Changing seasons

 Although still February, spring is definitely feeling like it's just around the corner.  The weather has been warmer with daytime temps up to c 11 degrees C and some lovely sunshine. The magnolia tree has fat buds on it, the garden sports a lovely carpet of snowdrops and one early daffodil, a few crocus have appeared, the irises are pushing up new sword-shaped leaves and the hazel tree is covered in catkins.

Meanwhile in the dollshouse room it is still Christmas.  I've added the remaining wall cladding and some edge trim to the Christmas porch vignette, glued the steps into place and added the remaining trellis on either side of the steps.

I finished the first house of the CrossStitcher SAL.  I like it but I'm a bit disappointed that the colours are so different from the magazine photo even though I am using the specified canvas and threads. I guess they photoshopped theirs to make the image pop more. I like the printed colours which seem warmer.

I've moved on to the second little house which has relatively similar colours but features a typical Harrogate House.

In the sewing room this week, I made up a padded laptop sleeve to give my laptop some added protection while it is riding on the plane in my daypack to Japan.  I will confess that the reason for the pink bar at the bottom is because initially I cut my panels too short so I had to extend them. :)  There is a concealed velcro tab inside to hold the laptop in place. The reverse side is the same fabric print but in a beige colourway.

I also completed another bag test for a simple book bag but I can't show that yet as it is still embargoed.  I was working on that during a charity fundraiser zoom call with Chooky in Australia - Friday evening for me but very early Saturday morning for them.  I sewed the final seams upstairs on my industrial the next day, when the bulky layers were becoming too much for my domestic Janome.

When I was having my big charity fabric clear out, I remembered that I had several 'Little Quilts' Sunbonnet Sue panels.  Early in my quilting career /early 1990s, I thought the Little Quilts designs were so cute, and I made a few small wallhangings out of their book. I'm a bit surprised to find the company is still going.  Anyway, I had a full panel of Sunbonnet Sue, and had inherited three more from my friend who passed plus some partial panels.  So I held onto those after the clear out and have cut them up to see if I can make a charity quilt out of them.  Each panel features a main wallhanging, a small doll quilt, and some freestanding figures.  I have four main wallhangings, five doll quilts and six sets of figures. So I'm thinking something like this.  

I cleared out a few more big collections of paperwork from the attic. I had two big sacks of jobhunting stuff: notes from jobhunting courses, interview techniques and my prepared responses, a huge binder of all the cover letters I wrote for applications, their replies, my notes from any subsequent interview; numerous versions of my CV etc etc.  All of it gone now because I don't need to do that any more!  Thank all the gods, because it was horrible.  While I am not ruling out ever working again if I get bored with retired life, I have digital versions of my CV and that's not likely in the near future.  Two more big sacks held the remnants of my corporate career: all my payslips, all my salary review letters, all my performance reviews over the years (many of these covered in handwritten angst as I agonised over perceived slights, lack of parity with colleagues, comparison with the cost of living etc.), my various promotions, examples of the corporation communications and publications I used to work on.  It's a strange feeling because I can remember it all being vitally important and yet now it isn't at all.  So that was a lot of shredding to do for all the personal information.  Our little home shredder can only be run for two minutes continuously so big shredding jobs have to be broken up over several days.

The benefit of the clearout was to empty a second cupboard in the attic which I can now expand my quilt collection into.  I refolded all the quilts on the guest bed because DS is coming home to visit soon, and they are now all stowed away back in the attic. But they definitely benefited from having their rest for several weeks, virtually all the creases had dropped out.  I fold quilts on the bias for storage after reading that tip somewhere, it is much better for preventing permanent creasing.

I've managed to give myself mild RSI in my right hand from too much videogaming, so I had better give it a rest today.  My first Dark Souls game was when my son introduced me to DS3, which is notoriously difficult.  It was a huge struggle for me and eventually I had to give up about 2/3rds of the way through when I couldn't progress any further.  Since then I have played several other Souls and Souls-like games and I would like to think my skills have improved. So a few weeks ago I started watching DS3 walkthrough videos to see if I would be able to pick up my DS3 game again and progress it.  I came to the conclusion that I would have to start over because I've just forgotten too much of the game.  So that has turned into a massive time suck even though I have been trying to limit myself to less than two hours a day. I am doing a lot better, very satisfying to triumph easily through areas that I can remember giving me a lot of trouble the first playthrough.  But my right hand takes the brunt of the controls and I have definitely overtaxed it.

