Still no rain

Our lawn looks like a desert now, just dried earth with a bit of yellow stubble here and there. I'm watering the garden every couple of nights trying to keep the plants alive.  Several of them are showing signs of stress even so.  It seems to be a year of extremes, all that snow going on and on in the winter and now this endless sunshine.  Quite apart from hating the hot weather, I just don't feel like doing anything and feel quite stupid when it's really warm.  So it's hard to feel energetic about crafting.  I've been living in a couple of loose t-shirt dresses so I've taken one and traced a pattern off of it to see if I can make a duplicate dress in some cotton interlock I bought online.  I'm not much of a dressmaker but it's a fairly simple shape so we'll see.

A completely useless finish in this weather are the Peerie Floorers mitts, now blocked.  Somehow one has come out slightly bigger than the other, even though I used exactly the same yarn and needles.  I was probably more relaxed with the second one because I'd worked the design out. They feel like they will be fairly warm as the stranding makes them thicker.

I've done a bit of simple embroidery on my tea cosy in the evenings, which is eating up an amazing amount of embroidery floss.  I had to go buy more of the same colour today to continue work on the second side.  The pattern has you embroidering flowers in the central half-circle but I think I will see  if some of the tatted flowers and bits that I bought at the Peterborough show from the Lace Guild stand will look nice instead.

My Ten Stitch Triangle Shawl has become too big to carry around easily as a portable project so it has now become a living room project.  As a replacement commuter project I've started on the purple roses cardigan using the self-striping yarn I bought on holiday in Cumbria.  The first panel of 'roses' has appeared on the back. It's a clever idea, makes a change from the normal self-striping patterns.  The written pattern helpfully directs you to check before casting on that you are getting green spots appearing before the pink ones, so that you don't accidentally end up with upside-down flowers.  Normally I knit from the centre of the ball but I'm having to knit off the outside of the ball to get the flowers to come out right.

I persevered in the Battle of the Front Porch and eventually managed to get the porch back together and to fit onto the front of my Japanese dollshouse and get the balcony doors to close.  It took a while to reconstruct the porch but it looks ok now, I don't think you would notice all the bodging adjustments unless you were looking for them.  I put a torch (flashlight) inside the hall to get a lighting effect for these photos.

I've started work now on the shingled roof overhangs for the first floor, which wrap around the balcony rooms so a lot trickier to fit than the simple one-piece overhang at ground level.

And that's pretty much it this week.  I did install the curtain rod over the closet alcove in my room so now I will be able to take measurements to sew the curtain, but I feel very procrastinatey about that because I hate sewing curtains. I'm very bad at arithmetic so it's stressful trying to get the curtain and lining and hems all to come out right.