A blackwork dollhouse miniature sampler and other special offers!

Here’s a quick heads-up on a couple of offers for mini sampler kits available right now, including my blackwork dollhouse miniature sampler design:

Dolls House and Miniature Scene magazine has a blackwork sampler design of mine featured this month on page 36 (in Issue 278 – the July issue). The article has the chart and detailed instructions for how to complete the miniature sampler. All you need to provide is listed in the article – it’s to be stitched on 28 count evenweave fabric, and you’d need a frame with an aperture of 1 1/2 x 1 3/4 inches. Alternatively, if you’d prefer to make it from a kit which contains everything you need (including the wooden frame), it’s available in my online shop HERE.

 

If you would like to stitch a sampler, but the blackwork one isn’t your cup of tea, then have a look through my full range of sampler kits for a different one that might suit you better. There are 12 designs to choose from, and they cover many eras and styles, including a ‘Home Sweet Home‘ one that is always popular!

As a special offer, you can choose any sampler kits and then get 10% discount off the usual price from now until midnight on Sunday 2nd July when you use the code SAMPLER10 at the checkout – this offer includes the blackwork one  🙂

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Are you interested in doll’s houses and stitching? Then why not visit my website, where you can buy doll’s house needlepoint kits to make all kinds of soft furnishings for one-twelfth scale dollhouses. There are over 280 kits to choose from, plus chart packs, fabric project packs, tutorials, and lots of eye candy to inspire you! Kits are available on 18 and 22 count canvas, 28 and 32 count evenweave, and 32 and 40 count silk gauze, so there’s something for everyone – from beginners to experts.

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How to make a quick quilt: 1

I’ve decided to take a break from my embroidery and dollhouse projects for a bit, and make a quick quilt. This because I’m due to go on holiday in a few weeks, and I want to get a project started that will be very portable and simple to do while I’m on the move.

I’d actually been looking around for a simple embroidery project, but then I saw this lovely fabric, and decided that I really wanted it!! It’s a fabric by Northcott, called ‘Stonehenge: A Stitch in Time – Quilt Blocks panel’. I got a half yard piece for £7.50 from The Corner Patch, which is based in Sheffield. They have a really good website. I bought the yellow gingham (a Makower fabric) at the same time. The mustard colour fabric was just lurking in my stash  🙂

I’m planning to use the yellow gingham for the backing, and the mustard fabric to bind the edges. The quilt is only little – it’ll be about 20 by 25 inches when it’s finished – more like a tabletop quilt than a cot quilt, even. Sometimes these panels that you just do quilting on, without having to make the patchwork first, is called a ‘cheater quilt’. I can see why! I’m planning to use it as a sort of blanket for my reproduction dolls to sit on, at the base of one of my doll’s houses.

I bought some wadding for the quilt from Cotton Patch, based in Birmingham, for £7.95 – they stock loads of different types of wadding, but the kind I bought is cotton/polyester blend, specially for hand quilting. I only needed a small piece, obviously, so I bought their small pack for crib quilts, and I’ll still have enough left over to make several more of this size.

I sandwiched up the layers, and pinned them one on top of the other, then tacked the fabrics together in both directions, starting from the centre and using long straight stitches, with the rows about three inches apart.

Then I just have to do running stitch along all of the lines on the fabric where they have already printed little running stitches! This is so easy, and it’s a great project to do in short bursts, when I only have a few minutes at a time. The ‘patches’ are about four inches square on the fabric, and each one takes about an hour to quilt. The wadding is thin enough to quilt by hand, and makes nice little ‘puffs’ on the fabric, which you can see in the picture above – the patch in the top right hasn’t been quilted yet, but the one on the left has.

I like to use a number 10 size quilting needle for my hand quilting. They are very short, so they are easy to manoeuvre through the layers of fabric. I’ve got a quilting thimble, but I never use it, so I just put up with getting  a hole in my middle finger!!

I used polyester thread for the basting, and 100% cotton quilting thread 50/2 by Aurifil in a deep cream for the actual quilting, which I bought from the Cotton Patch when I bought the wadding.

It’s quite obsessive, once I get going on it – I love the rhythm of just making the simple running stitches, over and over again. It’ll be a good one to take with me on my hols!

