A Miniature Craft Room in a Suitcase

Every now and then a crafting project comes along that sweeps you off your feet and captures your imagination in a way that nothing else can, and this was one such project. The idea of a room in a suitcase, or a portable dolls house, came from issue 93 of Mollie Makes and was created, along with some patterns for you to make at home, by Bethan of Little Lucciola, who makes and sells these little wonders from her Etsy shop, and you can see the room she created for the magazine in the photo below.

As soon as I saw Bethan's room in Mollie Makes, with the setting, styling and attention to detail, I felt so inspired to have a go at something similar myself. I had a chat with Bella and she wanted very much to get involved so we ordered a suitcase and made a plan.

Would you like a tour? You can hang your bag and coat on the peg rail right there. 

Pull up the stool at the desk and switch on the radio. The pencils are sharpened and knitting needles ready, fabric folded and paper rolled. 

The standing lamp behind the chair gives a soft light for reading. 

Take a seat in the arm chair - your current WIP is in a basket at your feet....

....and there's a lovely soft alpaca throw if you're cold.

Coffee or tea? I'll put the kettle on.

The footstool is a handy spare seat and the rug will keep your toes warm on those floorboards. 

Wouldn't you love a craft room like this? Oh, I would. I'd move in if I could. There's so much here I love; the table with the hairpin legs, the chair, the rug, the details like wall hangings and posters, the peg rail, the plants and little copper watering can... 

As always with this kind of project, I can hear a voice asking what and who it is for. Is it a toy? Is it for display? Aren't your children a bit old for this kind of thing? (At nine and eleven, NO!) Bella will play with this with her Maileg mice, and she and Angus were very involved in the making of the various parts. Even if they weren't actually cutting or painting or gluing, they were very often sat with me at the kitchen table while I was working on it, asking questions, suggesting things, playing with or making other things. But it's not really robust enough to seriously be a toy, some care does need to be taken with the furniture and tiny parts inside, some of which are sharp. So is it for me? Well the pleasure for me was in the making. Now it's finished, I have no use for it really, it was all about the process, and what an indulgent, imaginative and totally enjoyable one it was. 

I've spent a few hours over the last few weeks looking at dolls houses and miniatures online and it is so seductive. Not the period, Victorian style collectables, that's not my cup of tea, but I love it when people create a modern home, like you'd actually live in, in miniature. And when the interior design is beautiful too, even better. It's an internet rabbit hole I quite happily fell down and I could, with enough time and money, get quite obsessed with the miniature world so it's probably best for everyone if I don't. I'll just stick to small projects like suitcases for now.

Supplies

I tried, as much as possible, to use things I already had. To just go out and buy everything ready made from a dolls house supply website seemed too easy, not to mention expensive. The fun for me is in making these little things, especially if I can repurpose something ordinary from around the house. Over the years I've amassed a reasonable collection of useful crafting tools and kit such as a glue gun, spray paint in various colours, beads and buttons in different sizes, string, yarn etc so I didn't need to buy much. I did spend around £20 on some pieces of balsa wood in various sizes and thicknesses, a small amount of wooden dowel, wooden discs and some more chunky wooden beads. I also bought the suitcase, which at £15 for a set of three seemed good value, and the two smaller cases are already in use in Bella's bedroom. I also, with the children's permission of course, took some small accessories from their Playmobil sets and perked them up a little. 

Details

The thing I always want to know when seeing handmade miniatures is how they were made, so below I've listed everything I made for anyone who might be interested. Please ask in the comments if there is anything you'd like to know.

Suitcase: this measures approximately 30 x 20 x 10 cm. I painted the inside with white emulsion and drew on floorboards with pencil and ruler. On the back wall, I used crafting paper to create a half-wall of wallpaper, and used a strip of balsa wood to make a picture ledge that ran above it. 

 Desk: a small piece of balsa wood and four long hair/kirby grips. I slightly opened each grip and sprayed them copper before gluing them to the underside of the table.

Basket: a plastic lid from a bottle of mouthwash covered with glue and wrapped around with string (and all done, including the rolls of paper, by Bella).

Chair: small squares of foam covered in grey fabric (living room curtain off-cuts) with balsa wood arms and legs.

Bookcase: pinched from Bella's existing dolls house and sprayed white, then stocked with folded fabric and felt.

 Lampshade: a plastic roll-on deodorant lid sprayed copper.

Textiles: a knitted throw (some lovely alpaca yarn on 3mm needles) and a chunky crochet cushion (cotton yarn on a 3mm hook).

Coffee table: a wooden disc, bought just like that, and wooden dowel legs glued on.

Yarn basket: wool felt sewn together on each corner with blanket stitch. The balls of yarn are little pieces of plastic straw with wool wrapped tightly around each with a needle, and the knitting needles are tooth picks with a tiny wooden bead glued to the top.

