in hopes that we will have a nice show next spring, although last year's were a bit of a literal flop with only one tub flowering properly and we missed most of its show when we were in Japan.  Don't know what happened to the other three tubs, I don't have a lot of luck with bulbs.

Road Trip fun

One of the Youtubers I watch has been vlogging her fabric and antique acquisition road trip in Pennsylvania this month and I have been very envious.  But today I had my own highly enjoyable road trip right here in the UK, thanks to DH nobly volunteering to chauffeur me around.

Our first stop was the Fitzwilliam Quilters 25th Anniversary Exhibition just outside Peterborough, which I found out about in the Events diary of Today's Quilter magazine.  I was imagining a small group show but it turned out to be a really well organised and well presented show, with loads of quilts and sales tables.  We ended up spending about an hour and a half there, with DH waiting patiently while I enjoyed:

• a cushion and bag raffle, where you bought five tickets for £1 then put each ticket into the fabric envelope attached to each raffle item that you wanted to win - so you have a chance to win something you actually would like.  And the items were really well made.
• a mystery parcel table where £1 bought you a wrapped handmade gift.  I had two goes and received a handmade mug bag complete with mug, and a fabric basket including a 'cupcake' pincushion - both beautifully made and worth far more than £1 each!
• a fantastic secondhand book table, with fabulous expensive books all priced at .50p or £1.  I spent ages on this one, handing books to DH to hold as I worked my way along.  They had quilting and knitting books and some other stitching hobbies as well.  Rowan magazines for £1.  Australian magazines for .50p.  New looking hardcover knitting books for £1.  I could have taken it all home but settled for two boxes of books and magazines which I shall enjoy reading for some time to come.
• An Alzheimer's charity table full of handmade items for sale.  I got a little kit to make a decorated clothes hanger with an applique cover, the sample looked really cute.
• Four rooms of quilted and embroidered display items, including an entire room of Christmas themed items.  They have some really talented people in their group and there were some wonderful quilts on display.
• Fabric traders - I was strong and didn't buy any more fabric but I had a good look.
• A good sized cafe with tea and cake to finish off with.

A really great start to the day.  Then we drove around Peterborough to the Plush Addict fabric shop, whom I have bought from at shows but never visited.  They trade out of a large warehouse in an industrial estate, and have loads of fabric for both dressmaking and quilting, lots of interfacing, bag hardware, patterns, some yarn, and quite a lot of trims, ribbons and zips.  Great resource and I'm sure I will be back in future.  I purchased three widths of  bias tape makers that I need for my current quilt project, a christmas decoration kit, and some gingham ribbon, and I enjoyed looking around.

After a longish drive up to Leicester, and a stop at a supermarket for a picnic lunch, we arrived at the Big Textile show at Leicester racecourse.  I've never been to this show and I don't think I would go again.  It wasn't very big considering it cost £10 to get in, and it was a random and muddled mix of a few traders, quite a few textile artists and displays by textile groups, a few yarn shops, a few guilds (Leicester quilt guild, Leicester machine knitters etc.), and various workshops for printing on fabric or making ripped magazine page collages or similar.  I did buy a small kit to make an A4-size crazy quilt collage of ribbons and laces from one textile artist, and a half-price lavender bag from another textile artist.  My main buy was a box full of 'free' magazine cross-stitch kits from a charity stall, I was looking through it and I asked what donation they wanted for a kit.  It was the end of the last day of the show and they jokingly said I could have the lot if I wanted.  Money changed hands and I walked the box out to the car.  Now I've got it home I can go through it at leisure, keep the kits I want to make, and offer the others to friends or donate them back to local charity shops.

So between the box of books and the cross stitch kits, I've got lots to look through over the coming weeks.

Crafting this week has mainly been working on my Let's Bake applique quilt.  I finally finished up all the cutting apart from the background fabrics, altogether it took about five hours of cutting I think. I now have a bunch of plastic baggies labelled for the various applique motifs.  I'm going to choose background fabrics as I go along, to contrast with each applique.

Step one was to layout all the border blocks and sew them together.  The original quilt has embroidered flowers in all the gingham squares.  I haven't done that yet although I might do some embroidery later on so I've left the blocks loose for now and not sewn them into rows. I love having a design wall, it makes this type of quilt layout so much easier to work on.

I am following the online Let's Bake Sew-Along tutorial which starts with the pies:

Each shape is made by stitching around a traced line on interfacing then turning the fabric through. The shapes are secured to the background by a narrow zigzag stitch.  Some of the shapes have additional hand embroidered details.  For some reason these three pies all had their own background shape which you then stitched together, which seemed like a waste of effort so I just cut one full panel and appliqued all three pies to that.

