This is not keeping me calm

As I discussed last week, crafting is important to me for various reasons, one of which is keeping me calm and balanced - it can even be meditative.  This Chinese dollshouse in a globe is the work of the devil and has made me anything but calm this week.  I've done my best, it looks pretty rubbish and will self destruct if anyone so much as sneezes in the vicinity.  One day the batteries will die, and we will disappear the project and Never Speak of It Again.

One of the intriguing aspects of the box picture was that the house seemed to be floating in a cloud of snow with no visible means of support, like a ship in a bottle.  It turns out that this ship is floating on a flimsy disk of card which first of all has to be bent to be inserted into the globe then never wants to flatten again.  Secondly the card disk does not want to float level but instead at some weird Dorothy in a Kansas tornado angle.  The battery pack and wires fought me every inch of the way as I attempted to fold them through the hole in the disk to hide in the snow beneath. Therefore the house wouldn't sit flat on the 'ground' because the ground was bent and the wires were bulging up. And to get the house through the aperture, you have to rotate it in such a way that the wires and battery pack are pulled back out of their hidey hole again. And all the time you are fighting with the above, the 'snow' is spilling out the front and getting inside the house; and the impact-activated  lights are flicking on and off like a horror movie.  When we finally landed at something vaguely resembling the box picture, there were a lot of spots bare of snow so then I had to try to reach in past the house with little spoonsfuls of snow, which is why the snow looks so mounded in places.  I got it to the point where I took these pictures, but the slightest knock (is going to turn the lights on) is going to disarrange the snow and possibly even the horizon line. What a contrast to those scenes in a tin that I made a few years ago which were such fun and good quality.

Moving on to something less rage-inducing, I arranged my motifs on the Giggleswick Mill Quilt centre this week and fused them down.  Then I started stitching around each motif with a narrow zigzag in invisible thread to hold them down.  It's a lot of stitching because there are so many little details to stitch around.  I've done the border motifs and am currently working on the centre bouquet. That's why it looks a bit crumpled in the picture as I am constantly bunching up the fabric in my hands to manipulate it under the needle.  Invisible thread is not an heirloom technique but will help keep the edges adhered.  It's not truly invisible because up close you can see the plastic thread glinting in the light, but from any distance you can't see it.  I'm using a very fine needle (70) to avoid obviously punctured holes in the fusible.  Once I get all the edges finished, then I will be able to trim the centre to size and start adding the borders. The somewhat ovoid centre circle bugs me a bit but otherwise I'm pretty pleased with it.

I've been stitching together the Hey Teach cardigan after knitting the bands onto it. It's not completely assembled and I haven't pressed the seams yet.  I gave it an early try on and it seems a bit broad in the shoulders but otherwise the fit isn't bad. I'll have to look out four buttons in my stash, hopefully I've got something suitable.  I didn't put any button holes in the 'skirt' portion, I think it will look nicer hanging free.

Work has been better this week.  We've been moved onto a different type of casework that I find more engaging and less like drudgery.  But we've received a cautionary memo from the head of operations who says that although almost the entire office is now working from home, our productivity is only 50% of what it used to be.  I guess I'm not the only one getting distracted by home fun things. We used to grumble about being constantly supervised like children when we were in the office but it shows there is something to be said for keeping people focused on what they are meant to be doing.  We're supposed to discuss in our individual team meetings how we can be more productive going forward.  Oh yay, can't wait.

We were amused this week watching a juvenile blackbird out of our kitchen window, who was trying to make friends with our stone statue bird that we have fastened on top of the feeder/swing beam.  He kept looking at it and even gave it a few pecks like "Why won't you play with me?"

Hi to Linda in Illinois who commented last week. I agree with you about restricting outings to a minimum. We did go to our little local shopping mall yesterday now that it's re-opened, just to go to Wilko to pick up a bunch of useful-but-not-entirely-essential items like lined pads, lining paper (I use to draft patterns), clothes hangers, toilet cleaner etc. that we had run out of during lockdown.  To get there we had to navigate a confusing one-way system laid out on the mall floor in yellow tape, made even more confusing by the minority of people who were ignoring it and wandering around where they liked. I also snagged some bottles of hand sanitiser which is once again available in the chemist.  Despite the strange aspects of the situation, it did feel oddly comforting to be doing a 'normal' activity even if I had to stay alert to the movements of other people.

Stay safe.