A very small adventure

 (Warning - this is an even longer than usual post so if you just want to know what crafts I was up to this week, you will need to skip a ways downward)

In an effort to start taking advantage of being retired, I booked a weekend away by myself to visit the Harrogate Knitting and Stitching Show and the York Dolls House fair which coincidentally were both on the same weekend and in the same neck of the woods.  It sounds so simple - but felt quite worrying on several levels.  For one thing, I haven't been anywhere without DH for about six years and he does all the portaging of cases and heavy bags due to my weak back and propensity to tear muscles easily.  I hadn't been on a train since lockdown in March 2020. It would be a step change in terms of potential COVID exposure. My gluten and other intolerances have gotten much worse the last few years so food is always an issue.  Despite trying to do a walk every day, my stamina has become much lower over lockdown / working from home compared to when I was commuting to a full day of work including four miles of daily walking.

Putting all that to one side, I slapped myself around the head a few times to remind myself that a) I'm not getting any younger so if I can't do this sort of thing now, it's not going to get any better and b) I may have become more feeble but I am hopefully not any dumber and in the past I have booked many complicated overseas trips myself so surely I could manage a weekend to Yorkshire.

Armed with my shiny new Senior railcard, I set off Friday morning for what was meant to be a four hour train ride to Harrogate but  - due to a broken down train blocking the exit from Nottingham station - turned into a 5.5 hour trip. Since you can drive to Harrogate in 3 hours, this was just annoying as well as pretty much eroding my sightseeing time for the remainder of the afternoon. Luckily, being a paranoid person, I had packed emergency snacks and an emergency book on top of the normal snacks and book, and ended up breaking into both as well as turning the heel of my travelling vanilla sock that I started in the caravan a while back.  Hardly anyone was wearing a mask on the train so this was the beginning of my potential exposure to COVID. I did see some very pretty Christmas lights that evening while walking around the town admiring the Victorian architecture.

Saturday morning I dropped my bag off to the pre-booked storage place  and walked around some of Valley Gardens, laid out in the Victorian era and full of old well heads and pump houses for the mineral springs that used to attract the fashionable crowds to this spa town.  There was even a little Japanese garden.

Then I headed over to the Royal Pump House Museum to learn a bit more about the spa town in its prime.  This houses a rather eclectic mix of antiques and Egyptology but the building itself is quite interesting. You can't take the waters any longer but I remember back in 1982 trying a glass of spa water somewhere, possibly Bath?, and it was just disgusting.

Then it was time to go into the Knitting and Stitching show which was in the Royal Hall and adjoining convention centre.  The Royal Hall is a stunning Edwardian theatre building and it was open for people to enjoy teas and coffees or packed lunches in - so I ate my gluten free picnic lunch while sitting in the theatre seats admiring the view.

The show itself was quite enjoyable, I think partly because I hadn't been to anything similar for so long.  It was smaller and much less pretentious than the London show they do, there were very few guilds present and not many exhibitions.  There were a lot of stands selling dressmaking fabrics and some quilting fabrics, so would be ideal if you had a car and sew your own clothes.  There were several sewing machine manufacturers present, Grace quilting frames, and a live demo theatre. Most crafts had some presence: cross stitching, knitting, beading, scrapbooking, sewing patterns, embroidery, etc.  I quite enjoyed wandering around although it did get quite busy and in the end social distancing became pretty impossible. My favourite exhibit was from the Embroiderer's Guild, who had brought together a number of examples of antique embroidered and beaded bags and needlework tools, together with some modern stitched examples. I should have taken more photos.

I thought this was an interesting construction, a hanging lidded box

that slides out of a decorated cover.

A tiny embroidered bible cover on a real printed bible.

I thought this also was an interesting construction, because you could cover the

surfaces with anything: patchwork, printed panels, decoupage, and then hang

it on the wall as storage.

