Melting

We continue to suffer under a punishing heat wave.  I was away for the weekend attending a lace course and it was like an oven in both the classroom and my dorm room, which really made it hard to feel like I was enjoying things.  I was working on a couple of samples to learn new techniques and it went fairly well but everyone was complaining about how stupid they were feeling in the afternoons when it was so baking hot (no air conditioning in the buildings and the windows didn't open).  Not the management's fault and otherwise the course was very well organised and I met some nice people.

I also picked up a few more bargain secondhand bobbins.  I asked a few of the more experienced lace ladies how many bobbins I should be aiming for to be able to tackle more advanced projects and a few projects  at a time.  There were some very furtive looks as they confessed to having almost 2,000 bobbins each.  Wow.  Maybe I don't have as much of a problem as I sometimes think.

It's been too hot to do anything ambitious.  I've started to embroider feather stitch along the seams of the vintage fan tea cosy that I'm making, and I finished the second Peerie Flooers mitten but still need to darn ends in.

I finished the second balcony room on the Japanese dollshouse  and completed the fiddly task of hinging them both on.  They were on and off several times as I tried to get them to close properly and be even with each other.  In the end I had to pack out all four hinge rebates with some pieces of coffee stirrer because the hinges seem to be set in too deeply for the doors to close properly.  I eventually got them both hinged on  and fairly even. You can get more of a sense of what the house will look like now, if you imagine a second similar floor on top of these two floors.

But then it started to get very frustrating.  In chapter 66, they have you fine-tuning the fit of the front porch so that it will fit underneath the balconies of the first floor.  It turns out that the plastic fancy tiled porch roof should never have been glued on - it was glued on when I got it but poorly, I broke it off and repaired and repainted the porch then glued it back on again.  The plastic part of the porch now hits the front of the balcony's lower beam preventing the porch from going back far enough to meet up with the ground floor.  And the porch was too high altogether so hitting the bottom of the balconies.  So I've had to partially destroy the porch, ripping the roof off so I can whittle down the porch wall enough to get it under the balconies.  I've had to whittle the undersides of the balcony to fit over the fancy porch roof.  And now I've got to re-cut the roof understructure to allow the roof to go back on a few mm further forward than it used to be.  At least it's cool in the basement dollshouse room. It's very disheartening to have the porch in pieces again,  and shavings and sawdust everywhere.  When all this is over I'm going to have to deep clean the rest of my houses and their display shelves.