Rug: now this is ingenious and, like the yarn and knitting needles, one of the patterns that came with the magazine. You draw your circle shapes onto a sheet of paper, then stick clear plastic over the top. You gradually glue your spirals of string until you have the desired shape then wait for it to dry, them simply peel away the plastic sheet. It's ingenious.

Footstool: just dark grey wool yarn in DC, stuffed with toy stuffing.

Standing lamp: the base is three lengths of dowel glued together and the shade is a section of the inner tube of toilet roll covered in fabric.

Plants: chunky wooden beads, sprayed copper or left natural, and filled with small bits I snipped off any fake plants I could find in the house. The trailing plant is just embroidery silk threaded with tiny random pieces of felt.

Desk accessories: the needles sit in the lid from a spray bottle of leave-in conditioner, while the pencils are in a Playmobil bucket that I spray painted copper. The knitting needles are toothpicks topped with beads as before, and pins. The pencils are toothpicks snapped in half with their tips coloured with felt pen. Angus made those.

Other accessories: all Playmobil parts taken and repurposed. I especially love the little copper watering can. It was purple before. 

Wall hanging: a curtain ring sprayed copper and hung with small lengths of cotton yarn.

Stool: a  plastic milk bottle lid, four hair grips and an off-cut of fake sheepskin. As with the desk, the hair grips were stretched open and sprayed before being glued to the sheepskin-covered lid.

Pictures: possibly my favourite part. I found photos on my computer and edited them so that they were tightly cropped and with exaggerated colour and contrast, so they showed up well. I cut and pasted them into a Word document, played around with size, then printed them onto white card. The frames are just crafting matchsticks.

I do hope you've enjoyed looking around this tiny room. If you have a favourite corner or item I'd love to hear it. 

A Succulent in a Hoop

I recently bought a copy of Mollie Makes, a magazine I've not bought for some years. Back when it first came out, around the time I started blogging, I used to really love it. I think I had a subscription for it, and I remember making one project a month from it for a year. That was fun. But I started to enjoy it less and less over time; the projects didn't grab me so much, and perhaps my children started to reach an age where I didn't want to make quite so much for them, and I certainly have much less time now than I ever did before, both to read magazines and to make things. 

But the most recent issue, with it's spring like colours and plant-themed projects, really grabbed me and I spent a long time in the supermarket (once I'd removed all that ridiculous plastic wrapping) flicking through it. I was especially taken with this Boho Botanical supplement, full of gorgeous ideas and really right up my street.

This project, a piece of hoop art designed by Helen Wilde of Ovo Bloom, grabbed me straight away. I loved the colours and the contrast between the silky embroidered and spiky crepe paper leaves.

I always find satin stitch harder than it looks. It couldn't replicate the perfectly smooth, even texture in the pattern but I did my best. It looks ok.

The French knots for the soil were much easier to stitch. I do love a French knot. 

To create the spiky succulent leaves, you cut small strips of crepe paper, twist them into bows, glue the two leaves together then cut into a leaf shape. Then you slowly layer them onto a small disc of cardboard, about the size of a two pence piece (or wine bottle lid, that's what I used), gluing them down as you go, until you are left with a beautiful, tactile little object. Paper craft isn't something I've ever really experimented with but I can see the appeal.

Then the small cardboard disc is glued onto the linen fabric. So simple but very effective.

 I absolutely love it. It feels like spring might finally come when I look at this. 

I've hung it in an awkwardly shaped corner in the dining room, next to the book shelves, and I think I'm going to create a hoop wall there. I already have a little pile I've been collecting for a while, piled up there on the bookcase.

That will be a lovely job. 

Christmas Gifts: Cloth Dolls

Do you ever finish a project and then straight away look for the flaws? I always do. It's a really horrible trait, and not something I do to other people, but when it's my own work I immediately search for the imperfections. The bit that could have been neater, straighter, better. And once I've found it I can see nothing else. 

It gets you no-where, thinking like that. 

If you look closely, you'll see that the left arm on both dolls does not sit as neatly as the right. It should have been tucked in more before I stitched over it. But do you know, I honestly don't care, and I don't think the recipients of these dolls will either. I made them for my nieces, Jennifer and Eleanor, aged five and three. They won't notice and I hope they will like their Christmas presents and just play with these dolls and drag them around everywhere and take them to bed, getting them dirty in the process and they'll end up in the washing machine a few times, as all well-loved toys inevitably do.

No, I am proud of these. I am proud of my careful machine stitching around the hair and hairband, something I wouldn't have been able to do a few months ago. I'm proud of how I made the seams on the leggings and shoes line up so neatly. I love the colours and patterns and their sweet smiling faces and the way they feel when you hold them - soft, but heavy too, as rag dolls should. 

