Summer standstill - not much happening around here!

We have had a few summer-like days this year, mostly cloudy, and unfortunately I was too lazy to get my passport renewed, so I was stuck, trapped and imprisoned here, though I believe the passport office was having difficulties issuing passports anyway, so it probably wouldn't have made any difference had I made the effort. Despite that, I still didn't bother much with miniatures.  Apart from the beginnings of a patchwork quilt, everything else was made a long time ago, but kept secret. Good job, I kept things aside for emergency blog content! :D  

I've seen a few people making patchwork recently, Ilona recently made one for a customer and kindly supplied a link for a very good  miniature patchwork tutorial here, which is by Gill of Make It Small. I used graph paper! I know Gill advised against this, but I am a rebel!! And yes.. it was fiddlier and more difficult to work with, but my fingers are quite good at tiny, fiddly manipulation and creasing, but I would definitely recommend her suggestion of magazine pages over my rebellious choice, the graph paper bends easily! :D I couldn't be bothered measuring and ruling! Also, because I am making this for myself and time taken is irrelevant, I opted for a 1cm square (I did consider 0.5cm........, then reconsidered back to 1cm). I thought 15cm by 15cm should be enough, so this one needs more squares.........................and the tacking is still in place which alters how it will look when finished.

This patchwork pattern is loosely based on an Amish design, Sunshine and Shadows.  The effect isn't quite as dramatic as a life size one due to the size of the squares, but I quite like it.  It looks a bit like a tile though doesn't it! :D 

When I started my patchwork quilt, I went off to the Little Trimmings website, only to find they were about to close the shop for the whole of August, how dare they, and there wasn't enough time to order anything, so I had to go with whatever I had in my fabric stash. Having no patience to wait until the end of August, the above fabric is all that I had to work with.  I had fully intended to provide links for each fabric, hence this photograph, but three were bought at miniatura, and I cannot find them online now. The second one down is possibly CF111 and the third is CF81 and both of those are from Little Trimmings.  Though I'm pretty sure I have seen the other ones at some point on the various online dollshouse shops and on ebay.

I also made some pillows, using cotton lawn (Batist) and filled with glass no hole beads. Rather than make a case to be turned inside out, I sewed the two pre-creased sides together, to get sharp corners.  I cut out a paper rectangle, (in scale, for a pillow) and folded the edge of the fabric over all sides, similar to the way the squares are made in the patchwork tutorial. This creates equal rectangles to then sew together.
 I intend to make little pillow cases for them, because I am mad and like the idea of removable pillowcases! Well, they have to be washable!

I also used a pair of hair straighteners in lieu of an Iron, for pressing down the creases. Much more convenient!

I made this bedspread sometime ago, with material and lace bought from Little Trimmings. The central and side panels are fine cotton lawn, the central cross is lace code CL2171W, the border is lace code CL184W/Iv/E and the side panel is lace code CL203W.  This is not true 1:12 scale due to the bed in situ size problem that I have. The bedroom is too small for a scaled down double bed, so I made it a bit smaller, now all bedding has to be made to fit THAT bed. Rather annoying really.

You can see it on the bed here.

This painting will not be to everybody's taste, but I have a forged smaller copy of it in real life, so I must have it in miniature. It is by a French artist called Jean Dubuffet, and is called Femme et Bébé. It also has copyright restrictions, that I can't make any sense of, so hopefully this photograph isn't against the law, I did manipulate the image slighty, so it could count as a derivative work, ie, removed the watermark :D Look, I really needed it!!. I, er.......stole borrowed it, resized it, printed it and then stuck it onto a piece of card. I am not very good at making squared frames so I made the card backing a bit bigger than the print, and stuck the frame sections directly onto the card.

I hope my blog is not removed, because of a tiny forgery! :D

P.s. I have been having problems with blogspot recently, frequently seeing an empty reading list and apparently not following any blogs, according to blogspot. Has anyone else been experiencing this? It used to happen the odd time when I logged in, but now it happens nearly everytime.

Vintage copyright free images!

Today, I discovered an amazing flickr site, "Internet Archive Book Images", which already has over 2 million copyright free, public domain images, which I thought would be very useful for future miniature printable projects. It's quite difficult to find images that are safe to use freely these days, so I am over the moon about this site, and the best part is, it is searchable, though a little bit hit and miss, you can still find some great images relating to your search word.

Image courtesy of Internet Archive Book Images.

Each image links to the book, from which the image was scanned. By searching for "doll-house", I found the above image, which linked to a book published in 1905, which has instructions and plans for building the above dollshouse. The book is available to read online here, and the instructions for the miniature house begins at page 71.  On page 109, you will find some instructions for tiny furniture too. There are even plans and instructions for a working miniature elevator on page 95. It is a lovely book to "flick" through!

P.s. When searching for images, make sure you have checked Internet Archive Book images in the drop box, below the search box. Flickr is a little confusing and you may inadvertently search all uploads to Flickr.

You can read more about the project here. 

!!Thank you Mr Leetaru and to everyone else involved!!