Next I made some measuring spoons and a measuring cup.

Now that the endless cutting stage is finished, I'm enjoying the actual stitching. I'm looking forward to gradually 'baking' the various elements.

I also finished the applique and embroidery on my two purse panels this week. After the stitching was finished, I tried painting the pink marks from the heat transfer pencil with Vanish stain remover, dipping the panel into detergent water briefly, then scrubbing the pink marks with a stiff paintbrush before rinsing the whole panel.  It worked quite well and the pink marks are gone, I just need to press the two panels to remove the wrinkles.

I'm pleased with how it's turned out although I found applique with this coarser woven fabric fairly challenging.  The petals have to all come together in the centre which makes for quite a lot of bulk, with the small yellow circle in quilt fabric sitting over the top but having to hide the raw edges.  The embroidery is with three strands of floss, I'm not very good at embroidery but this was pretty basic stuff and looks alright.  The next step will be to cut out the purse panels, line them and do the hand quilting. The Japanese process is to produce completely finished components, which are then stitched together into a finished item, with an emphasis on handwork.

Yesterday I was on a one-day bobbin lace course to start a new Bucks Point lace mat.  It took me about 2.5 hours in the morning to get started and get all my bobbin pairs pinned onto the pillow and in work for the pattern.  I was quite pleased to get to the point where I could get on with making lace, so was a bit devastated when my teacher wandered by and critiqued the starting point dictated by the instructions, and decided it should all be undone and started again at a different point. To give her credit, having seen my crestfallen face, she volunteered to undo it all herself over lunch and re-start it. By 2:30pm she had got it back to almost the same point, so I was able to get on and work a little bit of lace before DH picked me up at the end of the day. It probably was the right decision to re-start as it will make finishing the mat much easier in the long run, but it means that I didn't really get a lot done.  I haven't done very much bobbin lace lately but now that I've got this new mat started, I shall have to try to work on it more regularly.  I've got a few lace days coming up this next month but I don't know if this mat would be too complicated to work on in a distracting environment.

Have you had any good road trips lately?

As it turns out, I do NOT have enough fabric

This is what my sewing room looked like last weekend after I trashed it trying to pull enough fabrics for a new project.

I feel like I have a lot of fabric.  The design wall in the corner of the picture is hung on the back of a row of IKEA bookshelves which are full of fabric, and fabric has spilled over onto other shelves and into containers on the floor. Admittedly a lot of it is rather elderly, much of it dating back to some quilting holidays in America in the late 90s and early noughties. 

So you would think I wouldn't have a lot of trouble pulling fabric together for a new project, which is a free quilt pattern called 'Let's Bake' by Lori Holt.  She hosted free tutorials on her website a while back and I kept up with them, and there is a Let's Bake Sew Along Guide which contains the cutting instructions and fabric list.  Her finished quilt looks like this:



I thought it was quite cute so I saved the pattern for my queue.  Having recently completed the top for the 30s Sampler, it seemed like a good time to tackle this pattern in similar fabric colours because I had my 30s fabrics to hand.

Now I had not reckoned with the marketing juggernaught driving this pattern line.  The entire pattern is presented on the basis that you will buy all of the designer's fabrics, make the applique shapes using the designer's packaged plastic templates and sew with them with the designer-brand interfacing, then embroider said shapes with the designer-brand thread, before assembling your quilt and finishing it with the designer-brand trim.  Trying to work out how to make the quilt without buying any of that has proved quite a challenge.  The Sew Along Guide has thumbnails of all the fabric, and there is a LOT of fabric: 54 fabrics in total. Presumably to work in a bit of all the designer's fabric lines?  My printed copy of the guide (thank you office laser printer) isn't very true to colour but I did my best to work my way through the fabric list and pull suitable fabrics from my stash.

I thought I had a lot of these bubblegum colours in my stash.  Well I can tell you now that I do not have nearly enough for 54 variations.  Even resorting to stealing fabrics from wildly different stashes like my Edyta Sitar fabrics, an American Jane jelly roll, a couple of other Moda jelly rolls, my fat quarter stash pile and some of the elderly fabric buys, I still have had to double up on a few fabrics.  In particular, I do not have the lovely aqua blues that she used.  I did manage to pull together some painter-blues. In general, I think my fabrics are going to be a bit darker in value.  We'll see how it goes.

So having trashed the sewing room and having spent almost two hours re-folding and putting fabric away, I started cutting.  Each of the 54 fabrics has a specified cutting list, sometimes just a couple of pieces, sometimes half a dozen.  I have now put in about four hours on cutting and I'm still only just over half way.  It's slow as you can't batch cut, each fabric has to be individually unfolded, pressed, then cut out the specified shapes, then add each shape to a separate labelled baggie (mixer, flour sifter, cookie sheet etc).  I will eventually have cut little kits for each applique motif on the quilt.

