Regular readers may remember I bought this on Italian eBay almost exactly three years ago. It was originally issued by De Agostini as a very expensive partwork, and published in Italian, Japanese and apparently Korean. I found out about it when a finished example was featured in a British dollshouse magazine, and when I looked it up online, I found I could buy a complete set in Italian for about one tenth of the original price. We were in the middle of house renovations at that point so the kits have been sitting in the attic ever since. Meanwhile we visited Japan ourselves in 2016 so I now have a ton of photos to draw on as visual references. The main stumbling block now is my inability to read Italian but I am placing great hopes on Google Translate and explanatory photos in the instructions.
As a preliminary step, I am hunting on eBay for a cheap small kitchen table that will fit into my dollshouse room to serve as a temporary work/building platform. I can do the messy stuff in the unfinished basement room, but I can't leave the dollshouse in that room as it's really damp and I think the dollshouse would probably warp. This build will likely take months (possibly over a year) so I think it needs to be located in the much-less-damp dollshouse room. Unlike my previous big dollshouse kit builds, I don't think I am going to blog this one specifically as the construction has already been well documented by a couple of other bloggers here and here. So you may have to put up with the occasional post on this blog!
You may have noticed I slipped in an extra post this week about how I made my travel lace pillow, and on my day off this week I moved my Bucks Point edging onto the new pillow. Yesterday I worked on my edging for a few hours at the Nene Lacemakers Saturday meeting, and the new pillow seems to be working really well. The padded surface has a nice feel to it, I have enough room for my bobbins and the roller pillow is holding pins well. I received several predictions that I won't be able to make a new pricking that exactly fits around the roller so it seems likely that I will have to leapfrog my original two prickings instead, but that's fine. The new pillow, when folded up, is so compact and easy to carry that as I headed out the door to go to the meeting, I had a strong sense that I was forgetting something - because normally when I travel to lace events I have a huge bulky bag of 24-inch pillow and accoutrements that makes it hard to even get out the door. This new pillow just hangs over my arm like a 1950s handbag! ! The club members seemed to like it anyway.
Also this week I finished my Knitted Doll. As well as replacing the buttons with smaller buttons that I found at the haberdashery, I finished a two-part playsuit and a hat, so she has a change of clothes from her original dress and cardi. I've used up almost all my four colours of cotton yarn that I bought for this project so I am going to stop there.
I've offered her as a gift to a knitting friend for her toddler, recognising that the toddler is probably too young to manipulate the buttons and clothing yet but Mum could help with that. I've sewn the buttons on very securely and the toddler is over two years old now so I think the doll is sufficiently play-safe.
Today I have cut some binding strips and I'm planning to machine the binding on to my Blue and White China Quilt then I can stitch the other side of the binding down by hand in the evenings this week.
I've been tackling a few outstanding items from my projects list (I have lists for everything because my memory isn't very good) so yesterday I spent a few hours cleaning up and re-waxing the antique sewing machine I bought a few months ago. The beautiful machine is now on display in the upstairs hallway where I can admire it every day. The wooden cover looks a lot better after a clean and wax but it is going to have to go into the attic for storage because I think it will get damaged if left in the hallway. And last night I sat down to re-spangle a bunch of old bobbins, something I've been putting off for months. I get almost all my bobbins secondhand, and some of them come with some pretty weird spangles, or the wire ends are sticking out, or they've used some huge inappropriate centre bead like a 1.5inch crystal drop, or there is no spangle at all. [The spangle is the ring of beads at the bottom of the bobbin that adds some weight and prevents the bobbin from rolling.] I went through my two pillows in use and mended various spangles on those bobbins, then I sat down with a box of all the other bobbins needing attention and worked through about half of them in front of the tv last night. I'm not the world's best spangler but even my attempts are better than what was on them.
The unusually long cold snap continues here, it's been hovering around 3 degrees C for several days with heavy frosts every morning. But my garden is now bedecked with several clumps of pretty snowdrops, some pink hellebores, and a couple of primroses are trying to bloom despite being voraciously attacked as usual by slugs. The magnolia tree is covered in buds which promise much bloom in a few months, and the corkscrew hazel tree has catkins all over it. Meanwhile the rosemary bush at the front of the house, which is supposed to be a Mediterranean plant, has decided to bloom which is just crazy. Maybe it felt left out!
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