Losing at shingle chicken

 I did some more work on my dollshouse porch this week.  After installing the lights, it was time to glue and screw the roof into place on top of the porch posts which was a bit like wrestling an octopus - I had glued pins made from toothpicks into both ends of the posts so they had to fit into holes in the porch and into the ceiling under the roof, while the roof had to fit into the corner of the structure and be approximately level, meanwhile with my fourth and fifth arms I had to get the drill in place to finish screwing in the screws to reinforce the wood glue.  I got DH to help so he forced the roof into the corner while I screwed. Surprisingly it all came out ok, then I clamped it up to dry overnight.

As part of my Christmas present of porch bits, my friend Anita had very kindly included a roll of 'real asphalt shingles' which according to the box should have covered the area of the porch roof.  I measured placement lines 1/2" apart according to the instructions, and started glueing.  It was very kind of Anita to give them to me, but I have to say they were rather frustrating to use as the shingles were all different widths. So it was impossible to get them neatly lined up with the next row covering the previous row's seam between shingles.  And the more rows I applied, the smaller the roll was getting.  I held my nerve and kept glueing, but did eventually lose at shingle chicken 1.5 rows before the finish.

So before glueing down the final strip, I scanned the final partial strip of shingles with my ancient desktop scanner to create a .jpg, which I then imported into my Brother ScanNCut software to create a cutting file so I could cut the extra 1.5 rows out of black card on the machine.  I glued that in place and then touched up the new shingles with paints to blend them in a bit better.

Then I gave the whole roof a 'frost' effect with drybrushing, because this is going to be a winter scene.  I'm fairly pleased with it. I'm thinking there might be snow eventually as well but we'll see.

I tackled an alteration project this week that has been sitting around for a while.  Back in the end of summer sales I bought two double cotton gauze skirts from Matalan with the idea of combining them into a dress. I had bought a casual dress pattern by Waves & Wild called 'Kinjarling' after seeing another lady wearing various versions of it at the bag retreat back in October.  I wanted the bodice for my project so I sewed a toile in old sheeting but found I needed to size up to get a better fit.  Then I cut up one skirt and sewed it into yardage so I could cut out a bodice and sew it.  I took the waistband off the other skirt and sewed it to the bodice, then I opened up the skirt side seams and sewed in pockets using the Kinjarling pocket pattern.  The end result isn't bad: a comfortable loose-fitting plain dress which I will try out as a travel dress because hopefully the double gauze isn't going show the wrinkles too badly. If it works out, I might sew a full version of the pattern in a different fabric.

Another sewing project this week was to make an additional cover for my Christmas present Kindle.  The Amazon cover that I had bought for it is slim and sturdy, but quite scratchy and hard-edged so uncomfortable to hold.  I looked at various other covers on Amazon and tried one, but they were all so bulky and heavy that you are losing the whole benefit of the slim e-reader. Similarly the various Youtube tutorials all produce fairly bulky covers or were sleeves that you had to remove the kindle from in order to use it.  I tried making a Mk-I version that slipped over the corners of my existing cover and was held on with elastic down the spine, but even that small amount of bulk prevented the magnet closure from working and the edges of the cover were flipping upwards.  For my MK-II version, I just went with a slipcover on top of the scratchy cover, and to hold it shut (because the magnet closure still wasn't happy) I added some elastic.  The elastic has the added benefit of fitting over the hand to make it easier to hold.  I'll see how it goes.  At least it looks better and is more comfortable.

I had some happy mail this week.  I've ended up on the mailing list for the Oh Sew Sweet Shop somehow, I think because I bought some ByAnnie stuff from them at FOQ. And last week they emailed me with a new Northcott fabric line called 'Tea for Two' which features a digitally printed photographic large panel of a china cupboard full of vintage china which I just loved.  I love pretty vintage china and have several pieces of my own. So I had to have it, and along with that I bought some of the coordinate fabrics so I can throw a few borders around the panel and make it into a wall hanging.

One of the coordinate fabrics is another photo-realistic digital print, this time of white lace against a light grey background.  When I received it, I realised that it might actually work as a background for the borders of my Australian BOM quilt.  I took it downstairs and tried it out with the embroidered panels, and I think it might work.  Although there isn't much pure white in the quilt, there is some, and there are also some soft greys.  As far as I could tell with a flat lay, the white lace fabric is popping out the white and bright colours in the quilt panels making it all look lighter and fresher - whereas the sepia tones of the kit fabric or my replacement were bringing out the yellow/browns.  So I've ordered a couple more metres of the white lace fabric to see if it will work better once I get the scalloped border made.