I wanted to make them essentially the same, but different, to avoid competition and squabbles. Sisters eye up what the other has and look for advantages and differences - I should know, I am one of three girls. Both girls are brown-eyed red-heads, and so the dolls are too. 

I used acrylic crafting felt for the hair, hairbands, leggings and shoes. The arms, legs and face are made from some plain off-white cotton fabric I bought in Ikea, and for the bodies I used scraps of Liberty print in Betsy D and Betsy J, a pattern I adore and come back to again and again. I buy small amounts and use it very sparingly. 

The pattern is written by Laura Hunter and is from an old copy of Mollie Makes. (That subscription just keeps paying for itself!) You'll find it in issue 14, and I thought it a really good pattern to work from; clearly written and easy to follow, plus the dolls are not too small which helps avoid horribly fiddly turning-the-legs-the-right-way-out moments. Laid out flat they look like this and measure 43 cm or 17 inches from head to toe. They look a bit like they're in a morgue in this photo, don't they, laid out flat on a white sheet. They just need a tag on their toes.

I finished these dolls last week, but have been waiting for a good day to photograph them. The light seems to be either too gloomy or searingly bright, neither of which is very helpful. Annie wrote recently about the difficultly of taking photographs during the winter months, in particular the lack of daylight, and the challenges it brings. Some things - like food - just don't look so good when photographed in electric light, but I want to continue to share my life and creative endeavours (both the edible and non-edible sort!) here in this space and, for me, that means photos as well as words. So I'll just have to continue to improve my photography skills. I like a challenge.

Thank you for sharing all your Christmas traditions with me. What a great response! It seems the trend in North America is to begin the festive decorating around Thanksgiving, whereas here most of us decorate the tree mid-December.  I think there is something really romantic and traditional about putting up the tree on Christmas Eve, as people used to do, and keeping it there until 12th Night. But my own children would never stand for that, and I know that I want to enjoy the period before Christmas as much as the time after, and so I'll put mine up a couple of weeks before the big day and take it down on New Years Day, which always seems a nice way to mark the end of festivities and the start of a fresh new year.

A Mollie Makes Challenge

Way back in Febrary 2012, my very good friend Abigail gave me an annual subscription to Mollie Makes for my birthday. It wasn't a magazine I'd bought before, although I'd heard of it, but Abigail knew it would be my sort of thing, and she was right. I was instantly very taken with it and decided it would be fun to make one thing from each issue, which was more of a pleasure than a challenge, if I'm honest. My absolute favourite item is the crocheted cushion, pictured above. My interest in crochet had been simmering in the background for some time but this project cemented my desire to learn and prompted me to book myself on a learn to crochet course. I still love the pattern, colours and feel of the yarn as much today as I did when I made it, and it moves from living room to bedroom depending on the seasons and makes me happy every time I look at it.

I thought it would be fun (and yes, a little indulgent) to look back at all the things I've made. So, here are the fruits of my labours. From issues 11, 12, 13 and 14 we have two fabric mice, a pretty but not very useful apron, that crocheted cushion and a box of felt macarons.

From issues 15, 16, 17 and 18 we have one pair of sparkly pumps (which I actually wear a surprising amount!), some friendship bracelets, a bunting-decorated bag and a string of pompom bunting (pomting?) for Angus's bedroom.

Then, in issues 19, 20, 21 and 22, I made a pile of decorative fabric leaves, two crocheted coasters, a cotton granny square throw and an autumnal themed embroidery.

And finally, from issues 23, 24, 25 and 29 (my subscription ended somewhere here and I started buying random issues), I made a felt fox and racoon, a pretty floral crocheted garland, the knitted washcloth and two felt ice lollies.

Some things, like the patchwork apron and the crochet coasters, I did to see if I could, to improve my skills a little. Other things, like the felt macarons and fabric leaves, were crafting eye candy - projects that appealed to me for the way they look as much as for their use. Some took twenty minutes (the pompom bunting) while others, like the crocheted throw, took months and months. There were things for the children, for me, and for gifts. Absolutely everything has been worn, washed, played with, used and and loved, with the exception of one thing - the apron - because what is the use of an apron which doesn't stop the front of your clothes being splashed when you're cooking? - but I still like it all the same.

I've enjoyed doing this enormously (except for the mice, they were too fiddly). It made me try things I otherwise wouldn't have and at times pushed me out of my comfort zone. I've just looked back through all my old issues for ideas for Christmas presents and there is certainly a lot of inspiration in those pages. I don't buy it every month now - probably every third of fourth issue - as our tight budget has meant I've had to drastically cut down on treats like magazines, but I am still very tempted every time I see a new issue of Mollie Makes on the magazine stand.