A short break

I am off to Knit Camp in Stirling, Scotland, so am not going to be able to work on my dollshouse, nor to blog, for a week or two.  And I've been busy getting ready this week (insane decision to knit a fair isle vest in time to wear it at the camp) so haven't done much shingling.

Following my successful shingle test last week, I made a start on shingling the back roof.  I immediately found that there are some problems with the measurements of the supplied kit shingles.

1)  A significant number of shingles are up to 1/8" shorter in length.  This means that you can't just butt the shingles up to the pencil line, you have to watch that they are lining up at the bottom correctly.

2) A significant number of shingles are slightly narrower (as per the shingle on the right on the top row in the picture).  This is leading to alignment problems between my rows.  I've had to fudge a few rows to nudge the points of the shingles back into line with the seams of the row below.  It seems to be the way the shingles are punched, because a couple of times I've found a fat shingle still joined to a thin shingle from the manufacturing process.

When I reached the point where the back roof cut out begins, I had to decide whether to maintain the clean line of the cut-out, or whether to overhang the points of the shingles.  I decided to maintain the clean line, as this is how the Pickett Hill house is. 
To go around the corner, I shaped one shingle into a curve by drawing the curve in pencil from behind, then trimming carefully with small scissors.

Across the top of the cut-out, I am running a row of upside down shingles, butting the square end to the top of the opening.  Once the glue dries, I will cut the shingles off at the pencil line using a straight edge and knife.  This is quicker than cutting individual shingles to length, and easy to do as the shingles are so thin.

So that's it - hope you are all having a great summer!