Despite the above stash acquisition, this week I have been working at decluttering the sewing room.  I went through every single fabric shelf and collection (apart from the ones I had already sorted out) and pulled out all the ugly fabrics, all the panels, all the ancient fabrics that I had bought 20 -30 years ago and never used (some of these were secured with pins that were so rusty I had to use pliers to pull them out!), the hideous backing fabric purchased only because it was cheap, the inherited fabrics from other people's stash, the leftovers from long ago quilts...  I went through all of it and made a lot of decisions and the upshot was two big sacks of fabric and panels which are being collected by Project Linus tonight to be made into charity quilts for children in hospital.  

It feels really good and there is so much more room in my storage area now.  I don't know why I was keeping half of it, out of sight out of mind mostly.  A lot of the panels came from a friend who passed about 10 years ago and they weren't my taste, and some of the ancient stuff I can remember buying on my first trip to Paducah c. 1992!  Part of the problem was that early in my quilting career I had a penchant for big print fabrics or theme print fabrics - which are really difficult to use because if you cut them into pieces then you end up with radically different coloured pieces. And there are only so many bag linings, and quilt backs and feature fabric tote bags you can make. I also used to get a lot of cheap fabrics on sale at the Fabric Guild when it was a physical store in Leicester back in the day, buying based on the price tag rather than the aesthetic.  I think (I hope anyway) that nowadays I am a lot more discerning and while I still buy things not knowing exactly what I will make out of them, I at least have a general idea.

For example, today I went to the Textile East Fair in St. Ives (Cambridgeshire) with some friends, and while it wasn't a huge show, I did get this layer cake of attractive Japanese-style fabrics because I had literally just seen a project I liked in Quilter's Companion magazine the night before that uses either these same or very similar fabrics. So now I have another project to add to the queue.

This week I did some more work on the second Bruges Lace flower which is pretty similar to the first one, and going along fine.

And I have upped my game on the gifts I will take to Japan with some taller cellophane bags that come with these attractive bows to secure them. I've also added in a little Union Jack memo pad behind the three tea bags.  I've shown this to one of the Japanese ladies I chat with online and she was quite taken with it, so I think we are almost there.  She suggested that I add a printed note with my name 'a gift from ...' inside so I might do that.

I'm still unpicking the quilting lines on my son's quilt that is falling apart - it is an incredibly tedious job and I could probably have made him two new quilts by now, but I make myself do 20-30 minutes every night. One day it will be ready for new quilting.

I may have chosen my knitting project for Japan. As MeMeM suggested in her comment last post (I can't reply to them as they are set to 'no reply' in Blogger), I've found a lacy cowl pattern called the Giselle Lace Cowl by Julie Harris Designs. It looks quite fancy but according the the instructions is actually straightforward.   I have some hand dyed merino/silk yarn from the Wool Barn that I bought at some long ago fair in a duck egg blue which I think would look nice. Although it says the merino element is superwash so I don't know if that is going to inhibit the lace from blocking well - anyone know?

Carting another old friend off the charity shop

 I'm a bit sad because today we have downsized an old pine mirror/dresser combination that was my first ever antique furniture purchase - way back c. 1986 in Canada.  I loved it dearly for many years, and it was my only full length mirror through a few apartments before being shipped to the UK to use in our first (and subsequent) houses.

I sometimes listen to decluttering videos while sewing, and one presenter struck a chord with me recently - she said that an item might have been important or precious to us in a previous season of our life, but in our current season it may no longer be required.  I do tend to hang onto things for a very long time, past their sell-by date so to speak - like the machine knitting magazines that hardly anyone wanted - just because at one point I cherished them. (I learned a lesson from that experience actually - I took several years of Designer Knitting magazine along to my recent sewing retreat and unloaded them to good homes on the donation table). To get back to the mirror/dresser, it had no place in our current house and for 8 years has been sitting up on the attic landing collecting dust and just being a place where we piled stuff.  So I decided to donate it to the charity furniture shop. And to be honest, when we took it apart to get it into the car, it was clear that it wasn't in great shape, it needs some repairs.  The charity shop took it but were a bit dubious - I hope it can find a loving new owner who will fix it up and enjoy it, I hope if they can't sell things that they at least give them to someone else and not throw them out. But I'm glad it's out of the house - if nothing else, we had a lot of trouble getting all the heavy pieces down all the stairs and into the car so better to do it now than in 10 years when we are even more feeble.

