Meerkat Triplets

I like to wander through toy stores, usually on the off chance that they have Sylvanian Families. Well, last winter at some point I managed to get out of work early enough to actually stop by Cheeky Monkey Toys, and they had Calico Critters! I don't recall if they had a good selection or not, but at the time they had the meerkat triplets, and I couldn't resist. So here are Peter, Penelope, and Patricia.

I also went by Old World Designs and picked up a bunch of fun thread. Mostly with the intention of using them to knit or crochet clothing for my Sylvanian Families. I haven't had a chance to use the thread yet, however.

Carpet Bookmarks

One of the vendors at Costume College (in 2011) had these carpet bookmarks. I'm not actually sure why they had them, but I happily picked up a few of the designs.

Below Germaine and Stephanie model some dresses on one of the carpets.

I decided at some point that I should put together a workbook of crocheted clothing for Sylvanian Family figures. These two dresses were probably the start of that idea. The plan is to have increasing levels of difficulty, from a fairly simple dress in size 10 crochet thread down to items in size 80 thread or single strands of floss. I have some of the patterns figured out, but I haven't gotten around to writing them up nicely yet. You can follow some of the progress on Ravelry: Workbook Test Dresses.

Mini Furniture From Daiso

I have a backlog of posts. I didn't even realize how long the backlog was until I acquired some new Sylvanian Families.

So, some time ago (in the spring or summer of 2011), I was wandering through Japantown and stopped by the Daiso store. They had a bunch of mini furniture at really cheap prices (like $1 or something in that range). So I grabbed one of each item I thought would be sized correctly for Sylvanian Families. Most of the furniture was too tall, but a few looked like I might be able to cut them a little shorter if necessary, so I picked a few of those as well.

Clarice Bamboo with a hexagonal end table. (Packaging for the furniture in the background.)

Edwin and Ella Ellwood behind a desk. Well, I think its a desk. It almost looks like a table except that there are low support bars between the legs on three of the four sides.

Clarice and Alexandra Bamboo beside a fancy self. This was my favorite of all the furniture I picked up. I was very tempted to make a trip back to the store to get some more of these shelves. (By the time I wandered through Japantown again, Daiso no longer had any of this furniture.)

This 'Country' set was one with items I thought would be too tall, but easy enough to cut down. Chair on the left is the original, and the one on the right had its legs partially cut off. I haven't decided yet if the cabinet needs to be trimmed down a little as well.

Below is Edwin relaxing on the chopped down chair. The new height seems pretty reasonable when compared to a standing figure.

I pulled out some of my other items, and set up a couple scenes with the new furniture. Below, Elliot gets a sewing lesson from Ella while Eliza takes a look at the knitting basket. Father Edwin is putting away the dishes in the cupboard.

Alexandra starts a sewing project while Bertram relaxes at the end of the day. My brother gave me the glass mushroom on the far right on the end table; he made some while taking a glass blowing class. (He also gave me a glass elf hat, that I still need to post a picture of at some point.)

Petit Point

Needle 'n Thread had a recent post about embroidery scissors, and buried in the post was a link to Micro Stitchery. I'd been thinking I need some rugs as accessories, so I am very tempted by a couple of the rug kits.

Sewing Posts

The next month or so might be a little light in content. I have a series of sewing related posts I want to make, but the complete project idea and series isn't far enough along to begin without a several gaps in posting occurring. Also, I still haven't gotten around to looking up copyright stuff with relation to doll clothes patterns, and I really need to do that before I can get very far in the series.

On the knitting front, I have a blouse design for a Sylvanian Family sister-figure mostly worked out, but I haven't yet started to write up the pattern.

Pickleweeds or Brambles?

A while back I mentioned that Barnes and Noble was having a toy sale, and that I had ordered myself the hedgehogs and elephants. Well they showed up within a week of ordering, but I got a bit distracted with posting my slipper pattern and jacket pattern. So I fell even further behind with my posts. Now that I am otherwise caught up with my collection posts, it is time to introduce the Ellwoods and the Pickleweeds:

The fur on the Pickleweeds came out of the box a little mangled (from the holes in the carton),

but re-fluffying their fur with the little brushes they came with mostly seemed to work.

Now, are the Pickleweeds Brambles, or is Peaches a Pickleweed?

Hopefully I should now get back to the sewn clothing posts I've been intending to write.

Voles, Pandas, Koalas, and a Penguin

In August I finally decided to order a few of the Sylvanian Families I wanted, before they cycled out of production when I wasn't paying attention. I really wanted the Sewing with Mother set, so I ended up placing an order with Sylvanian City.

The Sewing with Mother set: Stephanie and Sybil Clearwater, and a cute little sewing machine and accessories.

I also got the Bamboo Family and Billabong Family.

Polar de Burg: I don't like the bottle mouth much, but the penguin is cute.

London Additions

So last April my boyfriend made a trip to London for work. While there he made the mistake of asking if I wanted anything. So I promptly replied with an ordered list of Sylvanian Families I was interested in. I also gave him a link to SylvanianFamilies.com, saying that they would carry a larger collection if he couldn't find any in whetever toy stores he was near.

Well, he did go out to their store, and he is still muttering about the hordes of people from the football (US soccer) stadium, which was appearantly at the same train station. In any case, he arrived home with Peaches Bramble, which was very exciting, and said that was all he had room for in his luggage.

Well, a week or so later a box showed up. Appearantly he bought a fair number of the items on my list, and had them shipped. So I acquired the Nettlefields, Underwoods, and Vandykes.

I also got the river crew with Seamouse Twitch, Beaky, and Murky Waters.

