Hibernation

The cold spell not only continues but is predicted to get much worse this coming week.  Parts of our old house are quite cold even with the heating on 24/7 and I am routinely walking around with a cowl and heavy jumper, augmented with a hat and sometimes a jacket when I go down to the basement to work on my dollshouse.  Consequently I just don't feel like doing anything, my biological need to hibernate has obviously kicked in and all's I want to do is stay still, stay warm, and eat lots of sugar  :)

However I have been putting in major time on my Japanese dollshouse, spending hours down there all day on my days off and a few hours each evening.  My DS has started referring to me as the 'basement dweller', as in 'How's the basement dweller tonight?'   As you can see, it is a hive of mess and activity.

I have a bad and longstanding habit of covering every available surface so that I end up actually working on my lap, but I've ordered a cheap rolling trolley off Amazon which should hopefully be coming this week so that I can offload the items I am only using occasionally like the paint bottles. I've also ordered some more clamps as it is becoming obvious that there will be a lot of sanding to fit and clamping on this project.  As it is built in small steps, the potential for small errors to creep in that disrupt later combination with subsequent walls/floors is large although I am trying to keep everything flat and accurate.

The first few days of time were spent rectifying the previous owner's bodge job on Chapters 1-6.  Luckily they used some kind of inferior glue so I was able to break apart the front porch, completely repaint it, then glue it back together.  I also broke out the sliding doors and fixed them so that they actually slide now, and repainted them as well, and repainted the 'cobble' frontage. The lower part of the walls is left unpainted for now as there will be clapboard siding later.

I repainted their kitchen walls and repainted the beams in a darker brown, I had no choice as they had already been painted with a rust brown so I couldn't stain them.  Now that I've moved on to subsequent steps, I've stained the later beams with Georgian medium oak colour, sealed with matt varnish.  In this picture of the kitchen, you can see the dark brown beams on the rear wall, and the stained beams on the left hand wall.  I'm trying to decide which I like better, to do the rest of the house the same.  I think I'm leaning towards the stained beams because the wood grain, although not in scale, looks more lifelike than the flat painted beams.  But staining/varnishing does take more time to dry.

 I waxed the dais in the kitchen to improve the finish and textured the kitchen floor to look like a tamped dirt floor, and repainted the traditional kitchen stove (after prying the glued-on lids off the pots so I could paint them as well).

They had really done a number on the lower section of this kitchen cabinet, I think in despair they had just given up and glued or forced in the drawers and glued in the lower doors which were meant to slide.  I managed to pry their pieces apart without too much breakage, and spent a long time scraping glue out of the sliding grooves and sanding things until it all fit together properly and the doors worked.  I built the top part of the cabinet (with two further sets of sliding doors) in one of the new chapters, then put it all together.  As they had painted the lower half, I had to repaint their half and paint my top half so it all matched, plus I aged the whole cabinet to look well used.  I'm pleased that everything is operational on it now.

The new chapters 8-10 are now focusing on the hallway, including building a three sided traditional entrance, which I've almost finished.  So far I'm taking a couple of chapters at a time, so that I can stain and paint in batches without risking losing things.  I'm using a couple of bargain store baking sheets to store the chapter pieces on.  I'm really enjoying the build, the kit quality is much higher than I had expected, with a lot of pieces precut or pre-routed to size, I can sort of see why the series was so expensive to begin with as it would be a massive job to retro-engineer and assemble all these components into mailable chapter packets.  I've only had one piece that was too short so far, and I was able to cut a replacement from my stash. The instructions are very detailed and I'm starting to recognise some Italian words that are being used frequently like right/left/piece/glue etc. I don't always do it the way they say because sometimes from experience I  know it's better to do things in a different order.  I do feel a bit pressured by having a box sitting next to the table with 100 more chapters in it, but I just need to take it a few at a time.

I'm continuing to knit on my 10-stitch-twist shawl and have just joined on my fourth little ball of sock yarn.  The sides are getting much longer now so one little ball doesn't do a full circuit any more.  I've knit a bit more on the twisted rope edging of my GAA Afghan, I'm on the fourth and final side now so the end is in sight although several feet away.

With all the dollshousing going on, I haven't done any bobbin lace this week and almost no quilting!