One Inch World

I’ve been much too busy recently, trying to find time for my ‘real’ job, the one I get paid for to work occasionally, and also trying to finish Jo’s phonics swap. Which I did at the last minute today, squeaking into my post office ten minutes before it closed. Sort of like how I joined the swap, two days late, luckily scoring another late mom, Schelle, for a swap partner, and then Anne of itty bitty love took pity on me and added me as an extra swap partner. Lucky me! In the mean time I’d agreed to do 15 items with Schelle since we only had one partner, and we did a full-disclosure swap so we didn’t get any items we already had, that made it trickier too.

My plan going into these is always that I will make three of everything so I have one for my daughter too, but I fell behind a little bit on this one. We’ll see if I manage to go back and make it up.

Here are the things that I made, rather than bought:

Tiny quilts with 1/2″ patches, one of them with an ‘I’m lazy’ experimental zigzag stitch for binding and one with an honest binding (I hate binding quilts, it is by far my least favorite part.) My daughter did the packing, deciding which of paired objects went to the little boy, and which went to the school, that’s almost as good as rolling dice, right? I think these came out pretty well. They are pushing up against the 10cm size limit though, perhaps I should have done smaller.

Wool felt embroidered hearts, for H, but they could go for E for embroidery too. This is something that I can work on while walking down the sidewalk following a two year old on a tricycle. That’s one of the great things about tiny hand sewing projects.

Books. I got the pdf for these from the Internet Archive, ‘Funny Alphabet’ which is a great source, they have other ancient alphabet books there too. After getting the pdf I spent two hours swearing at pdf munging tools and my printer, trying to get the pages properly interleaved and duplex printing lining them up right. And here I thought it would be simple… I have vague memories of creating a tiny Alice in Wonderland book, I still have it, the book is real, about one inch tall, the creation process is vague, but I think the main difference was I started from text, and used postscript and nup rather than pdfs… and a ‘real’ duplex printer. But enough about that. They came out alright in the end.

Then there’s velvet for V, which I hemmed with lace, I’m not sure I really like how that came out, it’s a bit crooked and fussy, and plain cotton lace for L, both of which Schelle vetoed because she had plenty already. Maybe Anne does too, but we didn’t exchange item lists for vetoes. And okay, I didn’t really make the lace, I just put tape on the ends. Last swap I made little lace boards with three different kinds of lace, but I decided that having a larger single piece of lace you could see through was more tactile and satisfying.

Olives, I think this is the right Montessori phoneme for O, I have trouble with remembering which vowel sound is the primary one, I need to print out a list. Like for I you are ’supposed’ to use the short ‘I’ sound like ‘in’, not the long ‘I’ sound in ‘ice’. Are they all the short vowels? My phonics partners in the past haven’t been too picky, and I probably need to take another look at my boxes, because that can make it confusing to mix the sounds. I suppose I should separate them out and make long vowel boxes too? I am obviously not Montessori trained like Anne and Jo.

Anyway, the olives I made out of fimo, and they were the perfect olive color before I baked them and they darkened. And then I did a bad job using ModPodge to make them glossy, (I used a coarse brush and they came out quite ridged), before spraying them with acrylic glaze which sort-of fixed things. Maybe these fall in the un-lovely plastic category. Most of the time I’m so crunchy, and then I find myself baking fimo in the kitchen, thinking, what am I doing. And then I go and sand it, which is worse, but at least I was doing wet-sanding, that helps a lot with the not breathing poison thing.

Moving on to the kites for K. They are just paper around cardstock, with embroidery floss tails. Turns out Schelle was going to make me a kite too, so we both dropped that, but Anne still got one. Rebecca really likes these, so I’m not sad we have an extra. I found one outside on the sidewalk, so we may not have two for long. I need to get these things into her phonics boxes before she plays them to death.

Ravioli for R, felted acrylic with cotton batting filling. You’ve seen this before.

Washcloths for W, I knitted these out of striped cotton, another following the tricycle craft. The first one I knit on bamboo size 0 needles, which was no fun, because they kept bending rather than doing what I wanted, probably because the yarn was too heavy for them. The second two were knit on size 3 metal needles and there was far less hair pulling. They are hardly any bigger either, because of the weight of the yarn. Perhaps washcloths should be terry cloth in the modern world, but I like these.

Jump ropes for J, these are super tiny, made with pearl cotton and seed beads for the handles. I glued the knots so they would stay. I wasn’t sure these would read as jump ropes, but a friend of mine thought they were perfect so I have more faith now. I hope they don’t get too tangled.

