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

Blog Give Away Winner.

We have a winner!!!

I used www.random.org to help me do the draw, number 17 came up, comment number 17 was from Jonquil from latchkey and jonquil. Congratulations Jonquil, please send me your address.

Thank you to everyone who participated.
Elga

300 Followers Give-away

I have been watching my follower list the last few weeks and yesterday I hit the 300 mark, when I started the blog I was so ignorant about blogging that I didn't even realize you could have followers or follow other blogs. I would have never dreamt that so many of you would be interested. To say thank you, I have decided to have a give-away.

The give-away items are a sideboard kit from The House of Miniatures, some French antique 100% cotton lace and a resin frame that my daughter painted a few years ago.

To enter the give-away, you must be a follower of this blog and leave a comment on this post.

You have until  21 September 2012 12pm South African time to post your comments (I have a clock with South African time on my side bar) and I will draw and announce the winner on Saturday.

Good luck
Elga

All Things Lace

I just want to thank everyone that regularly leave comments on my blog, it is much appreciated, and I treasure each one of you as a friend.

For the last few years I have been itching to do two things, learning how to make bobbin lace and miniature porcelain dolls, lace I have never made before, dolls, lots of them but in full scale sizes and many years ago, but I still have my kiln and lots of china paint.

Last weekend I went to the Johannesburg Embroidery Guild's bi-annual exhibition, but what blew me away was the room box full of miniature lace and right there and then I decided the time is now. So in the last week every spare moment was spent on researching lace making and all the necessary equipment needed. fortunately for me the Pretoria Lace Guild met yesterday and one of the ladies sells the threads etc, and I had a fun time meeting them and seeing some examples of beautiful handmade lace.

Yesterday afternoon I made myself a lace pillow from a piece of 6mm thick MDF cut in a circle, topped with a piece of styrofoam that I bought cut ready to size from a craft store. I shaped the edges with a knife and sandpaper to give it the dome shape. I glued the styrofoam to the MDF with white wood glue and covered the whole thing top and bottom with a thin layer of batting and then made a removable cover out of cotton. Most lace makers choose a plain colored cotton so that the white thread will show up, I found this wonderful blue fabric with just a bit of a darker flower print, the thought of plain blue was just too boring!

On top of the pillow is very fine Egyptian lace thread, some pins for miniature lace making, they are only 0.45mm thick and 17mm long, a pricker for making holes in your printed paper pattern and a neat little tool for pushing the pins in and take them out again.

One item that I need a lot of is lace bobbins, one isn't too expensive, but you always use them in pairs and you could need anything from 6 pairs for the simplest lace to 50 pairs or more depending on your project and that can get quite pricey. One of my new friends was so kind to lend me a bobbin to copy, so guess what, the rest of the afternoon will be spent in turning my own bobbins, I have plenty of wood and a new lathe that needs trying out.

And on the subject of dolls, I thought I would show you a few photos of an antique reproduction Armand Marseille doll that I made way back in 1995 and dressed in a dress made of antique lace with an overcoat of muslin and lace. I also made her wig and lace bonnet, knitted socks and leather shoes.

Most antique dolls were made of white porcelain with a thin coating of pink china paint added all over the head before the painting of all the facial details, painting the eyebrows etc is done in a few successive firings, the lip and cheek color is also built up in thin layers with each firing.

Isn't the lace just gorgeous?

I am so looking forward to making dolls again, I will be going for mini doll classes from next month on.

Have a great week everybody
Elga

Victorian House: The Scullery

I was busy cleaning out my dollhouse when I realized that I have never shown you photos of the scullery before. I wanted a veranda too somewhere on the house and thought that grandma would enjoy shelling peas, etc outside on a nice day.

The outside.

Close-up of the roof showing the drainage system. Somebody forgot the pumpkin on the roof and the mice are having a feast.

Imagine having to make a fire to boil all your whites clean.

The scullery door from the inside.

The scullery will be hinged to the house to give me access to it, the door from the front are too small and you can't see the whole of it either. 

I used moldings to disguise the join as much as possible. 

Glimpse of the scullery from the kitchen. You can read more about the dollhouse here.

Elga 

17th Century embroidered casket

I have started on a project that I have wanted to do for a long time, Sundays are supposed to be my day off from working on commissions but not today, I started building a prototype of a 17th century embroidered casket. Because of copyright laws regarding photos I am sending you to a few websites to look at to see some original caskets.

I am planning on making two different caskets, one with a domed lid like this one in the Metropolitan Museum in New York and a flat lid one like this one in the Museum of Lancashire. One of the biggest charms of these caskets are all their secret drawers and you can see them in this casket at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.

So how the heck does one fit in all those drawers into a piece that measures only 18 mm (11/16") high without the lid and feet and what wood does one use to get to more or less in scale caskets. I went to buy some plywood today for another project and then it hit me, plywood would be perfect, it is a lot stronger than normal wood. Hmm, but will it work???

And so I had to try it to see :-), hence the madness of working on my off day!

Here you can see the back, one side and shelves glued in with the other side next to it to show you that I actually cut grooves for the 0.4mm shelves, the sides and back are made from 0.8mm thick wood. The real caskets were papered on the inside and the drawers and top compartment lined with silk. Silk will be difficult to use in so small a piece but I do intend covering the pieces with paper before gluing them together.