We went to check on the caravan in the storage yard today, and then DH took me to Bramble Patch in Weedon, probably one of the UK's larger quilt stores although modest by American standards.  I was looking for a replacement fabric for my Australian BOM kit  quilt border.  I looked carefully at all the offerings and mentally shortlisted about six of them.  I was just starting my second pass around when one of the staff started following me and trying to 'help' by asking lots of questions and pulling out unsuitable bolts of fabric. It was very distracting and she really wasn't taking the hint that I didn't want the help.  So I settled on the safest choice instead of taking a chance on something a bit more interesting, but I still hope the ecru floral I have chosen (on the right in the pic) is more interesting than the bland background fabric (on the left) that came in the kit.  The pink floral protruding from the bit of pieced quilt is what the scalloped border will be made out of, which is appliqued on top of the border fabric. I would have loved to get something more romantic, like a faded pink chintz, or barely-there stripe, but they didn't have anything like that.

I put away the re-homed red fabrics and the pile of FQs this week and have realised that my fabric collection now exceeds my available shelf space.  I think the last few years I have been taking in more fabric than I have been using up, partly because a lot of my stash is so old now that it never seems to go with anything.  I should probably pull out a lot of old stuff and donate it to Project Linus.  But energised by the mini-clearout, I actually got out a couple of the quilts I quilted on the frame, pressed and trimmed them, and sewed their binding onto one side by machine.  I finished the smallest one completely as it is only a tabletopper panel I added some borders to, but it looks cute in the hall.

I tried out an online cross stitching Zoom call this week.  I was stitching on the first of a 16-part Stitch-Along being published in CrossStitcher Magazine.  As you may have gathered, I have a weakness for houses in all forms, and this is a sampler of 16 typical British architectural buildings.  So instead of sensibly finishing the Little House Sampler that has been on the backburner for a couple of years while I did the Australian BOM, I have started a new project. As you do.  I don't need a second house sampler so I am going to turn this one into a little book instead.

I don't think the other Zoom participants are my tribe though, they were like English Channel swimmers compared to me paddling in the shallows with a bucket and spade.  Several of them were working on enormous projects fully three feet wide, they track their number of stitches on iPads that tell them what percent they are done and their estimated finish date, they have huge collections of patterns and projects, they were sitting in front of complicated needlework frames with specialist lights.  And here's me just holding my little bit of canvas in my hand.  And I was going backwards for part of it after realising that I had been using the wrong colour for a while. Just a dabbler, that's me :)

As it has warmed up a bit outside, my dollshouse room is no long so uninvitingly chilly, so I went down to work on the porch lights a bit.  I've decided to keep it simple, and found a bit of old handrail which has a channel along the bottom to hide the wires of the bulbs.  So I drilled a hole through and glued the bulbs and wires in, and drilled out the bases of three of the Christmas light fixtures.  Since taking these photos, I have painted the handrail part black, and glued on the Christmas fixture with silicon glue (so that I can remove the top part if I ever need to get at the bulb.  Then I will feed the wires through pre-drilled holes in the wall and glue the other end of the handrail bit to the wall.  The wires will be extended either with copper tape or more wire, and connected to the transformer to light the bulbs.

I also finished the Tilda Club tool belt this week. I was a bit skeptical about this when I first opened the packet, but actually I think it might be pretty useful.  It's quite comfortable to wear, and the elastic loops are loose enough that it's easy to get the tools in and out.  I have quite a limited cutting space and I am constantly losing my rotary cutter, pencil, scissors etc. because I have put fabric down on top of them. This way everything will stay to hand. As well as being stiffened with wadding and woven interfacing, there is a piece of Bosal foam in the back section to keep it all fairly rigid. The belt is adjustable to you can wear it higher or lower depending on what's comfortable.

A bit of acquisition this week: some matching sewing tools I stumbled across on Amazon after seeing the scissor holder in a magazine.  The scissors aren't very sharp so I substituted a pair of my own snips after taking this picture. It's handy that the sheath and scissors are connected - a bit like a scissors fob but actually being useful.

Now that the calendar has changed to February, it feels more than ever that Japan is looming on the horizon.  Yesterday I was feeling a bit panicky and anxious about it - which I know must seem ridiculous since it is something I am choosing to do, but I tend to be quite a worrier about details: what to take, what not to take, what are the rules, what is the etiquette, what if I am taking too many bags etc. etc.  I am slowly working through my To-Do list, like buying some bits of clothing, a Japanese SIM card, hiring a pocket wifi etc.  I think what triggered the worry session was trying to choose craft projects to take with me, and completely dithering about how many to take, how much things weigh, will I have time at the language school or be too tired in the evenings, will the light be too bad, what if I don't take enough things to do....  so far I have packed a little cross stitch kit which I am still second-guessing myself on as the chart is fairly complicated and maybe the little scissors I have packed will get confiscated even though they comply with the TSA and international guidelines of having short blades. I have also ordered some embroidery floss and prepped some of the quasi-redwork panels that came in the vintage-style wallhanging kit I bought in Paducah, because that is mostly backstitch and would be easy to do in poor light or hanging out in the living room of the shared house.  So I just need to choose a knitting project now - usually I take socks or gloves travelling because they are small and simpler, but for longer trips like this one I usually take a shawl because you get more knitting time out of one ball of lace yarn.  Thing is, I already have about 20 shawls and don't really need any more.  Sweaters are out because they require too much yarn (bulk and weight).  Maybe a lacy pair of socks?

As a palate cleanser, I sewed up a quick little trinket tray from this tutorial, using some Japanese fabric.  It folds flat and will be useful for corraling small items in my hotel and shared house rooms.

I've also started trying to come up with some gifts to take with me but I'm not there yet.  I've watched several Youtube videos on the giftgiving culture in Japan, which has a lot of rules.  The main advice is something consumable from your country, and that the packaging is much more important than the actual contents.  I ordered some individual Yorkshire tea packets, some cellophane bags and some UK stickers to see what they would look like combined into a little gift.  I think I need a taller bag so there is more of a 'top' to it, and a more impressive ribbon - I put two packets in but maybe I should put three.  These will be goodwill gifts to give to neighbours, teachers, maybe fellow students, but I don't think they look sufficiently attractive yet.

All of a sudden, the days are staying lighter for longer, and we have a nice show of snowdrops out in the garden. Meanwhile the daffodils have started to push up long green leaves, and the magnolia tree has some growing buds. It is starting to feel like spring is just around the corner.

If you wait long enough then you don't have to do it

 This week I tackled some of the glory holes in my sewing room that I mentioned in the previous post.  For example, I had about 15 big plastic sacks containing either fabric collections, WIPs or planned projects - none of which were well labelled, everything was jumbled together and it was all in a relatively inaccessible corner cupboard.  I dragged it all out bag by bag to evaluate.  The fabric collections were pretty easy - I printed A4 labels to slip into the bags to identify them.  The purchased kits were similarly labelled.  Planned projects were more of a minefield, and I made some decisions.  I am no longer going to make the Piece O'Cake designs 'Aunt Millie's Garden' applique quilt that I've been collecting red fabrics for over 10 or more years - I've done my one enormous needleturn applique quilt and I think now that I don't want to make another.  So all those red fabrics got re-homed.  The big lengths of yardage I bought for two Stack N Whack quilts around 1998 went into the backings pile - it's been years since my Stack N Whack phase and I don't even like those fabrics much any more.  I put for recycling the massive binder of handouts from my first ever sampler quilt c. 1994, I don't even have that quilt now and there are much better sources for accurate block patterns nowadays should I ever want to make another.  So now I have a corner cupboard with well-labelled distinct project bags and I have updated my quilt queue list accordingly - it felt good to cross off some ancient unwanted projects.  I made new labelled bags for the four or five newer project accumulations that were on the floor in boxes or trays and cleared them off the floor.  I put away the massive block holder I made for the Australian BOM because those blocks are all sewn into sashed rows now.  I have pulled out the teetering tower of 'FQs waiting to be put away' which was constantly falling over, and have put them on my ironing surface so that I really will put them away (I haven't yet though).  It's a start, there is still of stuff that would benefit from being sorted out.

I finished the dresden plates for the corners of the Australian BOM and sewed them into the corners.  I can't do much more without finding a replacement fabric for the inner and outer border.  The drab tonal that came with the kit doesn't appeal to me at all.  I've spent quite a while searching online and got DH to take me to the local quilt shop, but I haven't found anything that goes with these faded sugary pastels.  Next time we go to check on the caravan, we will stop into Bramble Patch in Daventry which is a much bigger quilt shop with a lot more fabric, hopefully I can find something there.

At the sewing retreat, I pieced two small panels of Tilda squares for the Tilda Club Sewing tool organiser that arrived recently.  I carefully pieced the panels so that the fabrics featuring ladies all had their heads facing upwards.  This week I sewed on the contrast fabrics and cut out the pouch shapes.  Did I sew the contrast fabric onto the side of the panel so that the heads would face upwards? No I did not.  I don't feel like piecing and quilting more panels so I am just going to live with upside down ladies. There are some sideways ladies on the back panel but at least they are hidden.

An acquaintance was celebrating her diamond wedding anniversary, and I made her a card on my Brother Scan'n'Cut using one of the downloadable projects and a printed paper I got in the Colemans closing down sale.

I went to a Lace Day where I finished off the first Bruges Lace flower from the Sutton book. It's okay but not great: I had some tension issues both with my passives and with the filling (too many twists) and made a mess of some of the sewings (I hate sewings).  I've made a start on Flower 2 which is fairly similar to 1, hopefully it will come out better.

And I finished the cross stitch bookmark which I started during caravan holidays this summer and only worked on occasionally because I found the narrow band physically hard to hold - I posted earlier the crude frame I made to stretch it out.  Plus I found the counting hard.  So some of my cross stitches are not well formed.  But overall I'm pleased with the effect, the colours are quite striking. The kit came with blue felt to finish off the back, and the tassel.

We're allowed to reveal our recent test bag makes now - this is a pattern by Mrs H designs for her upcoming bag retreat.  It was a straightforward sew once the beta bugs were identified in the pattern - one of those has resulted in my handle being much too long so I need to shorten it.  The fabric is fun - I got it in Nippori fabric town in Tokyo on our 2019 trip.  I wasn't planning to visit Nippori this time but now I feel like I want to get more cute bag fabric. And it was a joy to use my new industrial on this - on the final top stitching around the upper edge, it chomped through multiple layers even where almost half an inch thick (where the strap tabs are in the seam) without even changing sound, no straining whatsoever. I'm still keeping my fingers well away from the needle.

I'm enjoying making bags but have a new issue of an ever-growing collection which I don't actually use.  I haven't carried a handbag for decades apart from the occasional business trip or funeral.  Everything goes in my fairly smart Mia Tui backpack which is much better for my back.  I prefer to sew organisers or tote bags because I might at least use those.  But I'm learning a lot from sewing bags even though I don't use them much. People will probably think 'why don't you sell them?' but in my experience selling handmades is a total PITB, people barely want to pay the cost of materials much less labour, and if you are selling it then you feel like it has to be perfect which mine rarely are, and I would worry about how they will stand up in use etc.  I sometimes give them as gifts, such as to my m-i-l who appreciates them.

I tried out one of the UK Quilt Guild's new virtual lecture series today: a talk by American quilter Lori Dickman on speedy solutions for cutting and organising your scrap stash - tickets were £8.  It took the form of a Zoom call with almost 300 participants. They made the strange decision to open the room 30 minutes early, resulting in a constant arrival of people many of whom were having problems with their camera, or their mike, or both, and telling their husband all about it without muting, we heard one husband reading out their wifi password, somebody else was listening to the radio or TV...I gave up and turned everyone down until the speaker arrived. Being American (sorry to Americans) we had the inevitable 15 minutes of self-promotion of her website, books and courses before getting to the actual talk.  Very much like Bonnie Hunter's scrap system so I don't know who came up with it first, or perhaps minds just think alike.  It's funny what different ideas people have about what constitutes a scrap.  Lori will cut out anything leftover from a project including cutting squares as big as 12.5 inches - if I had that much fabric left then it would get folded and stored in my FQ collection.  Unlike me, she actually uses all her cut out squares for projects which is what her books are about.  One suggestion she made which I had never thought of was to use our collection of speciality rulers to cut scraps: cut out hexies, Dresden plate segments, tumblers etc.  I might actually use those whereas I rarely seem to use my scrappy squares. Food for thought.  She sorts and stores her squares by size, but tries to organise them into darks, mediums and lights within each size box.  I've been storing mine by size and colour and hadn't worried about value apart from keeping very lights separate.  If you quilt - do you keep your scraps? How do you organise them?  Do you use them?

 

A sewing week

 I haven't touched the dollshouse project this week as I have spent a lot of my time sewing, and then I was away Friday-Sunday for a sewing retreat.

I spent most of a couple of days sewing up another bag test, this time for a medium-sized handbag with strap. I can't show that one (it turned out fine though), but I can now show the tote bag I tested a few weeks ago since that pattern has since been released. It's a straightforward box-corner tote with mesh pockets inside.  I used some of the vinyl I bought from Manmade Fabrics at the October retreat, which sewed up beautifully on my new industrial machine.

My eyesight is distinctly middleaged nowadays, but I did notice on this week's test bag that my seams looked a bit fuzzy like chenille.  Finding and putting on my 3.5x magnification readers revealed that every stitch puncture had forced out a little tuft of fabric thread or stabiliser.  So that seemed a bit odd, so I took the needle out of the industrial for the first time and had a look at it with the same magnifiers - size 26!!!!  you could probably sew leather boots with a needle that thick.  I have swapped it for a considerably smaller needle which is behaving much better.  I had sort of vaguely thought that the dealer had left the machine all set up ready for me to sew with, it had never occurred to me to check the needle he had put in.  Or perhaps left in, if that is the needle the factory installed.

I finished the little cross stitched pincushion  I was working on last week.  It's cute but probably not incredibly useful. Nice to finish something small in cross stitch though instead of the larger projects that drag on for years. I had the little pair of vintage scissors in my stash, I don't remember where I got them.

At the sewing retreat, I spent Friday working through Months 19 and 20 of the Australian BOM - which was basically cutting sashing strips and stitching them to all the blocks, and then cutting the in-between patches that join the blocks together.  It needed a lot of concentration as there are multiple sashing colours and block sizes, and being a kit meant I only had just enough fabric and hardly any left over so I didn't want to make a mistake. So it was a good thing to do at the retreat - apart from a large stream of admirers who caught sight of the embroidered blocks and wanted to see them, and then brought their friends to see them, who brought their friends etc.  None of them had ever seen anything like the style of this design and were amazed that it was all done by hand and not by a fancy embroidery machine (oh, and there was a group of about 10 ladies who had all brought their £15,000 sewing/ embroidery  machines for a class so about £150,000 in one corner of the room which made it look like the NASA control room for shuttle launches).  Two of  the admirers were so enamoured that they are going to sign up for the BOM as well because it's still available.  I pieced the centre of the quilt and the borders but didn't join them together yet as I want to find a substitute fabric for the rather dull one in the kit. Also I haven't finished my Dresden plates yet which will go in the corners. It's so wonderful to have this project finally turning into a quilt and not just a pile of untrimmed embroidered blocks.

Friday night I sewed a quick cover for my Featherweight as I had completely failed to find the nice patchwork cover I made for it several years ago, despite combing through my sewing room twice (although I found lots of other glory holes - that room definitely needs a tidy up).  My Featherweight was once again much more popular than me amongst the retreatees, many people came to coo over it and tell me how their mother/grandmother/auntie etc. used to have one and how they are worth £600 now in America. Many threats were made about disappearing the machine off to a new home but disappointingly noone offered me £600 for it.

Saturday morning I sewed together some simple patchwork panels cut from a Tilda 'Hometown' charm pack for a tool caddy but couldn't go any further because I need more supplies.  That left me with the Edyta Sitar Winter Village blocks that I have worked on at a few retreats.  While cute, they are a bit tedious because each house takes about three times longer to cut out all the squares and rectangles in the listed sizes than to actually sew.  I got bored with that pretty quickly and decided to turn the remainder of the Tilda charm pack into pinwheels with the help of some linen-print tonals I bought from the on-site supplier. I don't know what I'll do with them, but I have more Tilda fabric I could sash them with. I was able to make 16 x 8inch pinwheels.

I also bought some one-metre cuts of tone-on -tone solids in pretty colours because it was only £5 a metre and they will be useful for lots of things.

Then it was back to the House blocks.  I laid them out on the floor of an adjacent conference room on both Saturday and Sunday to choose fabric for subsequent blocks, and was able to finish  as far as 21 of the 23 houses, and to cut block kits for the remaining two houses.  And that is in both the large size blocks and the miniature house blocks I am also making. So 42 out of 46 houses done.

The designer used the mini blocks for a separate wall quilt but I would kind of like to work them into the main quilt somehow, perhaps as a border.  The main quilt itself isn't very big, so there is room to add the little houses on as a border.  I'll have to have a play on my design wall.

I took my usual two travel knitting projects with me to the hotel to work on in the evenings - the Paducah lace shawl and the Lace scarf.  It was the final weekend of the new year's sumo tournament in Tokyo so I was watching the matches on my tablet while I was knitting. Exciting to think I will be there myself soon, and I'm hoping to get a ticket for the May tournament in Tokyo as well as touring around the sumo district.

I don't think I said that I finally finished the Elden Ring video game a few days before Christmas.  228 hours of gameplay following a 100% walkthrough as my guide.  Although the last 20 or so hours were just switching up my build and grinding levels trying to beat the gimmicky final boss fight which was an annoying finish to an otherwise excellent gaming experience. It's an unbelievably huge game, I never would have found several of the areas on my own without the walkthrough to help me.  It kept me busy from March until December and was something I could share with my son (although he 'finished' the game in about 45 hours - so he missed a lot of the optional areas).  So I don't regret the time spent although I can't help thinking what else I could have done in 228 hours.  That's like 9.5 days, or almost 20 if you only count waking hours.  I've now moved on to another souls-like game called 'Prey' which is set in a space station devastated by an alien invasion but it's not nearly as good and the visuals are quite monotonous apart from the occasional space vista out the windows.