And last, an oar, for O. I got the idea to make this from going through my years (99-03 I think) of Dollhouse Miniatures, otherwise it never would have occurred to me. This one is a long O and fills one of Schelle’s vetoed spots, so I only made one.

I did buy a few things too, and a few things I had left over from buying sets or getting duplicates from the first phonics swap, a tiny terra cotta pot, spring, switch, rolling pin, lady bugs and paper umbrellas. Oh, and a 50 yen coin. Mostly for Schelle’s 5 extra spots. (I’m sorry I meant to stick a yen coin as an extra in your package Anne, but I forgot!)

Things I meant to make but didn’t, pillows, underwear, masks, a house… other things on my list, a leaf in contact paper, a diaper, ornament (but that is a long O again), a chain… Once I get my phonics swaps in the mail I’ll see where the low spots in my alphabet are, and prioritize those for making. Schelle was great about targeting the list of my weak letters that I gave her, and I half did too, so now I have to see if any of them have turned into strong points.

I’m rambling. Anyway, maybe at some point I will be able to claim that I’ve crafted the whole alphabet. What do I have left? c,e,f,g,i,l,m,n,p,s,t,u,z – half way there!

My daughter does not discriminate by species, her doll house has many animal residents, and we decided they deserved a grass lawn in the attic.

We cut a bunch of medium and light green triangles and stuck them down on a dark green rectangle with the needle felting tool. Flexible glue would have worked just as well I expect. Then we ironed some light fusible interfacing onto the back to make it a little tougher, and trimmed the edges with pinking shears to give it a slightly more grassy feel. For such an easy project I think it came out pretty well, and now the cow has something to eat during the tea parties. And, um, the pigs might have a new toilet. We’ll have to see how that one plays out.

Can you tell what this is? It looks a little bit like a fighter jet. Or if you turn it sideways it could be a city skyline…

How about now? It’s sewn up, but inside out.

Oh, it’s a chair!

The other day we were having a tea party in my daughter’s doll house, and there were not enough chairs. Yes, it was tragic, but one of the four thrifted Kelly dolls had to sit on a couch. Shocking. Something had to be done. So I mentally unrolled an arm chair onto a piece of paper. That was the easy part. Then I had to find the time and motivation to do all the cutting and stitching and finishing. I think that took about three hours.

I’ve been wondering recently whether my life would have taken a different direction if all those aptitude tests in high school had been a little more thorough. I had great math and spatial relation skills, so I went into engineering and computer science, because those were the obviously salable things that I liked. But what if they had asked me whether I liked to sew? I don’t think I ever considered that I could be one of those people who created patterns. But it’s full of geometry and space folding and figuring out how to put things together, which I love. But it’s also one of those scary and unreliable artistic professions, and I’m often not very brave that way.

Would anyone want to make one of these chairs? Should I put it on my list of tutorials to do?

Spoonflower is fun. My first attempt came out 30% horribly though, lots of colors seemed to get shifted to black or white, so I decided to make a color chart so I could get it right next time. I think part of my problem may have been that I used a compressed tiff, although the preview looked right on their site, so I’m not sure. But anyway, having a printed color chart (on their fabric) is the only way to get the colors you want.

So I put one together and finally got it printed out. You can see the Spoonflower output up there with my GretagMacBeth color chart for comparison. You can also see how not-squared the fabric grain was when it was printed. It started out square, but once it was hand washed and ironed the grain straightened and the printing went crooked.   Also you can see how grey the black is, which you expect from this sort of printing, but the saturated colors came out better than I was expecting.

Here’s a jpeg RGB version, you can download the original uncompressed LAB tiff if you’d like to send it to Spoonflower yourself.

So what is this? The flowers are slices of the HSL color cylinder, each at a different lightness value (specified by the ‘L’ numbers next to each one), hue goes around the circle (obviously) and saturation goes from 100% at the rim to 0% in the center. Each rectangle patch contains lightness gradients from 100% down to 0% in 20 steps, for 3 hues each at 100% and 50% saturation.  So all of the rectangle gradients together cover 12 hues spaced around the color wheel.  (Does that make any sense?  I need to go to bed.)

So now I can get to work.  I’ve done 75% of the line drawings for a… hmm… robot/electronic/geek alphabet quilt.  So I’m 10% of the way there… And the baby is only six months now.  I better get to it.  I think the fun part is making lots of small scale colorful patterns to interleave with the alphabet blocks.  Hopefully the grain issues won’t be too much of a killer.

