Snow bound

It's been a strange week.  Weatherwise, the Beast from the East brought days of snow and sub-zero temperatures, very unusual for this part of England and for this time of year.  I don't think I've ever known it to be so cold for so long since I arrived almost 30 years ago. Normally I would have been struggling to get to work with my two mile walk through the snow, but Monday night I went down quite suddenly with a rotten head cold and I've been home sick ever since.  With the terrible weather, there was no attraction to go out even if I had felt well enough so it was sort of a mixed blessing.  DH was home as well on Thursday and Friday after his journey to work took four hours on Wednesday (normally one hour) due to accidents and road closures.  So we were all snowbound together like being shut up in some big log cabin.  Luckily we had enough food and milk for the first few days and of course lots of hobbies to do.  I was feeling on the mend by Thursday night and if the weather had been better I might have gone back to work on Friday, but the scene outside killed any motivation.  I even had to stop washing paintbrushes in the basement sink because the external waste pipe had frozen solid and the water wouldn't drain any more.  It felt like a long extended limbo, punctuated by lots of nose blowing  :)

The cat had the right idea for the weather.

But suddenly it's all thawing and the temperatures are rising fast.  Some green is showing on the lawn after days of being blanketed with white - I just hope we haven't lost too many plants.  We went out today in the car for the first time in days, to do some shopping with DS who has just been offered his first proper job. He'll be working in London with an accountancy firm on their graduate trainee scheme starting in a few weeks.  So it was off to the mall for a new suit and all the accompaniments that go with it, with DS being visibly torn between his loathing of shopping and his slightly terrified recognition that he will need all these things soon.  I'm very proud of him but secretly a bit sorry for him as well to have to leave his relatively carefree student life behind and join the daily working grind of adult life.  But on the other hand I don't want him still living here in his 30s!

So apart from the first few days of being ill, I've been spending a lot of time down in the basement working on the Japanese dollshouse.  I've been trying to keep the fan heater running a lot more frequently, even though it's annoying, in case the cold down there contributed to my illness in the first place.

My trolley arrived (Amazon were seemingly unhampered by the snow) and DS put it together for me.  It's holding all the tools and paints brilliantly, leaving me much more working area.

After doing a couple of the new chapters, I became impatient with the partwork approach of doing a wall (or maybe just part of a wall) plus a bit of furniture in each instalment.  This results in a lot of instructions such as for example leaving 2mm gaps when you are gluing on rafters, because a couple of chapters later the next wall has to fit into that 2mm gap.  But inevitably you didn't leave enough gap, or too much gap. Multiply this by three sides on every wall and ceiling, and no wonder the other bloggers were complaining that nothing fits together properly.  I gave up on that approach, and jumped ahead to cherry pick all the chapters which had the walls, floors and ceilings for the ground floor so that I could work on all structural elements sequentially.  While raising the risk of losing tiny bits of not-yet-required furniture or shutters, it meant that I could trial fit all the walls and floors that were meant to fit together and adjust notches or sand off excess as required, and see exactly where gaps needed to be left in decoration.  It became fairly intensive as I ended up working on around eight chapters at the same time but I eventually achieved a complete ground floor structure.  So now I can go back and sweep up the extraneous bits of decoration and furniture one chapter at a time.  I have little piles of partly-opened chapters all around the room with numbered post-its stuck on each one waiting for me to get to them.

I really like this entrance hallway, with the Mt Fuji window and its shoji sliding rice paper window screens.  I added some lasercut paper decoration I found at Colemans on the outside of the rice paper.  The overhead opening is awaiting the stairs which get constructed later.  The tatami mats in the corner are the first of many to be built  throughout the house, you make them out of real tatami so not exactly in scale but they feel very authentic.  The cabinet was built over two chapters and had especially fiddly sliding doors but I got there in the end.  The two beckoning cats are both souvenirs from our trip to Japan a few years ago.

The spa is still under construction.  The round wall mural is actually a coaster which we bought in Japan but it looks good here.  The decorative ceiling gets built many chapters later so I've decided to wait for that to turn up.

The kitchen has a ceiling now, another shelving unit, and both a sliding outside door, and sliding doors into the central hallway.

A picture for scale, and showing one of the tiny spa buckets that are in the kit, you have to wind wire around them, I've got another half dozen to do.

I'm sorry if you are reading this blog for the quilting or lacemaking because there has been very little of that this week!  I did pin my Snowman Quilt  up on the design wall to see how much more I need to quilt.  It's probably about 75% done now. Ironically it's been very seasonal this week.

I did a bit of work on my Bucks point hexagonal edging but it was halfhearted.  In the evenings I've been knitting on my GAA Afghan twisted cable edging, I am slowly approaching the final corner.  And I've moved on to the next little ball of yarn on my 10-stitch triangle shawl.

So it's back to work tomorrow for the first time in a week, if I can remember how to get there and what it is I actually do...