I didn't actually buy very much at this show.  I found the knowledge that I was going to have to carry around myself anything that I purchased really inhibited my impulse buying.  I did get another pattern from Beth Studley, having previously made her Honeycomb Organiser (one of the more useful things in my sewing room) and handled baskets.  This one is for a little two compartment hamper, with lids.

And I picked up a little kit to make a very pretty flower beaded necklace and earring set. I'm not much good at jewellery making (I can never turn the little metal loops properly) but I'll have a go.

Then it was over to York by train (delayed again). I have a fondness for York as I lived there for six months when I first came to the UK for college back in 1982.  It has changed almost out of all recognition since then, and yet it hasn't as the ancient buildings are mostly still there.  I had booked myself into a hostel, booking a bed in a 10 bed female dorm, partly because it was cheap and safe and would store my bag for free, and partly as an experiment - can I still do hostels?  Am I too old?  According to Youtube, lots of older people stay in hostels and certainly I saw several at mine, but physically can I still do it?  I was daunted to find I had been given an upper bunk but impressed at the introduction of privacy curtains and nightlights since my backpacking days back in the 80s.  Cocooned in my little curtained world, reading before going to sleep, felt a lot like I imagine a capsule hotel might feel  in Japan.  And surprisingly I didn't sleep too badly either.  I was only woken occasionally by the girl underneath me moving about.  I was expecting revellers to be coming back at 2am and had packed my super-duper earplugs accordingly, but in fact another girl turned the light out at 10:15pm and I didn't hear many people come in after that.  York itself was an absolute mob scene when I went out Saturday evening after checking in, I could not believe the Mardi Gras-level of crowds flooding all the shopping streets.  I think because there was a Christmas market, a normal market, Christmas shoppers and just Saturday night partygoers all creating a perfect storm. It was difficult to even move through the streets and every restaurant had a huge queue out the doors.  Using half-remembered local knowledge, I worked my way around the crowds and after trying a few places, ended up at a Pizza Express which at least does gluten free pizza and gluten free beer so that was fine.

Micklegate Bar with Christmas lights, one of the 

medieval gates to the walled city

The grand staircase in my youth hostel, in a converted Georgian mansion

The Shambles, one of York's medieval streets

Sunday morning I walked around a few old haunts and then hiked the mile and a quarter over to York racecourse where the York Dolls House Fair was being held. I haven't been to a dollshouse show for a long time - in fact it may well have been when we came to this same fair in York on our motorhome holiday back in 2016?  Also I have done very little dollshousing the last few years so I wasn't sure whether I was going to find it that interesting.  But it was quite fun. It's not a huge show but it's a decent size for a couple of hours including lunch at the cafe.  It again got quite busy so social distancing was not possible. There were some familiar vendors but a lot of newer ones as well, and of course everyone and their brother has a laser cutter now so lots of lasercut minis.  Based purely on this single show, 1:48 scale remains very popular, virtually no 1:24th scale, several 1:144 scale offerings.  There was a lot of 1:12 scale cheaper items being sold off in bargain bins, not sure if that's just this venue or a sign that that level of quality in that scale is less popular now?    I ended up buying several things to my surprise.

Some cheap old kits and some wicker instructions from the Breast Cancer charity stall

A Jane Harrop pocket shop 1:48 kit

Jane Harrop laser-cut little houses, and three kits from Valerie Claire for making

perfume and toiletry bottles. I got these for the 1:12 scale hairdressing salon

that I inherited from a friend and need to finish

Some adorable Christmas items which will hopefully find a home in my 

Mrs Santa bedroom vignette. The sleigh and Christmas cookies

are by Ella-Rose Miniatures, who had a lot of really nice things and

quite reasonably priced I thought.  The Teapot is by Uniqueables by Ursula who also made

the little caravan teapot below which obviously I had to get to add to my Canadian

house which is a sort of record of my life.

One stall was selling basic scenes in suitcases - I have a couple of these suitcases

but had never thought of making scenes in them. I would like it better it they were set up

so that you can close and open the case without disturbing the contents, like a puzzle box.