Step 1: Research! (actually step 0 was make a bad tomato I think…) Have you ever really studied tomato slices before? They are surprisingly not that symmetric. Do you slice your tomato through the stem? I slice mine through their equators. If they are squatty tomatoes. If they are lumpy heirloom tomatoes I cut them in chunks and them slice them any which way. I had a point somewhere. It was that tomatoes look so many different ways that you have a lot of freedom to play with the inside shapes. Don’t think there is some ‘right’ tomato slice or that they have to be perfectly symmetric.

I did make some funny looking tomatoes that no one could tell what they were… so there *is* room for bad tomatoes, but there’s a lot of leeway. And you could tell what they were if they were part of a sandwich set, but the first guess was ‘flower?’. I originally made the flesh red and the pulp pink and I left out the seeds. They were okay, but not very convincing I guess. The pulp of a real tomato is actually darker than the flesh, and the seeds seem to be pretty important. Here’s what I finally came up with:

This tomato only uses two felt colors, if you wanted to go for extra realism you’d have to make the mushroom-y bits that the seeds stick to a lighter color than the rest of the flesh. [There's an example of that at Akiyo's amazing gallery in the lunch section. If you want to read the text you can use Google's translation, it works pretty well.] But since I was needle felting the whole thing together I didn’t want to deal with the overlapping and shrinkage calculation of two ‘top’ layers, and I didn’t want them to overlap. Onward.

First cut out four circles, two large circles in the tomato flesh color, and two pulp colored circles 1/8″ smaller all around. If you want perfect circles you can trace a drinking glass or something, but tomatoes aren’t really circles anyway, so just cut them out freehand. Mine are pretty lumpy, aren’t they! But I trim them at the end.

Do make sure the two large circles are the same shape, and once you have everything cut out and lined up, mark the circles near the edge so that you can line them up again. While they are lined up mark one on the front and one on the back, one on each side so that you can put the marked sides inward and you won’t see them on the finished tomato. (Or use a water-erase marker, I -shockingly- just used a permanent marker.) Mark the smaller pulp pieces in the same spot too. You want to be able to put the whole stack together so they fit neatly. If you do cut out perfect circles then you can skip this step, because they will line up no matter how they are turned.

Next cut out holes in the larger tomato flesh circles for the pulp to show through. Decide how many holes you want, 3,4,5… then use a pen to divide the circle into sections and draw a C shape for the pulp hole into each of them. Make sure to leave a 1/4″ border around the outside of the circle with no holes, so that it will overlap by 1/8″ with the pulp circles. Otherwise you will have a hole through your tomato. Cut out the marked holes with a sharp pair of scissors. Once you cut out one side you can match it back up against the other large flesh circle, marked sides together, and use it as a template to mark the holes for the other side. Then cut the holes in the second tomato flesh circle.

Put together each inside pulp circle with one cut out flesh circle, lining the marks up. (You should have two pairs, don’t put the whole thing together yet.)

Either needle felt the flesh cutout to the pulp circle or use a running stitch or applique stitch around each of the cut out holes to join them together. Or, heck, you could use fabric glue if you’re in a rush. I needle felted mine.

Now that you have two hopefully solid tomato sides it’s time to add the seeds. Scatter them around, try not to space them too uniformly. I used two methods here, lazy daisy stitches in an ochre thread and green-on-the-inside clear seed beads. I’m not sure which I like better, what do you think? Looking at them now I think there are too many seeds and they are too small, but some varieties of tomatoes have lots of small seeds, so that’s okay. (^_^) I think it would also be interesting to try painting the seeds on with acrylic craft paint, but that might be more likely to be eaten off? I haven’t tried painting felt yet, I’ll have to add that to my imaginary list. Does acrylic stick to wool felt, or do you have to use acrylic or polyester felt? Questions to research.

After you have your seeds on line your tomato sides up back to back so that the flesh patterns match up. At this point you can needle felt them together, being careful to only go through the flesh sections so you don’t mess up your embroidery or break a needle on your beads, or you can stitch them together around the edge. After you felt them or before you stitch them trim around the outside edge to neaten it and make sure the two pieces line up perfectly.

Yum! (And am I glad to be done, this tutorial took forever to write up for some reason, and I’m not that happy with the pictures, I really had to force myself through this one and not wait for nice light. But moving on into the new year, let’s be more positive.)

So what do you think, embroidered or beaded seeds?