Here you can see the casket with the 2 bottom rows where the drawers will fit in. The top panel is a false front and when you remove it......

there is place for another row of drawers.

This whole thing was done rather hastily to see if it would work, I am pretty pleased with it because it is quite sturdy. I will need to make a few special jigs to make sure that it will be glued perfectly square. As to hinges for the doors, I have a plan up my sleeve that will involve lots of gluing area and no nails, once the casket is covered with petit point, you won't see any hinges in any case.

Have a great week

Elga

Wednesday Project and Petit Point Update

I haven't had much time for working on my Wednesday project for quite a while and are way behind my three friends, but this weekend I finally had some time to work on the tombstone doors for the upper case. One of my friends made a cutter from an old drill bit for the tombstone edges of the door panel, I am rather pleased with how it turned out. The cutter makes the top edges rounded, so I had to make the top corners square by hand, the door on the right still needs to done, hopefully you can see the difference. All the moldings on the door frame pieces were cut with  first a straight cutter and then a heart shaped cutter on the drill press. The trickiest part is making the slot in the door frame pieces where the panel fits in and mitering the small molding on the inside. The top rail is sticking out a bit, I think I will cut it flush once the door has been glued together, at the moment it is still all loose.

Showing the back of the door on the left, if you open the photo in a new tab you should be able to see it all a bit bigger.

The door lying in the case frame. You can read older posts about this project here.

Most days I make sure to take some time for doing a bit of petit point, I find it very relaxing, the deer is almost finished.

Have a great week.

Elga

Lots of Updates

Real life has been quite hectic these last few weeks, but I finally have a few things to show you.

First of all I bought this lovely antique chest of drawers and shelves for my workroom, I am really enjoying my new room and working in there. The shelves are typical of antique country furniture from the Cape Province in South Africa and made from indigenous Yellowwood.

This is the table that I taught at our Johannesburg club two weeks ago. It is a Sheraton style tilt-top table.

The original table that I copied is in the Metropolitan museum in New York, the table is made from Mopane wood and to give you an idea of size the top is 47mm by 33mm (1 7/8" by 1 5/16") big.

This table was the first piece of furniture that I made at our club when I joined in January of last year and the first time ever that I made cabriole legs. I never had time in class to do the molding for the table edge and I wasn't too sure how I wanted it to look either, so this week I took out my new cutters that I bought in NY and played a bit, I am quite pleased with the final result.

And then, I am still busy making Chippendale chairs, when I came back from Castine I found a big order from England for a set of six chairs that will grace a dining room in my inbox. With another six chairs still outstanding as well, I had to re-think about how I made the first few, as there was quite a few steps that caused me troubles first time round. The first thing that I did was to build two jigs for hollowing out the back splats, last time round I did it with a homemade attachment to my Dremel, although the results were fine, I just didn't enjoy the process at all.. My cutter isn't deep enough to do it in one cut, here you can see the front face of the splat being shaped only half way down, after this I lower the cutter a bit until I have gone the whole depth, something that I didn't think of doing first time round and the reason that I didn't build a jig then. This time round the brain cells worked a bit better ;-)

And here are six back splats with all the shaping done and all the holes have been sawed out by hand with a jewelers saw, all six the crest rails has also been shaped, when making sets of chairs it is important to do all the steps together while the machines are set up, you just never get the set-ups exactly the same again.

I refined the gluing jig as most of the joints are at an angle making accurate gluing difficult and last time round I had to unglue some joints and do them over as they slightly moved out of square.. I first cut out a raised piece to fit in between the back legs and glued pieces of wood on top of the insert to correctly position the back seat rail and stretcher. While I wait for glue to dry I always do some of the next steps, in this case shaping the back of the legs at the top where it is supposed to be nice and round, the left upper leg on the glued back on the left already has this done.

Showing the jig from the side.

Enjoy what is left of the week and hope you all have a fantastic weekend.
Elga

My new workroom and unexpected SNOW in my garden

The birdie has flown the nest and mom took over the bedroom for a workroom.

The room seen from the door, the orange paint will be covered with white eventually, it was my daughter's choice of color a few years ago :-)

I can just turn around on the swivel chair (sorry Karin C, I would have loved an old wooden one, but they are expensive and scarce here) and reach everything behind me, there are still space for more storage containers on the bookshelf. The radio.... because I can't work without music.

Close-up of the desk surface and that is not my new lathe, it is coming soon!

The desk from the other side, I am teaching my first workshop this Saturday at our local club, we will be making a tilt-top table and I am working hard to get the prototype finished, more about that later this week.

I want to replace the old radio cupboard with a chest of drawers for convenient storage, my house has all these funny angled walls, hence the weird shape of the work surface that still needs to be edged where my hubby cut it for me. Hmm, I should also consider adding a wall cupboard here sometime for more storage place. 

And then earlier today it snowed for a few minutes in my garden, I have lived in this area for 38 years and this is the first snow I have ever seen here.

This is the part of the garden that I can see from my workroom, until today our winter has been very mild.

Roses and snow, what a combination, it is actually time to prune the roses before spring arrives in a month.

Have a great week

Elga