All Framed Up

Yesterday it rained most of the day and I finally had time to make a frame for my Victorian sampler.

I will probably hang the sampler in the bedroom of my dollhouse, so I photographed it against the William Morris wall paper that I plan to use in the bedroom. I made the molding from South African candlewood, I love it because of the wonderful grain and color.

I hope you can see the grain better in this photo, it is not easy to take photos of it.

To make the molding, I first used the big cutter on the left to cut a rebate in the back of the molding, I then turned the molding over and used the same cutter to cut a wider shallow rebate on the inside edge of the molding. Next I used the cutter that you can see on the right to give the inside edge that nice hollowed out curve and lastly I used the small round over router bit for the outside edge of the molding.

Enjoy your Sunday
Elga

The Sampler is finished.

Doing the last two motifs didn't take too long, so the sampler is finished, well almost, it still needs a frame, will see if I can make that over the weekend, I have the perfect piece of wood with a very small grain pattern that I think will look great for a frame.

The sampler lying on top of the magazine page.

And a close-up, I am very pleased with my first charting efforts, but this is not as easy as it might look, I have gained a new respect for people that makes charts for miniature embroidery.

Elga

Sampler Update

The sampler has grown quite a bit since you last saw it.

I have just the second bird, butterfly, bottom corner and side border left to do.

A close-up.

And here you can see some of my charting efforts, the letters were an interesting mix of styles, some round and others sharp, most notable on the rounded V and W, but sharp M and N. In the beginning I planned on just using the more rounded letters but later decided to change the M and N to look more like the original sampler, I ended up by just writing on the graph paper and then filling in the stitches until I was happy with the look.

The roses was a bit more complicated, I drew one on the graph full size and then scaled it down (this is also the way I scaled the cat down), but realized that there were too many petals on the rose to successfully down scale it, so I went to my stack of embroidery books and searched until I found some good looking roses that were more or less the size I needed.

I then positioned the roses on my chart, added in a few dots for the rosebuds and then copied the roses into a computer charting program where I could see it in color and started adding leaves, which took me quite awhile until I was happy with them, keeping in the back of my mind that it needs to be a contained in a circle, some of my leaves went right past the boundaries of the circle and then I had to redo them until they fitted. You can see the printout of the roses and leaves in the previous photo.

If any of you want to try this, first decide on how big you want your embroidery to be when finished, work out a stitch count and then, well just play around on a piece of graph paper. It does take time and even in stitching I noticed a few things that I wanted to change, so here and there I had to unpick and start over again, but in the end, well worth the effort I think.

Elga

Lots of little pieces

I spent this morning casting a few tiny dolls, the first time in my life that I did this, in my way distant past life as a doll maker I just used to buy the greenware, molds are too expensive if you only plan to make a doll once. I am exhausted right now, I think from the intense concentration when you take them out of the mold and then trim them, you have to be so careful not too squash them and those little limbs are tiny.

Now they need to be soft-fired and cleaned before the bisque firing, only then can you start painting them. Porcelain shrinks a bit in the bisque firing so they will be even smaller after the firing. Oh, boy, now I have to clean my kiln that I haven't used in more than 10 years and see if I can still remember how to set it up for a firing.

I made a little bit of progress on the sampler, I am really enjoying stitching this one.

Elga

Progress on the Sampler

Thank you everyone for all your lovely comments on the sampler I have started, I have stitched a bit more on it, it is kind of addictive ;-)

I am quite pleased with the bird after about 3 tries, I used a half cross stitch to give it the sharp beak and a french knot to make the eye. When you stitch something this small your colors have to contrast  a lot more than in full scale embroidery, otherwise your colors just become a blur and you lose the details of the design. I wanted my own name on the sampler but with a period correct date for my dollhouse, so I simply deducted a hundred years from my birth date to put the sampler back into Victorian times.

In a next post I will try and show you how I reduce the motifs for those of you who would like to try this for yourself.

Elga

Miniature Sampler

On my first trip to the USA last year I bought a magazine with a Victorian Sampler that has been begging me to stitch it for my dollhouse, just one problem, the chart is way too big to just stitch as it is to be a realistic scale in miniature. To my delight Annelle Ferguson did a seminar at Guild School earlier this year at Castine and taught us how to reduce sampler charts so that one can use them in 1/12 scale. I was a bit scared to try but last week I decided to give it a try, the letters and borders were fairly easy, but the motifs, at first I wanted to be lazy and just use some Victorian motifs from my large collection of books, but on Saturday morning I realized that the motifs was exactly what attracted me to the sampler in the first place.

It took me the whole weekend to figure out the cat, I had to reduce the stitch count by half in both directions, which in effect means you take 3/4 of the stitches away, plus getting the colors right was tricky.

Well, I hope it looks like a cat playing with a ball of wool, I stitched it on a 50 count cotton fabric with Pipers Floss silk.

Have a great mini week
Elga