Many pins later

I now realise why I've had to buy two extra boxes of lace pins this past year - because they were all used up pinning the Bucks Point hexagon to the pillow!  It literally took a couple of hours to carefully pull them all out - carefully because if you just yank them out of the picots, it can pull the thread loop as well and ruin the picot.  So each one has to be individually removed while you hold down the picot thread loop with something else like a divider pin.  So many pins - I had to go and find an empty box to put the rest of them into.

But here it is, the right side up at long last.  I'm pleased that it's finally done but at the same time a little disappointed that it isn't perfect.  There are some wobbles in the ground and footside, a couple of dodgy picots, and my join is unobtrusive but not invisible. But overall it's not bad for my first big project and considering lacemaking is not my main hobby.

So in the above main picture, the join is not too obvious.  In the below closeup of the join, you can see the distortion in the ground and a blurring of the edges of the motifs which have the sausages of ends hidden behind them. But it's not awful, I have seen (and done) worse in the past.  Next time hopefully I will improve.

Last week I forgot to blog some adorable little dollshouse tins that I bought on ebay.  I saw these in the V&A gift shop where they were filled with sweets and selling for £4.50 each.  I looked them up when I got home and they are made by a wholesale UK manufacturer called Elite Gift Boxes and were designed in 2011 by Dana Kubick.  There was a set of six different designs on ebay for less than the V&A (but no sweets much to DH's disappointment).  The outsides and insides are fully decorated in 360 degree artwork, really cute.

And while I am blogging my shopping finds, look at this cute teacup pincushion I found today when we were browsing an antiques mall in Huntingdon.  It was a stall full of not-antique but vintage-inspired homemade sewn items and decor, and I liked the way this is accessorised with charms and decorated pins.

I had to pull out almost all of my second lace fingerless mitt.  I had knit up past the thumb thanks to some talks that I went to (I was knitting while I listened).  By now I am knitting the lace pattern from memory but it was starting to seem like something wasn't quite right.  Sure enough when I actually compared the knitting to the pattern, I had 14 stitches in my lace repeat when I should have had 17 stitches.  Turned out I had missed out a couple of YOs early in the proceedings and then obviously lost another stitch along the way which is pretty poor.  I pulled it back to the first repeat and am re-knitting.  I've finished the chart and main hand part of the second Winterland mitten and am now knitting the remaining thumb.

I have spent a lot of time this week wrestling with the roof of doom on the Japanese dollshouse.  How it should have worked was that, having created the armature of the roof, you then glue on a narrow edging all around the 'spokes' sticking out. The edging marks the edge of the underneath eaves as well as providing a support for the upper roof papers that will support the tiles.  However because my 'spokes' were sticking out at all sorts of odd angles and levels, thanks to my earlier issues, I had to do the reverse.  I had to float the narrow edging in mid-air - trying to keep it level, parallel to the main roof and at the same distance from the main roof all the way around - and then try to adjust the spokes so that they met up with the edging.  Much bodging ensued.  I think I had to clip back all the spokes in the end, break off and re-glue the corner ones several times, and adjust the edging, until eventually the octopus was tamed.

Now that the edging is in place, the next step is to cover the underside of the eaves.  The kit supplies very thin bendy veneer and doesn't instruct to paint it.  I thought the light wood colour was going to look incongruous with the rest of the house.  I googled for a while and it looks like the majority of eaves of traditional buildings in Japan are either in the white-coloured spectrum or dark.  I gave my bits of veneer a light spray of white paint.  Each segment has to be individually cut to shape.  To combat the bendyness, I am gluing bit of card on the reverse of the veneer shapes so that they won't develop curves as I glue them to the house.

 Gluing the coverings on to the eaves is fairly straightforward but takes a lot of clamps so I am having to do it in stages.

This week instead of working on my ongoing Christmas cross stitch, I was distracted onto a little 'quick' cross stitch kit I bought on the secondhand table at one of the Lace Days.  It's a little bowl of cherries that decorates a little notebook.  I've finished the cross stitching but still need to assemble the notebook so I haven't taken a picture yet.  My sewing machine is back from the shop and working much better, so I finally sewed together the block I cut out a few weeks ago but haven't cut out or sewn any others.

Yesterday we went to a garden open day owned by a snowdrop expert.  Her garden was just a sea of snowdrops, crocuses, hellebores and early daffodils, really gorgeous.  I developed garden envy so we stopped at the garden centre on the way home to get a tray of pretty pink primroses and a white hellebore.  It's been ridiculously warm and sunny for February, up in the high teens, so I planted them out when we got home and finished the tidying up / hacking back that I started last week.  We have some nice clumps of snowdrops and crocuses as well, and a couple of early daffodils have opened up, so it's pleasant to spend time out there.  Are the temperatures unseasonable where you are?