I was briefly excited by these magnificent French style houses until I realised

they are made out of high quality printed card.  They were on sale for £99

fully assembled but I assume they were originally some kind of 

flat pack presumably from the continent?  I so wish they were actual 

dollshouses. I wonder where they came from?

After the show I walked back  into town to do a bit more sightseeing but it was still surprisingly crowded, and getting very cold (6 degrees C) and raining a bit. So I took refuge in the York Art Gallery until it was time to meet my knitting friend Katie who now lives in York. It was great to have a catch up with her as I hadn't seen her IRL for several years.  By this point I was really tired, after all the shopping and walking and adventures on trains, so hopefully I wasn't too boring company.  Then it was time to get the train home again, with only one slight delay which resulted in me literally having to run with my suitcase to catch my connection.  I'm still tired and rather stiff today, plus I have acquired a floater in one eyeball - yay for old age (bleah).  But I did it. And it worked.  So maybe I can do it again. And meanwhile I will be taking COVID tests this week which hopefully will all be negative.

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We resume our regular programming - what did I do this week?

As part of the continued processing of project-notes-formerly-pinned-to-my-design-wall, I made a mug coaster with Japanese indigo fabrics, based on one that I sketched back in 2019 on our trip to Shikoku that I saw in a gift shop.  Mine hasn't come out as nice as the original but it's okay. It's stiffened with some Peltex inside. I think my fabrics blend together a bit too much so you can't make out the individual pieces so much.

Another design-wall-pin was to make a tailor's ham holder out of wood.  Very few people sell these, mainly an American woodworker, and his didn't look like they would fit my tailor's ham..  Sometimes you want to stand your ham on its side to simulate a shoulder or a bodice curve, or even on its end. It's quite awkward trying to hold a ham steady with one hand while also holding down a garment smoothly, and manipulate the iron with the other hand.  I made a mockup out of styrofoam, tweaking it until I thought I had the proportions right, then cut the side pieces out of the remains of the £5 oak mirror frame I had purchased for the bookcase project. I had to use MDF for the base because the remnants of oak wood weren't big enough.  The holder has turned out quite functional and works and it's fairly strong, although not very pretty.

I also ventured into the dollshouse room, which had once again become a dumping ground, and tidied up the work area, and put some of my purchases into their intended houses.  Then I carried out an audit of the various house kits I have accumulated in several scales, totalling a rather alarming number.  I think I will try to sell some of them.

before

after

And last but not least, this week my retirement gift showed up, purchased by myself with contributions from family members.  What's in the box?

I haven't actually taken it out of the box yet due to time constraints, fear and procrastination, but I have started watching tutorial videos.  It's a computer-controlled cutting machine which hopefully is going to cut applique pieces for quilt projects, card projects for dollshouses and possibly other things.  There appears to be quite a learning curve to climb.

Whew!

Changes

 One of the things I really want to get to in retirement, particularly over the next few months when overseas travel isn't an easy option, is to declutter and sort out the long to-do lists.  We all have those lists, things that would be of benefit to get done or to repair or to organise or to replace, glory holes of clutter, but not of sufficient priority to get to when life is keeping you busy.  After a brief trip to IKEA last weekend, I made a start on my sewing room this week.  The initial task was to replace this overflowing bookcase with a taller bookcase.

Of course, this required taking all the books and clutter off the old bookcase first and piling it around the sewing room by category.  By the end, I was fighting a strong urge to just give up, shut the door and pretend I never had a sewing room in the first place.

