Another year - who knows what it will bring?

 I have a weekly virtual meet-up with some lacemaking friends, and a couple of them were talking about the vaccine being rolled out the UK.  They both seemed to think that we will see a visible difference by summer, one of them thought by Easter.  I don't know if I am being overly pessimistic or just realistic, but I am doubtful we will see much change over the entire year in terms of restrictions and precautions.  I suppose for the vulnerable shelterers who have been trapped in their home, a vaccine may mean they can emerge to greater freedom.  DH and I checked one of the many online vaccinne calculators which showed us at over 23 million down in the queue, and likely not getting a vaccine until June at the earliest. 

Anyway, enough of this doom and gloom - how was your Christmas and new year's? Today I got up a little earlier (8:20am instead of 9am) to start phasing back into my work schedule for Monday (boo, hiss). I've also started taking down Christmas decorations and piling them in the front room to await packing and storage. It's been a very relaxing break, with lots of crafting and television watching.  .

I've done some more work on the Japanese dollshouse outer structures.  I tiled the entranceway roof to match the main roof, using leftover scraps of tiling and decoration from the main build.  The round decorations at the peaks are actually the wheeled section cut from a plastic toy truck bead found  in my bits stash.

I wanted to have a little lean-to outside the kitchen door, but it had to be sized to still allow the hinged front section to open fully.  I played around with the opening section and some masking tape until I could see what I had to work with, then sketched out a simple lean-to.  I built the side wall first then added a roof.

After filling in the end wall, I could start tiling with leftover wooden shingles from the main build, so that the roof matches the other overhangs.

In between rounds of shingling, I looked through my 1/24th scale kits for furniture to use in the lean-to. The house is an odd scale at 1:20, but I thought these two inexpensive Model Village kits would work because a lean-to could conceivably have odds and ends of old furniture.  The shelf unit is meant to be a deeper shop counter, but I cut it down to make it more shallow and added more shelves.  

Shingling complete, and the 'window' fitted with angled privacy slats

The finished lean-to construction, with furniture included for effect.  I've added a few knives to the table, perhaps they do their butchery outside.

The privacy wall in situ, with the lean-to visible in the background.

With the wall now constructed, I could start thinking about the garden.  We saw so many lovely gardens in Japan and I took literally hundreds of pictures.  But the constraints are severe here:  it's quite small and shallow, an inn needs a driveway, I don't have the depth to create a convincing water feature, and the garden has to lift away from the main house to allow the house to be opened up.  I cut some lining paper to fit the garden area and started roughing out ideas.  You may remember the bridge was bought several months ago at a garden centre gift shop.  I looked at a lot of our travel photos for ideas, and online as well.  I really wanted to do a proper tea house and surrounding garden but there isn't room.

I decided on a driveway (the brown in the photo) without a turning circle - perhaps the inn was built before cars were in common usage.  To tie the inn into the garden, I will have a demarcation in the gravel in front of the main entrance (the dark grey semi circle).  There will be a walkway leading away through the gap into the wall around to the servant's entrance.  For the garden portion, I am going with a dry garden - we saw a lot of those as well and the features can be shallow. There will be a small viewing pavilion in the corner.  I transferred my main sketch to the baseboard and painted in the areas which will be covered in scatter/texture later on, and cut my sketch up to use as a pattern to cut the foamboard you can see in the picture.  Since taking the picture, I have trimmed the foamboard in places and given it a base coat of dark green paint and glued it in.  DH and I also went on a rock-collecting expedition a few days ago, trawling the edges of local car parks and construction sites for potential garden feature candidates.

I tried out my Christmas present of my Janome ruffler foot on the skirt of a dress I'm sewing.  It's quite a neat little gadget, with an arm that creates tucks as you sew.  It seems a bit temperamental: I ruffled two identical strips of fabric and one came out longer than the other. But I think that's because I had overlocked the edge first and the overlocking was interfering with the smooth feeding of the fabric.

I finished knitting the mini bunny rabbits, then sewed them up and stuffed them this week.

I'm not that happy with them. I think I went down too many needle sizes and consequently some of the knitting is very tight.  The heads are completely different sizes, and the finishing up could be better (I think I might give them a steam which should help).  Now that I understand the pattern, I have started over again with the next size up of needle (2.5mm for this DK yarn) and am trying to do a better job second time around.

I finished my pink capelet off with an extremely girly ribbon bow - it's lockdown, who's going to see me anyway? I feel a bit Victorian in it.  It's surprisingly warm as well.

Look what I got in the post just before Christmas. They are purportedly Japanese needlework scissors, I thought they were very pretty when I saw them online, but I was picturing little thread snips - these are actually quite a bit bigger than I was expecting.  Still pretty though.  Hopefully my giant man hands will fit into those dainty loops.

I've started a small Torchon lace strip to decorate a Christmas ornament kit I acquired a few months ago.  The kit has two MDF shapes (a Christmas light, and a bell) with scrapbooking papers to cover them and some ribbons and things. The idea is that you work a strip of simple lace to go around the MDF shape.  I couldn't remember how to do Torchon lace since I've only been doing Bucks for some years now, but I got one of my reference books out and made a start.  There are no instructions but by trial and error I think I have now got the correct number of bobbin pairs and am working the correct stitches.  I'll just cut off the starting inch and a half of messy mistakes to hide the evidence when I'm finished.

This week I also tackled a long-standing annoyance which was my Youtube subscription list.  I had about 250 subscriptions and the notifications had long since ceased to work - I've tried everything I could find online to get notifications turned back on  but perhaps I've just exceeded the viable number of subscriptions. Anyway, I could never find anything and it was all completely disorganised.  I stumbled across a Chrome extension called PocketTube.  It is free although you can become a Patreon to unlock additional features if you so desire.  About 30 minutes of work and my Youtube subscriptions are now organised into clickable subject folders that even show me how many unwatched videos they contain, and I have unsubscribed to some of the chaff.  Much better.

Happy new year everyone!!