Back to the castle! You may not be able to tell from this somewhat inadequate picture, but the tallest tower (toilet paper tubes) is a jail shoot, you drop the bad guys in at the top, and then they are in jail. There is a tiny window, that Rebecca specified must be super tiny so there was NO WAY they could possibly escape. Of course there is a door on the back to let them out. But they can’t use that.

There is a fabulous balcony on the front, with curtains that have little pull cords to pull them open. The embroidery floss cord runs through a slit in the side of the (oatmeal container) castle that is quite tight, so that holds it in place when you are not pulling the string.

We are not done yet. It needs more windows and more fabulous sparkly pipe cleaners glued all over, and maybe some peg people ghosts and, oh, I have glow in the dark paint. No, we are not done with this yet…

PS, you are dying to go visit my Etsy shop and buy my pattern for felt monster balls you can tuck candy in…

This is a simple thing to make, I hesitate to call it a tutorial, so we’ll call it a mini tutorial, but what’s in a name anyway.

Step 1: Collect acorns. We live in a blessed part of the world, California, where there are several varieties of acorns available year round it seems like. Near our house we have the round fat acorns of my East Coast youth, and also long skinny acorns which belong to California Live Oaks. You need some good big flat acorn caps for the fairy plates, and some small deep ones with long stems for the cups. If you don’t live in California you might not be able to find the shape of acorn we used for our chalices, if not, collect some 3/16″ (~3-4mm) twigs for the chalice stems.

Using some heavy grit sand paper, something in the 60-100 range, sand the bottoms of the large acorn caps flat. Rebecca helped me with this, it’s good practice holding things steady while sliding them over the sandpaper. For the chalices just sand the end of the stem flat. If your chalice acorn doesn’t have much of a stem, cut a tiny bit of twig and sand the ends of that flat to use as a chalice stem, or consider yourself to be making tea cups. That was my original plan anyway…

Get out your glue gun and hot glue tiny buttons to the bottom of the chalice/tea cup stems. We put our buttons face down, which made them more stable as cups. If you decided to go with a bit of twig, glue that in between the button and acorn caps.

Have your 4 year old fill your dishes with glue and glitter, or other fairy food, such as small seeds, or beads.

After the glue dries, have a tea party! These are really easy, and I expect them to get a lot of play in the doll house!

I just updated my theme, hand integrating a bunch of changes, so let me know if you notice something horribly broken. I’m trying to get threaded comments working. I know my sidebar is grey, I haven’t figured out why yet… Oh, hey, now it’s not. Shoot. I hate it when things change for no explainable reason. Hrmph. Oh, it’s just grey on the front page… Moving along…

This is a work in progress from an embarassingly long time ago. How long? It has been stashed in a corner of my sewing basket through two moves now… probably unloved for almost 10 years. Why? Well, it was a fiddly pain, those pink squares are 1/4″ inch across. The whole thing is about 7″ across. What was I thinking? And then I got one of the stripes backwards and didn’t notice, so I had to rip a bunch out, and then I just gave up because the corners weren’t lining up. I think, it’s been a while so my motivations are a little hazy. Well, the corners still aren’t lining up, but at least it isn’t getting soaked in sewing machine oil anymore. I can’t say it makes a good doll house quilt, it’s much too stiff, but it makes an okay rug. Anyway, it’s done, so there!

You can see more of what other people made at the Flickr group. It was a nice little low stress quick project, and now Rebecca’s little people have some more furniture. We can’t really agree whether this is a throne or a mirrored dressing table, but I don’t see why it can’t be both.

I have about five other projects to post about, but they are just going to have to come when they come. This here is a no apology blog. Also, we did container painting (see here and here) for art group on Friday, but it seems unlikely that I’ll get around to posting that. I’m not sure I even got a good picture! Couple more weeks until baby#2 (Which do you think, Penelope, Margaret, Guinevere, Ginger, Elizabeth, Marigold? I could keep listing names, our list goes on… Rebecca says if it’s a girl she’s going to call her Monica, and if it’s a boy she’s going to call him Pit, so maybe it doesn’t matter what we think. Although she has agreed to lollipop as an adequate nickname for Penelope.) comes, and I’m trying to do a little less.

Here is the set of ‘nesting’ dolls that I made for my housemate’s baby shower. I like them a lot, although I should have made the pocket a little looser. Luckily mommy’s tummy is soft enough to accommodate baby.

A couple more weeks and things are going to get much noisier around here, then in another four months the noise will double when I have my baby. Almost like having twins in the house, but much easier since we also have four parents… (and by then a three year old…)

Do you know a little girl who needs more places for her dolls to sit? Maybe you? We had four place settings for our doll tea time, but only three chairs, so I made up the pattern for these chairs to fix that tragic shortcoming. Really tragic, one of the dolls had to sit on the sofa. Oh noes. But now, now they all have chairs.

I wouldn’t call this a beginners pattern, but there’s nothing terribly complicated about it either. The hardest part is keeping things lined up as you sew down the seams. As long as you mark the points that need to line up with pins or tailors tacks or pen or whatever, you should be able to get this to come together.

Materials:
• 7.5″x9″ piece of felt
• same size fusible interfacing if you are using thin (craft) felt
• matching thread or embroidery floss
• stuffing
• beans or rice for weighting the bottom
• embellishments: 1/8″ ribbon, lace, embroidery floss, beads, paint, whatever you are into.

I designed the arm pieces of this pattern specifically so that I could run a ribbon from the inside of the arm to the outside in one piece, but if you want to use a fabric (that ravels) rather than felt you would have to move the top and inside arm pieces to extend out to the side, so that you could add a seam allowance (there isn’t any room for one in the notch leading up to mark C). Or you can use this pattern, fuse interfacing to your fabric, and cheat the seams that you can’t add interfacing on a little bit. Can you tell I am a ‘patterns are just a guide’ kind of person? If you’re going to take the time to sew something, make it yours.

Really there are a lot of things you could do with this, you could slice it down the middle and add a couple inches in, that would get you a couch! What I’m really tempted to see is someone (me?) scaling this up to feet instead of inches and making a toddler chair out of it. I bet it would work just fine with decorator weight fabric and good sturdy thread/yarn to hold the seat corners to the bottom of the chair. There’s a challenge.

So download the pattern and get started.

Prep/Cutting

If you have a nice sturdy piece of felt, 100% wool or just heavy craft, you are all set. If you have a standard piece of craft felt that stretches when you peel the sticker off of it, then you need to add some interfacing. The purple chair is just wool felt, but for the tan chair I used light fusible interfacing, crossed my fingers and ironed from the interfacing side at a temperature hot enough to melt the felt. (My interfacing directions specify the wool heat setting). Everything survived. (Although that might have something to do with why the craft felt chair mysteriously turned out slightly larger than the wool felt chair, or maybe I just stuffed it harder.)

So, once you have your felt prepped, cut it out along the heavy red lines of the pattern. This is mostly the outline, except where it dips in at mark C. I tape my pattern down rather than pinning because it keeps it both flat and in one place. And the tape comes off the felt easily. Things always seem to go wrong when I pin patterns.

Embellishments

Now, before you do any of the construction sewing, is the time to add your embellishment details, while the piece is flat and easy to work with. I’ve sketched my embellishments for the tan chair onto the pattern in white, but you should work something out for yourself, or leave it blank if you’re going for a modern non-fussy chair. The locations are pretty standard, medalion on the front of the arm, over the arm stripe-ish bit, some decoration on the back, but you could put flowers all over, or use the back (front or back of the back) as a canvas for any scene you would like.

Embellishment ideas:

You could bead the lazy daisy flowers at the ends of the arms, change it to a simple circle or square for a more modern look, applique a simple felt shape, pin in a vintage earring, or sew on a small button…

For the ribbon detail over the arm you could embroider something instead, a chain stitch, or zigzag, or any fancy linear stitch, like a threaded herringbone stitch (I think this would be great across the back), fly stitch, twisted chain stitch, line of cross stitch, Portuguese stem stitch… You DO have a vintage copy of Coats & Clark’s Book No. 150: 100 Embroidery Stitches (35 cents), don’t you? This is a great chance to show off your favorite, possibly obscure, traveling embroidery stitch. Anything to make a fancy line. If you don’t like the straight line you could twist it so that it drapes over the arm and flows around the back and up over the other arm.

On the seat back, anything goes. I started with a simple running stitch and flower motif across the back of the tan chair, but if you want some really large decoration on your chair, this is the place to put it. An embroidered house, a dog, a rocket or robot, teacup, cupcake… who is the chair for and what do they love? On my first chair I had that adorable ‘I am drinking’ ribbon, and I really wanted to use it on something. So I did.

For my second chair which I’m photographing for this tutorial I decided on a tea robot. Here’s my embroidery process if you care:

I drew a robot pattern on a piece of tissue paper, and placed it on the inside back section of the chair. I stuck a pin at the top and bottom marks of that section so I would be sure to get it in the right place. Then I basted it down with thread to hold it in place.

I embroidered the design…

… then pulled off the tissue paper.

For the over the arm detail I wanted to try using lace for my second chair, but I didn’t like the look of the white lace along with the yellow embroidery. Or maybe I was just procrastinating writing this tutorial. Anyway, I decided that the yellow embroidery floss I was using for the robot was pretty much turmeric colored, and decided to try turmeric dying. It only took me 20 minutes for the boiling in turmeric, rinsing and ironing dry, and it came out the *exact* same color as the floss. I couldn’t see the stitches I made holding it down. Unfortunately it has actually changed color quite a bit since then, lightened up from orangey yellow to yellowey yellow, you can see the stitches quite clearly now, so I’m glad I made them mostly small and even. I’m still exuberantly pleased that my tea robot chair has turmeric dyed lace that I found in a second hand craft bookstore in the Jimbocho district of Tokyo. Woo. And now I have this desire to go around dying everything in my house with turmeric…

To finish the embellishments I added the same lazy daisy flowers as on my tan chair, although I’m not really thrilled with them. At the time I couldn’t think of anything else, maybe bolts? Or tea cups. Yep, shoulda been tea cups.

Time to get out of Flatland.

Construction

For the seams, if you want square corners you can use a regular blanket stitch on the outside of the seams, for softer corners I use a blanket stitch on the inside of the seams. Actually I don’t use a blanket stitch, I use a bastardized blanket stitch where you put the needle in through the other side of the loopy bit… after extensive searching (It is soooo hard to look up embroidery stitches when all you know is how to do them, isn’t it?) it looks like my stitch is a stretched out plaited buttonhole stitch. It is much more knot-ish than a straight blanket/buttonhole stitch and I find it holds things together pretty well. But there is nothing wrong with using a straight whip/overcast stitch, that will work fine too.

For these seams it is helpful to mark your folds where they line up with the corners, and when going around a corner take two stitches in the fold around the corner to the same point in the tip of the corner, if that makes any sense. In other words, the last stitch before you come to the corner goes into the tip of the corner, and then the first stitch after you fold the felt around the corner also lines up with the tip of the corner. Or just ease things so all the marks line up and it will all work out fine.

Seams:

* Match up the numbers and sew from 1 to 2 to 3. This is a short seam closing the end of the arm. Do this for both arms.

* Next sew the alphabet seam, A-G, once on each side. Keep those letter marks lined up.

* You should now have something that looks like an armchair with a flap open at the bottom. Sew from one corner along two of the sides of the flap, leaving the third side open for turning/stuffing. In the picture I sewed a little more than the two sides, because I wanted to get over the lace trim, but the smaller the hole you leave is the more likely you are to stretch the felt out when you turn the chair. (If you are sewing from the inside.)

Also, you want to use a really long thread here, because you are going to want the tail for the seat shaping stitches. It isn’t the end of the world if you need to start a new thread when you are doing the shaping, it’s just inconvenient to hide the thread tails once the chair is sewed shut.

If your chair is inside out it should look something like the above picture. Congratulations! You should be done with the hoping and swearing part now.

If your chair is inside out because you were sewing the inside of the seams turn it right side out now and poke the corners as square as you want them.

Now it’s time to gently stuff the chair with fluff, holding the seat in with your fingers – you don’t want to end up with a balloon, help the chair keep it’s shape a little bit, but you do want it generously full. You’ll be fixing the shape with some shaping stitches in the next step.

Put a little stuffing under the seat, but save most of the room in the bottom of the chair for your small beans or rice to help make the chair weighty and stable. When you are satisfied with the stiffness/fullness of the arms and back fill the rest of the seat with the rice or beans. You can see the rice trying to spill out of my chair.

Once your chair is full sew shut the third side of the bottom flap.

You might call it done now, but it’s time for some important shaping stitches to hold the bottom down. What you’re going to do now is stitch around the seat of the chair, more or less straight down to the bottom. This will make the seat look more cushion like and keep the seat corners from puffing up and loosing it’s shape.