It was a hugely depressing task because there were so many books that I have bought, read, and kept with the best intentions to make something from - but in 95% of cases had never got round to.  Plus I would have to retain my faculties until I was 110 to ever get round to it all - not to mention similar stashes for other hobbies.  But after a few cups of tea and some self-pep talks, and after DH kindly assembled the new Billy bookcase, I got on with it.  I've put the books back on the new shelves by category (applique, traditional, general, techniques, cartonnage, stitching etc.) and labelled the shelves.  I also got a bit ruthless and weeded out a lot of books that I was never going to use or read again for various reasons, and over the week I gave them away on Facebook to grateful new owners.

the discards

I had so much room then on the new shelf that I could bring out some of the binders and boxes hiding in the fabric storage nook. The end result felt so much better.

Before I knew it, I was excavating various other glory holes in the sewing room, pulling things out of cupboards that had been there since we moved in, pulling out messes of fabric that had been hastily shoved onto shelves when we had the flood, finding all sorts of empty boxes and rubbish that had built up over the years.  I also took a ruthless look at some of the 'get to it some day' projects that were hanging about.  I've been listening lately to a sewing decluttering podcast and in her UFOs episode she talked about rating projects from 1-5 in terms of how much they excite you, 1 being the lowest.  Then she recommends you get rid of all the 1's and seriously re-consider the 2's. She said why would you spend time on 1s that you could be spending on the 5s?  She also said there's usually a reason why you've never finished something.  In that spirit, I have thrown out the cheap tapestry picture of flowers that I started in 1985 on a holiday in Greece when my aunt/travel companion was driving me crazy, dismantled a few project material collections to salvage the raw materials, and added some other UFOs to the donation pile.  I've also added several more forgotten projects that were lurking in bags here and there to my master project list, because I probably do want to finish them.  I even found a grid-printed canvas ironing cover fabric squirreled away, and used that to re-cover the majority of my ironing surface - since for several months now I have been snagging my iron on the edges of a big hole which had developed right where I tend to do most of my ironing.

Half my design wall was covered in pinned up lists, patterns and project ideas so I took all those down, added some to the master list, and am actioning others. One of those was a free pattern from ByAnnie for fabric storage boxes.   I resized the pattern upwards to make three storage caddies that fit the cubbyholes in another bookcase in my fabric storage nook.  Rather than use expensive foam stabiliser as called for in the pattern, I sewed the boxes just with wadding in them, then inserted four foam sides frankensteined from scraps of foam stabiliser that I've been saving.  The fabric is from Aldi, their cheap fat quarters are perfect for this sort of thing when you don't want to use 'good' fabric but still want something nice looking.

I still need to give the room a good hoover but overall the sewing room just feels so much better now, plus I took the opportunity to move some things around so that things I use more often are closer to hand.  Which probably means I won't be able to find anything for the next six months.  Now I just need to tackle all the similar clutter build ups around the rest of the house.

Before I started all of the above, I wanted to clear the decks by finishing off various projects piled on my ironing surface - one of which was the antique anvil block quilt top I bought in Kalona a very long time ago.  Because of its age and the feedsack background fabric, I wanted something simple and a bit rustic (because the red plaid blocks were reminding me of lumberjack shirts).  So I looked online for examples of tree blocks and eventually found a quilt made with quite a simple tree block of rectangles that seemed suitable.  I drew out a pattern at a suitable size for my quilt top (which doesn't have right angle corners but I took an average measurement) and calculated the side borders.  But for the top and bottom borders, which needed the white space to be marginally narrower in order for the trees to fit, I had to call in the big guns as the arithmetic was totally beyond me.  DS, now a chartered accountant albeit based in our dining room, kindly helped out his aged mother and quickly calculated the shrinkage ratio for me. You can't see it very well in the photo but I used mixed cream background prints similar to the original top. I was really surprised when I added the first side borders, how it suddenly turned from a 'dark' top to a light one, because suddenly the background fabrics are making the blocks float whereas before the red was dominating.  The end result is actually rather Christmassy.  I considered whether a final red border would look good but couldn't find anything suitable in my stash so have decided to call it done.  I've pieced a backing for it out of stash squares I cut a long time ago, cut some binding, and added it all to the 'to be quilted' clothes rail.  DS is now talking about possibly moving out in March/April so I may yet get my quilting frame set up in 2022.

