Miniatures Monday

I decided some time ago that I wanted to try stenciling on the breakfast room walls in Hardy House, and found one in an all-over pattern that looked as though it could have been from the 1920s or 30s, maybe even 40s, so just right for what I'm doing with the house.  I knew ahead of time that I would have to cut the stencil to get it to fit around the door and window frames, so it required some planning to do the larger swatches first, then trim off strips for above the doors and window, and so on, in increasingly-smaller segments.  It didn't work quite as easily as I might have liked, as while I "dry-fitted" the stencil around the various obstructions, I didn't double-check the width of the back wall itself, and ended up having to decide between wider-spaced columns or a partial column in the back left corner!

But I think it's busy enough that while noticeable it doesn't really leap out at you, and once the furniture and pictures are in place, those distract the eye a bit too.

The stencil is an ArtMinds one -- that sort of leafy/feathery swag might be useful later, too.  My stenciling technique is far from polished, I know, and on top of that it was fairly awkward reaching into the room without being able to brace my hand much, or sometimes even see beyond it!  I can understand even better now why people say it's much easier to paint etc. before you even build, but of course I don't have that option here.  I was hoping that the stencil color would be a bit lighter, and therefore more subtle, but I didn't have the skill to daub more gently, nor certainly the confidence to thin the paint at all.  Still, I do like the way it turned out on the whole, so there is that.

(Haven't decided whether I should try to sand off the daubs that got onto the woodwork, or to paint over them with a similar "wood" color ...)

I haven't yet found a fabric I like for curtains, so that is still on the to-do list.  Maybe just a solid color (blue?), or faux damask, as there is a lot of pattern in the room now!  I think it also needs some more paintings on the wall, certainly one just beyond the door that leads to the kitchen-to-be, on the left here.

Two kits from Nancy Enge -- travel journals and echeverias, very pleasing to look at even in kit form --

I was noodling around with the US9 steel hook and some no.10 cotton, and came up with this improvised rug in double-crochet.  I was marvelously impressed with the "mock invisible join" developed by Mrs. Micawber, which took me some time to wrap my head around, as it were -- reading the instructions first was like blah-blah-blah-blah for me, but once I actually started to do it, it began to make sense, and indeed worked beautifully.  It didn't, however, work -- or possibly more accurately, I don't know how to make it work -- on the faggoting rounds, so I began looking around for yet another alternative, and ended up using a "no-chain starting double crochet" as detailed at by Hannah at Not Your Average Crochet.  It seems to me that if you didn't see the join there at the top of the outer two rounds, the places where I earlier worked the NSDC would be almost undetectable.

My current miniature carpet, this from a Berlin-work chart that is apparently floating around Pinterest like the Flying Dutchman, with no actual source.  It is dated 1903, in Russian.  It has a charmingly improvisational air to it that somehow works really well with that imperious diagonal -- the moment I saw the chart, I was besotted with it, and it jumped the queue over a number of other projects!

Comments

[Susan D]

Oh Jeanne, this is charming.

[Toffeeapple]

You clever thing, it looks marvellous.

It was lovely seeing you mention my friend Mrs Micawber, she is amazing at crochet isn't she?

Your carpet is looking good too.

[Mary Lou Egan]

Charming is the word!