Doll Restoration

Over the past month or so, I've been cleaning & renovating some of my 1950/60s vinyl fashion dolls. Here's the most impressive one before I started work.

She's a "Miss Rosebud" bridal doll: the body had white marks on it & was grubby in places, her hair was very flat & dusty & the dress was very grubby with some staining to the lace & net. She was washed using Ecover washing solution & her hair washed with Johnsons Extra Sensitive Baby Shampoo. The dress was left to soak in Vanish & then washed in Stergene. Here's the finished result.

The 2 dolls in the background were also cleaned - they too are Miss Rosebud dolls.

Step 5 - Finishing & Stitches

Here's just some of the stitches used for joining the pieces together - plus a personal name tag!

 

Step 4 - Making "Edges & Joiners"

These are the squares now complete with their joining fabrics placed ready for stitching.

After joining the main central pieces, the next step was to edge the quilt on the long edges using small strips & then binding all outer edges. Below are the 2 edging strips at either side of the long edges joined to the central panel.

 

Step 3 - Making squares

One main consideration in making this quilt was to ensure it didn't become too heavy. Being cotton fabric, the smaller the pieces & more joins there are, the heavier it gets. Too large pieces, then the cover can begin to look "scrappy". Below is the first set of squares made & layed out on a double bed to see what they look like. (the underlying black is an existing duvet on the bed).

On second thoughts, I decided to turn the squares as the overall length would be too long when finished left at the angle originally planned.. They also looked better this way. Looking at the remaining "border fabrics" resulted in planning colours to enhance those already in each of the squares. However, with insufficient sized remnants & to maintain minimum cover weight, these had to be made more as strips. 

I moved these joining pieces several times to retain the overall colouring effect - mainly equal distribution of pinks & blues.

This is the final layout plan - now onto making these inserts & edgings.

 

Step 2 - Cover designs

The next step after the initial samples, was to get some designs on paper - the first is below.

Checking on the fabric sizes, I was unsure if there were sufficient pieces that would allow me to complete some of the longer length strips either side of the central panel (above). Another design was then worked:

This appeared to fit the fabric pieces better & could also assist with assembling individual squares. With this in mind & working with the first 2 fabric samples, I decided to 'mount' the pieces in a fabric surround as below:

This would also enable me to use some leftover plain batik fabric as the outer square strips - these ultimately being stitched like log cabin.

Step 1 - Organise fabrics

The first part to the bed cover was sorting the many cotton fabric leftover pieces into some semblance of order & to ensure there was sufficient fabric. As the main colours ranged generally into pinks, blues & purples, it was decided to use this as a start with a backing lining chosen as being lilac (this was purchased as a flat double sheet in 200 count cotton).

After organising the fabrics, their sizing was next to be reviewed & at this point to start with (because of their varied shapes & sizes), try & join them into a radiating type of square - below are the first ones.

A "Summer Garden" is finished

Covid has meant that I've finally been able to finalise some projects that have been waiting to get completed. One of these was a way of using up a rather large pile of small cotton remnants that I thought would be a perfect "thank you" gift for one of my long-standing customers who I thought needed cheering up. Over the years, she has had many blouses & kimonos made - it seemed a pity to not use them up in some way. So armed with my recent Janome sewing machine, I asked the customer if she would like to have a single quilted throw made. She did - but not a quilted one .... just a cotton throw & here's the result (on a king size bed for the image) - all pieces have been stitched together using different pre-programmed machine embroidered stitches.

Full details will follow in due course as I've only just finished it!