Little Christmas sales in churches and village halls have started up.  We went to one this morning and I bought this little needlebook which is so well made. The pages are all finished rectangles rather than just made from felt, and each page has been embroidered with the name of different types of needles.  So much work in it so I was pleased (although slightly surprised) when they charged me £6 for it which is a fortune by church sale prices but little enough for the time it would have taken to make this.

Are you making any Christmas gifts this year?

Groundhog day

 It's only been a week, so I'm not bothered by the fact that I just feel like I am having a perpetual day off. It still feels very much like a temporary break and I occasionally find my brain reminding me of minor office tasks that are no longer relevant.  Even though there is just an empty corner in the study where my workstation used to be.  It's probably because instead of a hard stop from commuting to a physical job, I've had 18 months of working-from-home limbo so in effect I am still living in my 'office'.  I think I also feel slightly cheated because instead of the uninhibited do-whatever-the-heck-you-want lifestyle stereotype of the newly retired, I still have long to-do lists and mundane chores to get through.  Except now I have more time to do those then get to my own fun stuff.  So not complaining.

This week I finished the Lowarn bag from Country Cow Designs that I was making with her sew-along. It's a bit wonky but I'm pleased with my first-ever bag rivets and because I learned some new techniques.  The design results in tremendously bulky seams in the final step when you are attaching the end pieces to the tube of the main bag, and subsequently covering the raw edges inside with binding.  This was extremely difficult to do neatly and my machine really did not like all the bulk.  So my inside end seams are a bit of a mess and the end pieces are not symetrical. If I do it again, I will have to modify the pattern to reduce the bulk in that final seam.

I gave my new-to-me stream press a good clean then fired it up.  It works, which is good news.  I used it to fuse the stabiliser to Block 6 of the Australian BOM which turned up last weekend and it worked a treat.  This was a quicker block to do without so much embroidery, so I finished it last night.

I also tried using the steam press for some of my normal ironing with mixed results.  If the fabric isn't too wrinkled, then the stream press flattens it brilliantly.  But if the fabric is very wrinkled, like say a cotton hanky that was all balled up, then the press will just set the wrinkles.  I watched a few Youtube videos and it appears the method is to dampen the wrinkled fabric with sprayed water so you can smooth it out on the bed of the steam press and then press it.  It just feels quicker to use a normal iron on things like that.

After tidying up my sewing room a bit, I put together a little Trim-its kit for a poppy brooch.  I've made a few of these little kits before for various xmas decorations, they are very affordable and surprisingly good for the money.  This made a rather large poppy with a beaded centre, with a brooch pin on the reverse.

Some gratuitous photos of our very strange cat writing in ecstasy in a plastic bin bag - apparently she has a plastic fetish. These types of bags have an unpleasant chemical plastic odour even to me, heaven knows what they smell like to a cat. Perhaps she is getting high on the fumes.

We are going to go give our caravan a bath today, to leave it all clean for over-winter storage.  We're just waiting for the temperature to warm up a little, not looking forward to working with a cold water hose when it's only 9 degrees C out.  It would have been better to have done the bath a few weekends ago but what with retirement gallivanting this is our first free weekend.  I've been watching Youtube videos and reading online posts about what to do to put a caravan into winter storage, unsurprisingly there are many different opinions and contradictions ("Use WD-40 to protect your electrical connection pins", "DON'T use WD-40 as it attacks plastic and makes it brittle", "Use dehumidifer packs to keep the inside dry", "DON'T use those dehumidifier packs, they just suck moisture in from the outside" etc. etc.)  So I've made a list by looking through our caravan manual and trying to walk a middle road through the minefield of recommendations.  Wish me luck.