And finally, two lone babies: Charlie Moss, and Barry Thistlethorn. Now Prissy has a little brother!

The full London set:

And my complete collection as of mid 2010 (with a rather eccentric collection of clothing).

An Outdoor Chair

At some point I decided to go through all my old dollhouse furniture and see how much of it was correctly sized for Sylvanian Families. I didn't worry much about scale as a kid, and as it turns very little of my furniture was scaled correctly. So I contemplated making appropriately scaled furniture.

During my browsing of articles about making dollhouse miniatures, I came across The Art of Dollhouse Miniatures. This site discusses craft wood supplies that can be used as 'scale lumber', in particular the rather useful "Skinny Sticks" (I picked up a bag at my local Michaels). The site also has instructions for a Garden Lawn Chair.

Well, after looking at some number of miniature Adirondack chairs, I decided to try designing a chair scaled for Sylvanian Families. I also wanted a chair that they could sit in. Because of the way their legs angle, this made the project somewhat more complicated, since the seat needed to be extremely trapezoidal if I wanted the back to look like it was sized for one person rather than two.

The resulting chair is somewhere between the Lawn Chair and an Adirondack chair, and is made from 'Skinny Sticks'. It was stained with a wood stain after gluing all the pieces together. Also, some amount of filing and fiddling was required to get the pieces to fit together the way I thought they should.

I don't have complete step-by-step instructions, but here are the rough plans I made for myself along with a few notes on construction (pdf). I had some difficultly getting the back angled with the armrests actually sitting in the notches for them, so some additional filing may be needed. When printing the pdf out, make sure that it is printing without scaling (nor fitting to page, nor anything else that might cause the sizing to change).

Overall I am pretty happy with the result. My goal is roughly to have furniture the appropriate height: for example, table tops at adult waist height. Thus the legs should probably be a little shorter, so the seat isn't almost at their waist, but its pretty close.

Basket and Bread

Almost two years ago, while I was reading various articles and books about miniatures I came across some suggestions for using linen floss to make miniature baskets. I think this flower basket was one of the articles I read. In any case, I picked up the burgundy, brown, and green DMC linen floss from my local Michaels. Unfortunately I think those may have been the only colors they had, and they were never restocked. I never got around to following the woven basket instructions, but at some point I came across a cute little crochet basket by Pierrot (Ravelry link). Rather than using the suggested yarn, I used a single strand of the DMC linen floss, and a 0.9mm hook (US size 12 or 14). The basket could stand to be blocked, but I think the scale was approximately correct.

Cinnamon Hawthorne carrying a basket of bread:

The bread and the rolls in the basket were the result of reading various instructions and watching some number of YouTube videos about polymer clay food. In particular, this rather detailed video tutorial on bread. Since making the bread and rolls, and realizing I lacked useful powder colors to accent polymer clay food, I've collected a few more powders that looked like they would be useful, but I haven't tried them yet.

Knitted Baby Jacket

I went to re-check my notes/diagram for Prissy's vest (shown in this post), but then decided that the first knitting pattern I posted should perhaps be a little easier. Also, I wanted to test an idea I had for a top-down shirt/jacket with no seams to worry about. The result after the second attempt came out okay; here is Sandy Babblebrook wearing the second test jacket:

These jackets were knit with US size 000, or 1.5mm, knitting needles. I originally knit them with a size 8 perle cotton (DMC brand), since I already had a gauge swatch. Afterword, I also knit one up in a size 20 cotton cordonnet or crochet thread (specifically, Handy Hands Flora); I think it may be slightly larger, but not enough to be a problem. The perle 8 cotton is the purple jacket below, and the size 20 cordonnet is the blue jacket.

The instructions are both charted and written out. The pdf of the pattern, shown below, can be downloaded via GoogleDocs or Ravelry.

Kid's Sale at B&N

This post is completely off the topic of clothing, but it is Calico Critter related. Barnes and Noble has started a Kids Club. It's not for kids to sign up for, it's for adults to sign up for and list their kids. Of note is that you are supposed to receive a $5 reward for every $100 spent on kid's items (books and toys). Not much, really, but the program is free to join.

Why is this of interest to Sylvanian Family collectors? Barnes and Noble carries Calico Critters! They don't have a huge selection, but it seems worth mentioning because B&N is currently having a toys and games sale: buy one, get one 50% off. The offer only runs through November 15th however.

Also, link to list of Calico Critters.

So I ordered myself the hedgehog family and the elephant family:

Although, I was really tempted by the dress shops: Camryn's Country Boutique, and Margaret & Halley's Dress Shop.

Crochet Slippers for Sylvanian Family Baby

Well, I've mostly been keeping my posts in order, but I wanted to make the slipper pattern available. I went back and double checked my hastily sketched diagram, that I mentioned in The Slipper Project, to make sure it was correct. Luckily it was. On my first test, however, I misread my own pattern. Oops. So I went back and made a second pair, using three colors instead of my standard two for illustration purposes. Here's the initial diagram, and one of the original pair of shoes (in peach) along with the two new pairs created during the pattern test:

The slipper is constructed in three parts: a sole, the shoe sides, and the upper toe. The sole begins with a line of chain stitches, then works in rounds to make an oval: shown in medium blue.

The sides consist of three rows of single crochet stitches: shown in yellow.

Finally, the upper toe consists of two rows covering one end of the oval: shown in light blue.

After checking my initial pattern, I went and wrote up the instructions nicely. Here's a picture of the new chart:

Complete instructions, both written out row by row (using ch, sc, and dc) and charted with an explanation of the symbols, can be downloaded via GoogleDocs or Ravelry .

Pictures of the shoes on one of the baby grunts: