Concertina success

I have been having lots of trouble with the new Concertina. One of the buttons was sticking cause it to play a drone note all the time. I was also havng troible with keeping enough air to play properly.

After a lot of effort involving stripping down the instrument on about 10 occasions, I seem to have fixed the problem and it now plays cleanly. It seems that even when it sounded OK, the key involved was still leaking air because, now that I have sorted the problem, the concertina is completely airtight and I am not running out of the precious stuff quite so often.

Maybe now I can concentrate on playing it again because I was being put off by the problem.

Valerie finishes two puzzles in a week!

She had a great time doing the first one on her own. This is representation of Victorian life made up as a doll's house.

The second one was supposed to be a project over a few weeks. Valerie's 90 year old father comes round once a week and together they work on a Jigsaw. Now this normally takes them about 4 weeks to complete a 1,000 piece puzzle. However, her Dad had selected a 636 piece puzzle. They completed it in the one sitting! (Don't tell his wife what time they went to bed - grin).

One for me and one for her

I finally finished my next tapestry. This one is a strange one. It is sold as a Brigantia Needlework Inca Cushion Tapestry Kit. However, it is only 7 count mesh and the wool is quite thick. What you do is make a cross stitch rather than a tapestry stitch. A tapestry stitch is when you go from bottom left to top right across a join in the grid (or the other way round). With this one, you do both so you make a cross over every join. This makes for a very thick result. I made a mistake and didn't cotton onto the fact that you have to go the same way all the time; i.e. you must do the bottomleft to top right first everytime. Otherwise the texture is all jumbed. i did this wrong and had to undo a lot of stitches at the beginning.

the other difference is that the pattern on the backing is spot on accurate - you get a proper colour hit on every cross so you get an accurate pattern.


 However, I found it quite boring to do. With the other tapestries that I have done, the picture on the grid is not accurate so you always have to interpret a bit. With this, the thinking is done for you.


Never mind, it has come out very nice and the colours are very rich.


Valerie has just finished another puzzle with her father. They meet every Tuesday night and do a joint puzzle - I meanwhile drink a bottle of wine - grin. This puzzle is of Valerie's favourite place on earth (no not Hawaii) - Lyme Regis.

Valerie finished "Grandad's Workshop"

She really enjoyed doing this jigsaw

Concertina internals

I bought a new concertina recently. It is a 20key C/G Lachenal Anglo if that means anything to you? What it means is that is plays in the key of C and G but has no accidentals. It plays different notes on the draw from the push. The serial number indicates that it was built around 1882 - 1885! Not bad for £300.

 

When it arrived it had a stuck pad so under instruction from the vendor, I opened it up and fixed it. Today, one of the pads stuck so I took the opportunity to takes some photos of the insides. As you can see, it is nicely put together with leather inserts. It obviously has had new pads, thank goodness.

Weather Station

For those of you who don't know, we run a real-time weather station web page from our home web site.

This is based upon a Davis weather station and WeatherDisplay software.

You will need Flash to  see it so no good for you iPad/iPhone users (did I mention that my iPad came on Wednesday!). However, I am working on getting a non-Flash version working soon.

It is available from our One Rose Cottage web site

This is what it looks like

Touching Base

No pictures but an update on where things are.

Valerie and her Dad have finished another jigsaw - no pictures because, after I had processed the photos ready for her Jigsaw photo frame, I deleted all those on my camera before I had copied them over! My jigsaw is also going quire slowly.

I am currently halfway through the cross stitch Inca tapestry. The Evening Star one is more difficult to do - I am making progress but slowly.

Concertina - been a bit on hold this week. I got very depressed about the quality of my instrument. Went for a couple of Lachenal instruments on Ebay and missed them. The next time I will have £325 spare is sometime in May so I have found it hard to keep going on the one I have. Doesn't make sense as it has got me here but...

Tin Whistle. I have spent the practice time this week on the whistke and it is slowly improving. I must sit down and record some videos so that I can benchmark all of this.

I will do some photos and some videos ASAP.