back to moominhouse

 I had done that Moominhouse subscription plan starting - gosh,, maybe even back in 2022? I received the last shipment a couple months ago but I have an enormous backlog of unopened boxes because I'm busy and also some of the things are fiddly where you have to glue one thing and then let it dry, and I would tend to wander away and forget to work on it. 

I'm maybe a quarter of the way through the build at this point.

I stayed home today - partly because I was tired, partly because it's ungodly humid (we had a dewpoint of 77) and the university is not open on Fridays which means they turn the airconditioning off over the weekend. But mainly because it was threatening storms before 11 am and I decided to stay home because at one point it looked like those storms might become severe (they did not). So I did a little laundry and then after lunch, when the bad weather didn't materialize, I drove out to the small farmstand store a couple miles from me.

They have chickens. Free ranging, though as you can see one or two have slipped out of the pen are are even more free ranging:

 I wanted green beans; they had advertised theirs were coming in. So I got green beans, and some of the light-fleshed sweet potatoes for a later meal, and some frozen pork spareribs ( I will have to remember to defrost them next week; I want to do them in the slow cooker). And a loaf of focaccia bread; a local baker (she may be Amish) sells bread through them. I had some of the beans and the focaccia for dinner. 

And then I decided to try to work a bit more on the Moominhouse, with a vague goal of picking away at it off and on this summer and trying to finish it - because then I can clean up my fabric cutting board, and start working on quilts again, and it also gets all those boxes out of the room (cardboard smells when it's humid)

I didn't get a LOT done but did finish the fiddliest thing so far - the little sofa, where the upholstered bits are fabric (and a very fray-ey fabric) stretched over plastic or cardboard frames. Mine is nowhere as neat as the one in their photos (I don't know who made their stuff for them but they have more skills than I do)

 Not pictured is a tiny wooden kitchen shelf I assembled and stained; it still needs the drawer pulls glued into it once it's dry

And I did the optional step of mixing up a couple of "highlight" colors (using soap, interestingly, to help it bind to the plastic base) to make the "stone" foundation look a bit more real. It was some effort but it is fairly effective:

 There's one color that's black, white, and brown mixed and the lighter one subs a purple for the brown.. 

I did the same on the piece that attaches to the pull-out drawer - there's a little drawer in the "foundation," it is the "cellar" of the house- there are a couple little storage shelves there and when the whole house is done there are cans and bags of things like "onions" that get stored down there.

The pull on the drawer is a little metal watering can (it's permanently attached because it's the pull, but it's an effective trompe l'oeil thing

 I also glued together the "floor" that fits on top of the "foundation," so I guess I'm getting in more steps towards the actual shell of the house. I think the next one I have is making the set of stairs from the ground floor to the first floor.

Tomorrow is the "grand reopening" at Quixotic Fibers (They moved to a larger space in the same building) and I am definitely going. It'll be crowded, I bet, but that's fine - I'm better on my feet now than I was at their original Denison opening (that was just six weeks after I injured my knee) and now even parking some distance away and walking is not a problem. I don't NEED anything, really, but I want to see their new space and what they have and I most likely WILL buy something.