To start with take some small invisible stitches in from the corner you ended the bottom seam at in towards the center of the bottom about half an inch, until you are directly under one of the back corners of the seat. (You can see where the needle is coming up two pictures above.) If you want you can transfer the ‘Shaping Stitching Lines’ to the bottom of the chair to follow. Once you’ve found the stitching line corner and pulled your thread out the bottom of the chair, stitch straight up from the bottom through the back corner of the seat, pulling the stitch gently tight so that the bottom puckers in a little. Bring your needle back in further along the seat seam, a bit closer to the arm, like you were going to take a running stitch towards the front of the chair, but take the needle straight down and out the bottom. Continue this way sewing a running stitch through the 1/2″ thick seat, connecting the seat-arm seam and the bottom of the chair, until you get to half an inch from the front, then turn around and go back, then along the back seam of the seat, and up the other side seam to the front of the chair. You should end up with a U of shaping stitches all around the three (side and back) sides of the seat, pulling up a matching U in the bottom of the chair.

To manage this cleanly without mashing all the stuffing to one side it’s best to make two runs of shaping stitches, the first is more of a basting stitch, taking tiny stitches outside the felt, but large stitches traveling through the chair, and then once you’ve finished the U of basting shaping stitches make a second pass using a shorter stitch and pulling things a bit tighter.

Really I pulled the stitching in my purple chair much too tight and puckered the bottom much more than I needed to, it made my purple chair shorter too. The tan chair is a better example of how it should look, just tight enough to keep the seat from bulging up at the corners and giving it a nice cushiony look. If you want the arms of your chair to stand straight up rather than leaning out to the sides, you do need to pull these shaping stitches pretty tight.

Tie the shaping stitching off by taking a short back stitch and skimming the needle through the felt for an inch then cutting it off. Now you are done. Oh wait, you need to send me a picture, or link, then you will be done.

Questions?

Tea Time!

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.

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?

Last weekend we drove down to San Diego for my brother’s wedding, (where I played official photographer, and now oh my goodness I have too much RAW photo post-processing work to do, I think I need a new computer!), which is an 8 hour drive with a toddler apparently, so I had a little time to stitch some felt, when I wasn’t being mesmerized by the monotony of I-5.

Actually I think I got half of this done the week before, I can’t remember now. I have Mama brain. Anyway, I got through the bottles, and then when I was trying to convince Rebecca to let me work on more of the kitchen, she told me she doesn’t want a kitchen for her new doll house. It doesn’t need a kitchen, it needs more dolls. Right. Most of what it has in it, collected from around the house, are dolls. Small bear dolls, small stuffed animals, some plastic pigs, some wooden little people made out of dowels and masking tape… I have a doll loving girl though. So I diverted from the kitchen project, which really is for me, I know that, I just forgot… to work on a bear. And Rebecca picked the colors, so he is red and pink. Thus I’ll have to call him aka-chan, which is what you call babies in Japan, and translates something like little red. I guess because babies are small and red? I’ve forgotten. Chan doesn’t mean ‘little’ literally, it’s just a diminutive that you attach to kid’s names or when you are trying to make someone a cute nickname…

Anyway, it’s done except it has no legs yet. I needle felted the face and tummy and ears, My first needle felting ever was some wonky Finnish flags for a swap I spent too much time on but mailed off October 1st, so that’s off my list. But the needle felting was a lot of fun. I need a real felting base, right now I’m using one of my daughter’s hair brushes, which tends to move around when I felt since the brush bristles aren’t stiff enough. I’ve given myself two really good needle jabs so far. I think he’s coming out pretty cute though.

I think this reads as scatter brained as I am feeling. Also today is my birthday! Not that that means much to me anymore. Time to go make/figure out dinner, the troops are restless.

So Rebecca got some time to poke and prod sticky clay, and I got some time to hand build some plates for her doll house.  They’re a little wonky since they are hand built rather than thrown on the wheel, but they looked a lot better after I got to put lots of little dots all over them.  I was inspired by one of the bowls that Jennifer’s friend had decorated for their ‘Empty Bowls’ charity auction, which reminded me how much I like tiny dots.  The dots on the plates that I did first came out too big, I like the square cups better.  I hope they fire okay.