A week of holiday goes so fast...

We've had a relaxing week off work at home.  I had optimistic ideas that I was going to get loads done, hours of crafting every day etc.  In reality I may have actually done less on most of my hobbies, lol!  In between holiday treats like afternoon tea at a local hotel, a couple of lunches in cafes, trips to fabric shops and antique stores, plus doing a bit of work around the house and garden and generally slowing down, I have done crafts but not loads of them.

The dollshouse has not moved on much at all because the second lot of wood stain I ordered last weekend didn't turn up until Thursday and then we had to pick it up late in the day from the post office as we missed the delivery.  They are more in the right family of browns, two are quite dark and one is quite light.  I am experimenting with mixing the dark one with the light one and I think I will get something that won't look horribly different from the first half of the house. In the meantime I put together kits for two chairs, a low table and a Japanese lantern.  The chairs and table will be going inside the next balcony room when I can build it.

I did put in several hours on preparing two bobbin lace samples for a class I'm going to be taking.  I want to go to the class with both projects started, and I wanted to do the tricky starting part in the quiet of my own home without feeling under pressure.

I've done more work on the Cynthia England paper pieced wallhanging which I am really not enjoying.  It is so fiddly, lots of tiny pieces the size of a fingernail. I finished the third section and pinned it on the design wall, then realised that I had used the wrong fabric on two small pieces and that another fabric I've chosen is the wrong value.  So basically I need to re-do that entire section of about 15 tiny pieces.  Bleah.  I don't like to give up on projects but this one is starting to tempt me.

My Peerie Floores mitten  is coming on well, the re-worked thumb gusset is finally the right size and in the right place (fourth time lucky) and I'm almost up to the start of  my fingers now. So I need to decide now if I want to knit fingers or just a cuff for a fingerless mitt.  I'm thinking probably a cuff, no fingers.

On Thursday DH drove me over to the Fabric Guild warehouse in Oadby.  I used to shop there when it was in Leicester but then a while back they moved out to the burbs and this was the first time I'd been to the new location.  It's a lot bigger but I think there is about the same amount of stock, just spread out more so you can see it better.  I wandered around for a while but didn't actually buy any fabric. I had some member vouchers from previous visits and I traded them in for a cross stitch book of designs and a couple of mini templates.  But on the way back we stopped into an antiques mall which randomly had some nice fat quarters packaged up on one stall (new, not vintage) at a good price so I bought two packs of some repros I thought went nicely together. They look a bit green in this photo but really they are brown/sepia with red prints.

The other thing I tackled this week was to strip the wax off our hall bench/coat stand and paint two coats of primer and two coats of the green paint to match our wainscoting.  I was pretty fed up with painting it by the end of all that!  But it looks a lot better. Before it was sort of a dark pine which didn't suit the hall very well, now it visually appears to have shrunk and the hall seems a lot bigger. The bench has coat hooks along the back rail so we have somewhere to hang coats, because there isn't a closet in the hall.  DH wasn't happy that I was doing 'work' on the holiday, because it made him feel like he should be doing work as well and he didn't want to.  My view is that it's the kind of job I don't have time for in my normal life so a holiday is a good time to do it.