The next challenge will be drawing out the applique shapes without owning the designer's plastic templates.  The sewing guide does show the shapes as small thumbnails, so I will just have to work out the easiest way to scale them up to the specified size.

Eventually I will get to sew something.

You can appreciate that I haven't done a lot else this week.  I've been pricking out a lace pattern ready for an upcoming lace day, knitting on a chunky jacket, crocheting a bit on the crochet granny square afghan, and continuing the handquilting on the 25 block applique quilt (very slow progress).  I haven't been doing much commuter knitting lately as I am mostly using commute time to study Japanese now that my course has started again.

Are you tackling any gargantuan projects?

I'm a quitter

I found that headline very hard to type, despite the fact that I am trying to celebrate a maturity level  which allows me to be a quitter. I was raised to believe that quitting was failing and that you could do almost anything you set your mind to if you tried hard enough and really wanted to achieve it.  Consequently I have spent a lot of my earlier craft life finishing things simply because I had started them, even if subsequently discovering that I didn't like them, or didn't enjoy doing them,  I heard a podcaster explaining the 'sunk cost fallacy' once, which states that people demonstrate "a greater tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort, or time has been made." Once I have committed to a project, for example by spending money on the fabric/book and toting it home from foreign parts, it claims a permanent slot in my queue and a permanent claim on my future time.

As a supposedly mature adult, and in particular one faced with creeping decrepitude/diminishing energy levels, I am trying to combat this thinking.  Fresh on the heels of throwing out the horrible cross-stitch kit last week, I have now unravelled the 5/8th finished Misty Meadows Shawl, and the reskeined yarn is currently soaking in a hot water bath to remove the kinks ready for re-use.    It was this one if you've forgotten:

I had knit the cable section past the halfway point and decreased down ready to knit the next stripe.  I haven't enjoyed knitting with this yarn which is West Yorkshire Spinners Signature 4 ply, it feels thin and a bit scratchy and it is splitty to knit with.  The pattern is not well written either.  And when I tried the shawl on after reaching the next stripe, I realised that it looked very unattractive when worn.  The horizontal cable section across the back gave the impression of some sort of carapace or knitted armour, and the stripes were just not attractive at all.  So out it has all come, and I think the yarn may face a future as a pair of socks instead.  So hurrah for being a quitter!!

I have also been a finisher this week, completing the top for my 30s Sampler Quilt at long last!

I'm quite pleased with how it's turned out.  The different widths of the top and side coping strips are not obvious at all, the scrappy quality of the border balances out the scrappy middle in a different way than a solid border would have done, and the whole feeling is cheery and retro.  Also it easily fits on my queen-size bed as a topper so I'll be able to use the quilt.  I just need to choose a backing and cut the binding strips and then it can join the queue for future quilting.  Ironically however, although this project was chosen to reduce my stash of ancient 30 repro fabrics, I've actually probably increased said stash by at least a third as I had to buy more solid colours and then there were the three abortive attempts at buying a border print fabric. Sigh.

I also tried something new this week. When we were up in Nottingham for the lace weekend, we visited a bonsai nursery out of curiosity.  We had both enjoyed visiting the bonsai village when we were in Tokyo and seeing all the amazing living creations.  I found out they did day courses to get people started so I signed up for one of those and went on it this week.  It was a fascinating insight into the hobby although rather long winded on listening and short on actual practice.  But we did practice repotting a Chinese Elm bonsai from China, and then in the afternoon did a full conversion of a garden nursery Cypress shrub into a bonsai, including wiring the branches to shape it.  So mine went from this:

To this:

With the teacher's help, we thinned out the tree and wired it to shape it so that it looks like a miniature mature tree.  The wire will come off when it grows a little but hopefully it will have been trained to stay in that shape by then.  Looking after it will give me a taste of what it's like to have bonsai, it's a bit like getting a new pet as they have to watered almost daily and trimmed and maintained several times a year. But at least it is not going to sneak into my sewing room and make a bed in my fabric like some cats we might know.

The work reorganisation I mentioned some time ago has gone ahead and my team was officially disbanded on Friday.  We have been dispersed to other teams around the building and I start with my new team tomorrow.  They seem like they will be alright but my first reaction is always going to be "I hate all of you and I hate everything you do differently from what I'm used to."  It took me months to get used to my old team and will probably take me months to get used to this one before everyone stops annoying me.  At least I have three other people from my old team who are moving with me so I'm not completely isolated. Hopefully the things the new team are doing which seem stupid and inefficient will become familiar routines. Bleah.