I have been spending some time since Christmas trying to rescue a quilt I made for my son maybe 12 years ago.  He uses it a lot and had taken it to his new apartment, but mentioned that it had some loose threads and maybe I should take a look at it.  When I got my hands on it, I was amazed to see almost the entire back of the quilt covered in big loops of thread detached from the quilting.  At first I thought perhaps he had just popped a few stitches with use, but it's the entire quilt. I think what has happened is that the Bottom Line polyester thread I used in the bobbin, which is a very strong thread, has just sawn through the top cotton thread on all the broader parts of the motif where the stitches were a bit longer.  I normally use King Tut as my top thread, which is a high quality thread, but I can't remember what I used on this particular quilt.  It's rather alarming, as I quilt all my quilts on the frame with Bottom Line in the bobbin, it's recommended because it's a fine thread and you get more on the bobbin and it beds into the stitches well.  I haven't noticed anything like this happening on any of my other quilts but then none of them have had the hard use and washes that my son's quilt has received.  So I'm trying to unpick the existing all-over quilting design to remove all the loops, and then I will re-quilt it at the sitdown machine.  It's quite a pain to do, the hanging loops are obviously easy but then the stitches get smaller into the points of the design motif and those have remained firm and are hard to unpick. It's going to be a long job I think.

Mild panic ensues

 I'd been sort of vaguely thinking I had four months before I go to Japan, since it's January and I'm going in April.  But I realised today that in fact it is less than 3 months until I go.  Cue mild panicking.  So today I've made a shopping list of bits I want to pick up beforehand, like ordering new socks for when I have to remove my shoes indoors, and I've spent a few hours looking at destinations around Tokyo.  There is just so much that you could see, it's difficult to narrow it down to a short list that isn't going to burn me out by the end of the first week.  Plus Tokyo is so huge, you can potentially spend an awful lot of time on the train.

I've been working on the four Dresden plates for the corners of my Australian BOM quilt.  They are fussy cut from floral fabric so that a secondary pattern (of your choice) will emerge when the petals are sewn together.  After consulting my Australian expert Chooky, I created a couple of see-thru plastic templates with match marks and set to tracing petals onto my fabric.

Then I spent quite a lot of time gluing the fabric onto card plate templates, and assembling those into four plates glued to the fabric background.  I've just started stitching by machine to join the plates to each other and to the background. I also took my courage to the sticking point and trimmed all my embroidered blocks down to size - doublechecking all the measurements. Hopefully I've done it right.

I've spent some time this week getting the dollshouse porch ready for its roof  by fitting more clapboard, sizing up supports etc. But I want to install the lights before the porch is in the way.  When I looked at porch lights, they were ridiculously expensive at over £15 each.  So what I actually ordered was a cheap pack of plastic lamp posts intended for christmas villages which turned up yesterday.  I've already got some lightbulbs, so I'm going to make my own porch lights.

The Bruge Lace flower number 1 is coming along fine apart from a mistake early on, for which I had to compensate by skipping a pin on the first petal.

I've been working a small bit of cross stitch (supposed to resemble sashiko embroidery) to make into a pincushion using a free kit from CrossStitcher magazine. This has proven a challenge to my inability to count, and there has been a fair bit of ripping back. I'm very slow at cross stitch so this little scrap has taken me several hours of TV time.

And I made a book.  This is a result of falling down an internet rabbithole which started with me wondering if there was a journal where you could move the pages, but which wasn't a ring binder.  Which led me to the discovery of the hitherto unknown world of disc binding, which led to various Youtube videos on making your own disc bound journal, which led to me ordering some A5 disc-punched pages and a set of discs.  I spray painted one of the pages black, and scanned it into my Brother Scan N Cut to create a cutting template for a disc-punched page - you can buy your own mushroom punch but they are about £70, so no thank you.  I used the Brother Canvas Workspace design software to design a cover and divider pages, and cut them out on the machine from scrapbook cardstock.  And I invested in a cheap laminator off Amazon to laminate the cover/dividers but avoiding the punched out area.  Then I assembled it with the purchased pages and discs into a little booklet.  I'm experimenting with tracking some of the many things I am trying to get done like decluttering, quilt binding etc. and some of those regular jobs like backing up your PC, hoovering, and so forth. I don't know if the experiment will be a success, but I enjoyed making the little book.

My little laminator

My friend Anita sent me a picture of her Chinese bed with the cushions I made for her - doesn't it look amazing? She's doing a roombox.

Did I mention I had joined the local U3A (University of the Third Age - an international educational organisation for seniors)?  I joined to see if any of the special interest groups would be appealing.  There is a Monday afternoon zoom call for crafters that I am going to try, it alternates between needlework and card crafting.  There are also some walking groups that might be good when the weather gets better.