I've done a fair bit of work on the Japanese dollshouse this week after work each day. I finished the Tokonoma alcove in the second bedroom. The papier mache 'twig' turned out fairly well, I will likely do the same in the upstairs rooms as well.
Then I started working out how to glue the first floor to the ground floor. The instructions don't tell you to do this, I think perhaps it was intended that each floor remain separate with its own opening front section. But that just seems really unstable to me and inevitably going to damage connecting components like stairways. Of the two bloggers who built this house, one joined hers but the other left hers loose for transporting to shows. The instructions tell you to connect each floor into a unit, on the assumption that each unit will be an identical width/depth, but due to the modular nature of the construction, this assumption is false. Or at least it is for me.
I decided the safest thing to do was to attach one bit of the first floor at a time to the ground floor, so that I could align key points such as the vertical beams. Right away I had two problems: my lefthand bedroom was hanging out a bit over the side of the ground floor spa room (I think my spa came out slightly narrow due to the problems I had with the sliding window construction). This could impact how the hinged sections line up later, but I couldn't see how I could fix that so I've left it. The second problem was that my first floor landing, which should have been a mirror image of the ground floor hallway ceiling, was a good 1/4 inch deeper and my stairwell openings weren't lining up at all. The righthand bedroom was lining up reasonably well with the kitchen underneath, so it seemed the best solution was to sand/cut down the hallway landing piece until it fit between the two bedrooms, meanwhile trying to line up the stairwell opening. Once I had done that, I had to similarly whittle down the back wall of the first floor landing so that it would fit in between the two bedrooms. I hope that this width adjustment isn't going to cause problems in future chapters for the hinged doors meeting in the middle. Much sanding and clamping later, and I have two floors joined together.
By this point I had about eight chapters open and partially done, so now it was time to return to the earliest open chapter and start sweeping up the leftover bits. I made the 'shoe stones' in gravel trays that you can see in the first floor landing in front of both sliding doors. And I put together a 1:20 kit for a 1950s television.
The next two chapters are to construct the stairway from the ground floor to the first floor, which seems a complicated affair and doomed not to fit exactly. It took me almost an hour just to translate all the Italian using Google Translate and I'm about halfway through construction now. The first flight of stairs to the intermediate gallery seems fine, but the shorter second flight of stairs seems like it is going to be a 1/4-inch too high so I may need to bodge the top step into a much shorter step. That will be ok as it will be hidden by the thickness of the floors.
On my day off I forced myself to do an hour of quilting and finished the diagonal lines across half the Indigo Bears Paw quilt, and yesterday I drew the lines for the other half. It doesn't look too bad although I've wandered out of the ditch while stitching in some places.
The pattern is so terrifying that I've been procrastinating about starting for 20 years.
But I've pulled the fabrics for it now and I've watched a couple of her Youtube tutorials on how to do the technique. It still seems scary and hard to get right, but I'll have a go.
While m-i-l was visiting, she helped me with getting all my bed quilts out of my cupboard and off the display rack to shake them out and hang them over a couple of bannisters to let the wrinkles relax. They'd been out for a couple of weeks so yesterday DS helped me re-fold them and put them back in the cupboard. The cupboard is basically too full now after all the recent finishes, it's not good for them to be so crammed in. Perhaps I need a second cupboard...
I kept back this one and hung it in the hallway as it seems appropriately spring-like and I've always loved the colours in it.
On the knitting front, I've re-done the knitting I had to rip out on the 10-stitch triangle shawl and in the evenings I've been knitting on the Scalloway Tam.
My West Yorkshire Spinners Florist Collection yarn turned up so I'm going to kit up three future knitting projects for two shawls and a pair of socks.
And I made a new pricking for my Bucks Point lace edging to fit round the roller on my travelling lace pillow. I realised last weekend that attempting to leap frog my original two prickings as I worked wasn't going to be feasible as the short prickings didn't want to curve and lie flat. I was sceptical that a longer pricking would fit round the roller circumference exactly, but it's actually not a bad fit. Perhaps slightly loose but not enough to be a problem. That meant that I had to move the lace-in-progress from the old pricking on to the new pricking, a hazardous and nervewracking enterprise. This is a halfway picture where I've pulled out almost all the old pins and pulled the pricking off the pillow so that I can fit the new pricking.
Then I carefully pulled out the last of the pins and gently moved the lace onto the new pricking, trying not to put any tension on it. Then it's a case of trying to get enough pins back into the pattern to hold the threads in place, trying not to pull or distort the work in progress. I managed ok, I don't think the finished lace will show too obviously where I moved the work. I'm still working to get all the pins back in so I'm still having to be careful not to pull too hard on the bobbins, especially the passives. But now I should just be able to keep working and rolling the pillow onwards and never have to move the lace again until I have a finished length.
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