One Inch World

Things have been pretty crazy around me for the last couple weeks, we’re staying with my parents-in-law, and have been working hard to get through my sister-in-law’s wedding.  The last guests left the house this morning, so now I have a little time to leave super slow dial-up-land and get down to the local library for some much needed high bandwidth time.  :-)

I’ve been super busy, but weekend before last we had a 3+ hour drive to go to my husband’s cousin’s wedding (yes, and two weekends from now we’re going to my brother’s wedding, crazy crazy) so I had some time in the car to do some sewing.  My daughter got a really fabulous Plan dollhouse from a friend for her belated two year birthday a couple weeks ago, so I got a good shot of inspiration to revive my doll house furniture crafting love.  This time with a little help from a Japanese crafting magazine/book I picked up last time we were in Tokyo.  Here’s the sweet felt kitchen I want to make from it:

So here is how far I have gotten:

I haven’t counted how many pieces are in the kitchen set, because I would get too discouraged. I doubt I will make them all, but I will at least make the sink module. It took me three hours just to make the little box with handles though, because I wanted to add lots of extra stitching to make the corners, inside and out, square. But life isn’t about being fast, right? And patterns are just inspiration, when you make something it’s always nice to make it a little different to make it your own. Which is much easier when the instructions are in Japanese, so you have to make up half of it anyway! So I just use the basic pattern pieces, and add my own embroidery style.

I love this little house, (very little, 3/4″ x 1″ x 1 1/8″). It came out much better than Clover my last wool felt attempt, I won’t try that edge binding stitch again, not until I become a sewing machine. Which isn’t going to happen. (^_^) Tiny stitches around the edge to hold the pieces worked quite well, I think they make the corners look much neater than a blanket stitch, especially on something this small. So yay! (And how is it I can manage 10 stitches an inch on this, but only 2-3 stitches an inch when I’m trying to hand quilt? I know, I only have to keep the 10 stitches per inch up for a single inch…)

Anyway, here are all the sides:

I had so much fun stitching all the little flowers! The windows are unfortunately wiggly, and I’m not sure how to fix that. I don’t know any good ways to make fine marks on wool felt, blue water erase pens aren’t dark enough, and chalk lines aren’t really fine enough. I did stitch some vertical guides down the center of each side with thread, and that helped some. I will just have to become a straight-sewing goddess. Someday.

Leslie donated some prizes to MixTape. She sent all her readers over to read MixTape and enter their contest to write about a little goodness in your life, which she is all about. And I won! Now I can’t say I never won anything from a blog giveaway. And I will have to keep following Mix Tape Zine, which is not a hardship!

I FINALLY finished this quilt. I spray basted it ages ago (April!), started hand quilting it, with the intention to only hand quilt the center, which is really annoying to machine quilt anyway, and then I stopped. And the spray basting only lasts a week, so after I’d put it down for a little, and it had gotten folded and creased, it sort of grew into a monster project.  Because I’d already quilted all around the edges and bound it for crying out loud, and now it was no longer basted.  But it wasn’t nearly as bad as I’d been expecting and thus putting off.  I smoothed it out, stuck it in the machine with the walking foot and finished it up.  Yay!  Now I am that much closer to starting two baby quilts I’d like to make.  Not that I’ve been quilting much lately, I’ve been more interested in painting tiny cubes to look like houses… I need to finish those too.  Too many things to finish!

Here’s where I left it back in April.

Anyway, it isn’t any normal size, I just started the blocks, put them together, then added a border and binding. I think it is smaller than a twin, but it does a pretty good job on my daughter’s small kid’s bed. So good. It was supposed to be her two year old quilt, but I’m about three months late. Pretty good really! I like how the pattern came out, designing with disappearing nine patches is fun.

I also like how the quilting in circles came out. Circles on squares are groovy. And I like how the hand quilting looks more gently bunchy than the machine quilting, which just looks deeply grooved. I’m sorry I didn’t hand quilt the whole thing, although my hand quilting is really bad. I’ve never hand quilted anything before, it was fun, but unfortunately my housemate mistook my hand quilting for basting. Yes, the stitches were much too big. I was trying to do it without a quilting frame or embroidery hoop, and without pulling the needle all the way through every half stitch. I guess I am too lazy to do hand quilting ‘right’. I’ll try to get the stitches smaller next time. I should try an embroidery hoop, but I was worried that it would stretch the quilt out of shape. Maybe I’ll try a small wholecloth quilt next, and work on my quilting that way. One of the two baby quilts in my queue? But I’d like to make a white wholecloth quilt with red stitching… which doesn’t sound like a very good baby quilt. Ah well. Another project to never get to. Reminds me of little red and white doll quilt by Redwork in Germany, which, hey, has circles quilted over squares! Hee. Now I’m inspired again.