Does trouble come in threes?

It's been a bit of a destructive couple of days craft-wise: I snapped two pieces off the complicated roof structure I am building for my dollshouse, lost one of the drawers for the dollshouse cabinet I'm assembling, and finished off my trio of troubles by accidentally snipping a hole in my bobbin lace. Sigh.  Hopefully that's it and I've reached my quota for the current time period.

I've glued back on one roof bit and am thinking how to make the other one adhere as it's in an awkward place, I may have to peg it back on.  I made a new drawer for the cabinet, and I applied a tiny amount of glue to the snipped thread in the bobbin lace to stop it fraying any further.  A couple of people at my lace club said they've done the same thing, it's certainly a lesson to be more careful with where the scissor tips are when trimming threads off.

This is the current state of play with the Bucks Point hexagon.  All those tangled thread ends have to be hidden somewhere so that they don't show on the front of the lace.

I am bumbling my way through the lengthy joining process, using as much magnification as I can get to see what I'm doing.  You have to bunch threads together and hide them behind elements of the lace. It takes a lot of concentration and forward planning. There are still some live bobbins at the top of the picture where I have still to work the final picot edging. I was having a little moan at lace club about the dark mystery of joining lace, some people  told me they just tie knots and snip the ends off short because they are going to frame the lace or put it in a drawer rather than use it.  I would like to attach this to fabric and use it as a doiley so it needs to be quite neat.  It's a learning curve.

I've been working on the roof of the Japanese dollshouse this week, puzzling my way through all the kit pieces and the not entirely clear photographs.  I even had to resort to translating some of the Italian on Google Translate, something I stopped bothering with many tens of chapters ago because normally the pictures are self explanatory.  I started out building the left hand roof structure from chapters 91/92, then skipped ahead to build the mirror-image right hand roof structure from 94/95 while the process was fresh in my mind.  A lot of the slots need sanding to get things to fit, and there has been a certain amount of brute force and hammering required (which is how I broke off the two bits by accident). Another piece was mis-cut and I had to fix it. At the moment I am working on 93/94/95/96 at the same time which feels more logical than doing small sub-sections hoping they will fit into other sections later.  I had to stop because I ran out of longer clamps. Once the glue dries I can unclamp it all and keep going. The pretty leaf backdrops are plastic IKEA placemats which stop the roof gluing itself to the table.

In evenign knitting, you can start to see the new design on my second Winterland Mitten now, but I'm a bit worried because my tension seems tighter than on the first one, even though I only knit the first one a few weeks ago. Maybe I'm stressed  :)

I mentioned last week that I had finished the first lace fingerless mitten apart from the thumb when I was at the hospital, but I didn't post a picture so here's a pic.  I'm still on the cuff of the second one.

Also in the evenings I've been working on my Christmas cross stitch house off and on, the living room is starting to take shape now that I've done some back stitching to bring out the detail.

I haven't felt like sewing this week, not sure why.  I did piece together the block I cut out last week but my machine kept wanting to stuff the corners down the needle plate which was infuriating.  It's getting serviced in a few weeks which hopefully will set it back to rights.  I know I can use leaders and enders (bits of scrap fabric to sew on to/ off of)  but I shouldn't have to.  I cut out the pieces for another six-inch block which I might sew tomorrow.

My nose has been fine, apart from the supposedly dissolvable stitches stubbornly refusing to go anywhere.  The graft, although still scabby, is starting to look pretty good but the ring of tufty stitches makes it look a bit gruesome so I am still covering it with a plaster (bandaid) when I go out of the house.  I'm supposed to be getting any remaining stitches taken out (which in my case is all of them) on Tuesday hopefully.

This week I made my annual pilgrimage to the V&A museum in London (planned some time ago).  I'm still a member although it's not really cost effective now that we've moved away from the London area. But on the other hand it motivates me to go and hit several exhibits at once.  I started with the recently opened Christian Dior exhibit which would cost £24 normally and was sold out on the day I visited, but as a member I can walk in (well, I had to queue for a few minutes).  This is probably heresy but I was disappointed with this exhibit.  You and I as crafters want to see inside the garments and find out more about the ateliers, how they were run, what was it like to be a Dior seamstress, what are the construction secrets, how were the garments made etc etc.  Instead this is a huge exhibit with room after room of dresses on mannequins.  Not a single one is shown inside out, there is nothing at all about construction, the ateliers are mentioned only briefly, there is one room of toiles (mockups) on display with no additional information about how they were used.  On top of that, the exhibit is so arty and with such dramatic lighting that about 30-40% of the garments are really hard to see.  A couple of times they are displayed so high up the wall, in a small room, that you can only look partly up the skirts and in a foreshortened view.  A couple of rooms are pitch black with dramatic lighting - in one case this is fluorescent tubes inside black display boxes, with so much glare that I had to physically block out the light with my hands to see the garments.  One of the final rooms, a large ball scene, is so dimly lit that even after letting my eyes adjust for a while, it still wasn't great.  There were some absolutely lovely outfits of course but overall I did not feel I really enjoyed this as much as I wanted to.

 I did like this fairy-forest ceiling effect in one room.

Then I toured the recently re-opened Cast Courts, full of Victorian plaster casts of sculpture from around the world, which I found fascinating and full of amazing things.  The corridor between the two courts is the interpretation centre with some interesting films on how the moulds were made originally and how electrotyping was done.  I hit an exhibit on painted miniatures, again very interesting; a temporary exhibit on the Portmeirion pottery works; and then went round an exhibition on the art and design of video games which made me think of DS because it finished off with film from the 2017 world finals of League of Legends watched by tens of thousands of people in a stadium (he also plays LoL).  So it was an enjoyable few hours, it's such a great museum.  I didn't bother visiting the new members cafe because I hated it last time I went, just a big noisy crowded cafe now and not the oasis of calm that the old members room was.

I did get this very pretty totebag in the shop using my members' discount. When I got it home, I boxed off the bottom corners with my sewing machine to make it a more useful shape.

So that's it from a very blustery UK which is currently being hit by high winds from Storm Eric. Hopefully it will calm down soon, we want to go for a walk tomorrow to start getting in shape for Japan.