119 kits later...

The final 120th kit for the Japanese dollshouse is now on my worktable ready to be opened.  It's hard to believe I've been building this house for a year and a half now. The final kit is for the ryokan's sign.  I still have one stone lantern to put together and paint but I'm waiting until I work on the garden to assemble and paint that. I did a big clean up and hoover in the workshop because there was grey dust everywhere left over from all the sanding I had to do on the resin roof shingles I was cutting to size.

This week I put together kits for three ceiling light fixtures which were three variations on the same theme and even included  tiny wooden lightbulbs, and the kit for the final television set.  I struggled with the rabbit ears antenna for the TV as the tiny wooden half-sphere they are meant to fit into split in half, so the antenna didn't turn out as well as the first two TVs but it looks ok.  I hung the three ceiling fixtures and am fairly pleased with them. I'm slightly concerned they may be hanging too low but then I'm 5'6" and found I was either the same height or taller than a lot of the Japanese people on the trains so it's probably fine.

The TV set above is the one I made this week.

I finished putting together the four knitted toy animals from the kit with Let's Knit magazine.  They were tricky to sew up and don't look exactly like the pictures but they are still cute. They aren't suitable for a very young child due to the bead eyes and multiple sewn-on parts.  Although I'm tempted to keep the red squirrel which reminds me of the ones we've seen on our two summer holidays in Cumbria.

DH got a new toy for his birthday which is a static grass applicator, a cool gadget for creating realistic grassy turf for his models.  There is a hopper of grass and it uses an electrical charge to basically stand the grass strands vertically into a glue base.  He's never had one before because they aren't particularly cheap so a birthday seemed a good time to get one.

I was quite impressed with his initial samples so I asked him to have a go at the lawn around my dollshouse shed that I built a few years ago.  I used green sawdust flock pressed into glue to simulate lawn but have never been very happy with it. These are the BEFORE pictures:

And these are some AFTER pictures with static grass applied, don't they look so much better? Great job!!

I will definitely enroll his help for any bits of lawn I want for my Japanese garden when I build it.

After seeing the antique Baltimore Album quilts at the Festival of Quilts, I reluctantly decided it was time to stop procrastinating and start hand quilting my 25-block applique quilt.  I pulled out the giant Q-snap-type frame and set it up in the living room, and dug out my copy of The Essential Quilter  by Barbara Chainey to remind myself how to hand quilt. It's not something I've ever been very good at and usually instead I do basic machine quilting on my quilts.  But the applique quilt isn't really suitable for machine quilting and I don't want to spoil it (although my hand quilting is nothing to write home about either).  So I've made a start, and it's only going to take me about three million years to finish it. My underneath finger is already getting torn up, I've tried all the thimbles I've got but can't get on with any of them on the underneath side so I'm using the stick on pads which never last very long.

Before I cluttered up the living room with the quilt frame, I pinned my One Block Wonder quilt to the floor with T-pins and squared up the frame before basting down the hexagon panel in preparation for appliqueing it on the machine.  The applique is done now and the borders are all on.  It appears to be hanging fairly flat so result, although I have spotted one dodgy hexagon where I accidentally twisted one of the wedges, so I will have to unpick that and fix it. I also want to experiment with floating a few more spare hexagons into the borders to break them up