Miniature Santa Au Naturel...

A few years ago, I designed and made a small (doll-house scale) Santa Claus doll. I gave him as a little extra thank-you gift to one of my wonderful eBay customers. Anyway, I always meant to make another and just recently found my original pattern. The clothing pattern is missing – so I’ll have to redraw that.

I have a copy of a great old book, Dolls to Make for Fun and Profit, and the author, Edith Flack Ackley, recommends stitching small dolls by hand, so that’s what I did - and it was actually easier than following pencil lines by machine on something this tiny. Santa is a little less than six inches tall so he's just the right proportion for a 1/12 scale dollhouse. His arms and legs are wired for flexibility and I ran dental floss through the body to attach them. Next, he has to be gessoed and painted.

Nature Journal: Swamp Maple (Acer rubrum) Leaves

Most of the maple trees are holding on to their green color (here, in southern NJ) but there are a few leaves that are beginning to change. I wanted to try out my new Pitt sepia pen so I used it to outline the leaves and add a little bit of stippling to my watercolor sketch.

This is the first year I have not mourned the passage of summer – and I’m really looking forward to cooler weather – and more autumn color! It has been ungodly hot here for the last couple of months!

Messin' with Photoshop..

I found a beautifully coloured single-lobed sassafras leaf on the ground this afternoon, scanned it with a piece of decorative paper and applied the poster edges filter. Be sure to click to enlarge to see the details.

Vintage Barbie Clothes for Gene

Well, I wondered if the old Barbie patterns would work, scaled up, for Gene. Yes, they do! I enlarged the dress pattern 130.5% to fit my 15 ½” Gene doll. The fabric is a lightweight wool challis – a joy to work with! I’m going to make the matching coat like I did with Barbie, but I think I may make it shorter than the dress for even more of a retro look.

It’s important to remember that when the patterns are enlarged, the seam allowances get bigger, too! This is my second attempt on this dress because I forgot and used ¼” seam allowance the first time and the garment was too big! The adjusted seam allowance for Gene is 3/8" which is the default seam allowance on my sewing machine.

After Earl...

We went to the Ocean City (NJ) boardwalk last night to see if Hurricane Earl had made any sort of impact. There was a little rough surf but that was about it. Although it was a beautiful night, the place was pretty empty (as you can see in the photo from DH's iPhone) for the last big weekend of the summer season. How awful for the businesses there... Below is a radar capture (again, from the iPhone) showing where Earl was in proximity to the east coast last night and our location on the boardwalk in Ocean City.