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Are you interested in doll’s houses and stitching? Then why not visit my website, where you can buy doll’s house needlepoint kits to make all kinds of soft furnishings for one-twelfth scale dollhouses. There are over 280 kits to choose from, plus chart packs, fabric project packs, tutorials, and lots of eye candy to inspire you! Kits are available on 18 and 22 count canvas, 28 and 32 count evenweave, and 32 and 40 count silk gauze, so there’s something for everyone – from beginners to experts.

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Autumn quakers 6: almost finished!

I’ve been stitching like mad on  the Autumn quakers sampler by Rosewood Manor , and now it’s almost finished – here’s my progress over the past couple of weeks.

I’ve now finished another page and a half (sort of). Here’s the sampler with two thirds of it done – six pages of the chart in total:

Isn’t it looking lovely? It’s quite big, too – about 18 inches high, and I’ve still got another row of chart pages to stitch.

The bottom right hand corner of the sampler has a kind of cartouche, which you add your initial to, choosing from the complete alphabet of letter motifs which are included in the chart booklet. I haven’t stitched that part yet, as I’m not sure if I’m going to do it exactly as the chart says to, or ‘do my own thing’.

But it’s good to see how high the sampler will be in total, now that I’ve stitched the height of that page, even if I haven’t done the whole width yet.

For most of this sampler, I’ve been cutting the thread straight off the little balls of Valdani three-strand thread. I’ve been using one needle per colour, to try to save a bit of time by not having to re-thread one needle all the time. I bought this thread pack specifically for making this design, and it is very cute, in its own little box, but I decided I wanted something even quicker!

So I unwound all the balls, cut the thread into two foot lengths, and looped it onto a wooden thread sorter, which works much better for me.

Should have thought of that before, really, as you can see from this picture that I haven’t got much more to do, now.

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Are you interested in doll’s houses and stitching? Then why not visit my website, where you can buy doll’s house needlepoint kits to make all kinds of soft furnishings for one-twelfth scale dollhouses. There are over 280 kits to choose from, plus chart packs, fabric project packs, tutorials, and lots of eye candy to inspire you! Kits are available on 18 and 22 count canvas, 28 and 32 count evenweave, and 32 and 40 count silk gauze, so there’s something for everyone – from beginners to experts.

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I’ve found some more things for my dollhouse toy shop!

I know I’m supposed to be completing the decoration of my Sid Cooke toy shop before I fill it, but I’ve succumbed again, as I found some more things for my dollhouse toy shop – and these ones are really, really good!

A few weeks ago, I showed you the tiny dolls for dollhouse dolls that I bought from Diane Yunnie in South Africa, along with the child doll in the red coat – well, I happened to come across another website based in South Africa that sells miniatures from all over the world, and more of Diane’s lovely dolls were featured on it. The site is called Petit Connoisseurs. It had several dolls by Diane that were adults, besides the child and ‘micro doll’ sized ones. I hadn’t known that Diane did adult ones, so I was really pleased to see these.

I bought this beautiful lady doll, which will be the mother for the child doll I previously bought – they will be the customers in my toy shop.

Isn’t she lovely? She’s fully jointed, so she can be posed really well, and due to the way the skirt fans out onto the ground, she doesn’t need a doll stand to keep her upright.

Diane is such a neat dollmaker – look at the reverse of the doll – everything is so precise!

At the same time that I bought the doll, I bought this miniature toy ark as well. I’ve wanted to get an ark for over twenty years! I wanted one for the nursery of my 1:12 Georgian town house originally, but I’ve never been able to find one that I liked. Often, they are wooden, and quite basic and chunky, or painted too  brightly. This one, though, is painted pewter, and has a lot of detail. The animals are just gorgeous, and so tiny! The human figures are about a centimetre high, to give you an idea of the scale.

There are eight pairs of animals including the doves on the roof, plus the people.

The ladder is removable, and the roof comes off the ark (but you can’t fit all the animals inside – I’ve tried!).

I’m not sure who originally made this, as it was sold as a ‘pre-owned’ item from Petit Connoisseurs. If you haven’t been to their website before, I’d recommend it, as they have a lot of unusual things. But hide your credit card first!

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Are you interested in doll’s houses and stitching? Then why not visit my website, where you can buy doll’s house needlepoint kits to make all kinds of soft furnishings for one-twelfth scale dollhouses. There are over 280 kits to choose from, plus chart packs, fabric project packs, tutorials, and lots of eye candy to inspire you! Kits are available on 18 and 22 count canvas, 28 and 32 count evenweave, and 32 and 40 count silk gauze, so there’s something for everyone – from beginners to experts.

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