A milestone week

 It's done, I'm retired.  Still feels very strange to be saying that. I'm sure I will feel like I should be logging in tomorrow morning.  My last working day was Tuesday and then I was using up leave for the rest of the week.  I logged in Friday afternoon briefly, just to check if there were any last minute messages.  Then I spent an hour or so disentangling all the wires, unplugging equipment, and stowing the laptop and monitors back into their boxes, then dismantling the loaner desk.  So 19 months of homeworking is now reduced to this pile - someone from my old office is supposed to be collecting it tomorrow.

I received not one but three bouquets on Tuesday, every time I answered the doorbell I got handed another box, it was quite fun.  My team sent me a bouquet, my best friend on the team sent me a bouquet plus choccies, and my in-laws sent me a lovely bouquet with a small bottle of Prosecco.  So of course I had prosecco and choccies for lunch then just felt like going to sleep for the remainder of the afternoon.  :)

For this milestone weekend, I had booked us an indulgence of two nights at a posh hotel in a former country house, since international travel is off the cards.  We never stay at posh hotels so it was quite a treat for us.  We have stayed in former country houses before for work events and normally they have seen better days and look quite tired, and have been butchered with fire doors and ugly extensions.  But Kilworth House had the benefit of an extensive renovation about 20 years ago and a very sympathetic addition, and still retains 38 acres of grounds.  So it felt like being a guest at a national trust house. 

We reckoned our little caravan would fit five times into our bedroom

The breakfast room

We stayed two nights with a day out on Saturday with walks around the historic towns of Mount Sorrell and Lutterworth and on the estate itself.  I found a little wool and fabric shop in Lutterworth and picked up a cute fat quarter of Christmas fabric.

In a knick-knack shop I found a cast cement garden ornament in the shape of a tree house .

On the same day we also collected a secondhand  steam press which I found on Facebook Marketplace.  It's supposed to be in full working order, I haven't tested it yet.  I got it mainly for adhering bag interfacing now that I am sewing more bags.  Every piece of a bag typically needs woven interfacing such as Shapeflex fused to it, and then the main structural pieces often additionally need a second layer of more structural stabilisers such as Decovil or Bosal.  The Shapeflex has to be fused for 12 seconds at a time, in an overlapping pattern, so it can take a surprisingly long time to interface all the pieces of a bag with a normal iron.  According the bagmaking peeps online, a steam press makes it a doddle as the pressing area is so much greater.

So it's all over now, we're back home, with just the flowers and the pile of computer equipment to mark a very significant week.  And tomorrow morning I will likely feel a strong impulse to be logging on and working - maybe I will address some of my own paperwork.

Also this past week I received a very interesting delivery: an antique sewing box with contents that I bought online. I think I blogged several weeks ago about the secondhand book on antique sewing and needlework tools that I had picked up and how interesting it was. I subsequently ordered a few more used books on the same topic.  It's just so fascinating to see the historical versions of tools we still use today, plus the many fascinating compendiums and ladies companions and ornate tools.  I discovered online that there is a passionate collectors community for these tools and as a result have developed collection envy.  So when I saw this box at a fairly reasonable price, with interesting contents, I decided to go for it.  The box itself is in satinwood with veneered decoration and a mother of pearl inlay on the lid and around the lock. It probably dates to the end of the 19th century and is in reasonably good condition.  A couple of the partitions in the tray were loose, as were the tray supports, but I have reattached them.  The contents were a complete mixture ranging from two vegetable ivory pincushions likely also late 19thC right through to some modern Gutermann thread reels.  I had great fun sorting it all out and grouping like with like.  It looks like a luxury item to our modern eyes but probably wasn't at the time, underneath the veneer the wood of the box is only cheap-looking and the tray is lined with paper not silk.  There is no key.  

I have moved the modern haberdashery into my own stash, and left the antique contents in the cleaned up and repaired box fpr display. Quite pleased to have it.  DH now slightly worried I have started another collection.

Gale force winds and lashing rain have brought down various trees in the area, hopefully it will calm down for tonight and we will get a few trick-or-treaters.  Happy Halloween everyone!