Thinking out loud

Yet again no sharing of progress on the house as there hasn't been any other than the window frames..... but I am missing doing my blog so I will have to pester you with something and I wondered if I could persuade you to read a piece about how I am not doing anything.

Maybe not as daft as it sounds.  I talk back and forth with a couple of mini folk who are just setting out on the journey and I wondered if reading blogs is always helpful or comforting if you are feeling swamped by what's ahead.  Quite rightly we all tend to share our successes and in some people's cases absolutely amazing work and that's just as it should be.  I suspect though if you read too many of those posts, it is easy to think I can't do that and give up there and then.  I do hope not, those posts are there to inspire and help you forward, not to make a barrier.

So....... this post is to share just how much I am failing right now after six years of doing this.

Probably the biggest issue right now is that I invented a stupid idea (and yes, it was a stupid idea) of trying to improve the look of the plain windows and make them look as though they are Georgian sash windows.  This entails adding two (rather than the required one) pieces of laminate for the glass windows and then laboriously sticking eighteen fiddly pieces of wood on the acetate to make (additional) window frames.  This is after painting strips of wood and then accurately cutting out and shaping these eighteen pieces.  The wood has proven to be as hard to cut as concrete.  You also have to be extra  careful when messing with glazing as you don't want any glue to show.Take this and multiply it by the sixteen windows I have to do and I already have a task on hand.  Go no further than this to see this was a stupid idea but of course I did just the one window first to see if I liked the effect and thought - 'brilliant, I'll do that!' and then I couldn't go back.

before

after

inside before

inside after

This then leads to the windows inside the house floating in space and needing a sill to sit on so, further down the line, I will need to paint and cut and shape and stick in place window sills.  Next piece of bad judgement I spent money on buying a lot of door frame/window frame trims to put round the windows to help the reality kick in some more; requiring a ton more painting and cutting and gluing.  Luckily I have realised these will be covered completely by the curtains which I now have to make for the fourth wall to keep going with this idiotic idea, so I can ditch that performance and just weep over a mass of very nice trims I don't need.

With all that in the 'bad girl' pot you would think I could just crack on and get it done but, no, gentle reader I am suffering from winter blues and am too fed up to even try very much.  Sitting on the sofa and reading a book seems like a challenge.

In this state I decided to give myself a break and get out a furniture kit to make a matching Duncan Phyfe seat for the music room - I liked doing that I remember.  I got as far as undoing the box.

Oh, yippee, a curtain fabric sample has arrived to cheer me up - I was planning on a bit of an overspend on some silk taffeta because I have been on a very, very looooooong search for just the right fabric for the music room (silk, fine grey and white stripes) and I thought I had finally found it.  The sample is here and it is perfect.  Cheered by this, off I went to my computer  to order 0.3 metre only to discover at checkout they want £17.50 for postage -  whaaaaat????   When I have recovered sufficiently, in a couple of days, I will go back and maybe email them and see what we can do - I suspect they are used to shipping thirty metres at a time to folks doing real things with their silk.

For lack of better things to do I decided to try it in the pretty pleater I bought - 'it does what it says on the tin' - it pleats beautifully and I can see all sorts of uses for it, but not what I want which is softly falling silk drapes.  Back to the drawing board again.

definitely pleated

I then remembered getting a good result by just just pinning fabric when I did some previous stuff so I thought I would remind myself and see if I still liked them now I am further down the line and a lot more picky.

I have spent a good chunk of today going through previous builds trying to find pictures of fabric stuff I remember doing, especially curtains.  Like Pam Ayres 'Oh, I wish I'd looked after me teeth' I wish I had given more thought to how I might find things from my blogs easily.  I am now dreaming of having a big sort out and maybe starting a new blog just called 'How-to' where I could gather such things together and then preach on about how great I was at making a fireplace or roof or whatever.  If I do manage this, I suspect soft furnishings won't make it to the lectures.

pinned, draped and steam ironed

Good result.  I still love these cupboards in 'Chocolat'

The rest of these photos are from 'Wentworth'

my first roller blind - its OK but I have improved on that

not badly done, but way too fussy for my taste now

wrong choice of fabric this time - they resisted everything

better but still stiff as a plank - looks like I did use a pleater of some sort??

I found some nice bedding to cheer me up; too unnatural for me nowadays.

I dressed the bed upside down, makes me laugh every time I see this

 

remade the bedding the right way up and with a different choice of fabrics

Nothing in that search made me go whoopy-do or gives me confidence for the nine (or thirteen) sets of curtains I will be doing on this project.  That will be some learning curve.


So, here I sit with my work area littered with bits of window wood and accoutrements, an open furniture kit, bits of fabric, a pretty pleater and..... a birthday card .....something else I should be doing.

Newbies:  Take heart it is not all hunky-dory and perfection out there and many of us get our unproductive stretches BUT this is not a chore like cleaning the bathroom, this is a hobby and will give us much joy when we let it.