Here are some printable graphics I made for a couple of scrapbooks I'm making. Some of them are completely original, some are recreations of elements I saw in other people's work. If anything looks too similar to a graphic you are the copyright holder of, just let me know, and I'll take it down. Some graphics use shapes/textures from openclipart.org, morguefile.com, webtreats.mysitemyway.com and another free graphics site, but I can't remember which one 🙁

These are thumbnails. Click to see full-size. Right-click > Save Link As... to save the image. You can use these for digital scrapbooks, too, but you might want to add a drop-shadow. These were really designed for my physical scrapbooks. You might need to play around with your printer settings. I recommend creating a test-sheet first so you can see how colours translate from the screen to paper. I find that a gsm of between 100 and 130 is best for scrapbook graphics.

TOU: Non-commercial use only. Feel free to create derivative works for sharing, just don't claim credit as entirely your own. You don't have to link here, just don't pretend you made it from scratch.

A thing I made for my mum! I finally finished this on the 1st of March! It's made out of three shoeboxes reinforced with card, then paper machéd with newspaper and cooked-flour-paste. Painted with one coat of brilliant white emulsion, then acrylic paint. Embellished with half pearls and rhinestones.

I finally finished this on the 12th of March 2016. Here's what it looks like!

Stencilling should be done with sponges and not regular paintbrushes. I had to learn this by experience.

Not only can it take the weight of a toddler, it can take the weight of two toddlers and one me, making it strong enough to support 80kg+!!

And the kids loved it, so it was a job well done. The end.

[2021 update: it's a useful seat for the boys to use when they are watching me play Commander Keen.]

Right, here's how I made the loft bed for my dolls' house. To get the proportions, I based it on measurements from my old real-life bunk bed, scaled it down by 12, and made some tweaks.

What you will need:

• Cardboard, about A3 size, roughly
• Glue (UHU Power, or PVA will do)
• Pencil
• Metal ruler with millimetre measurements
• Craft knife
• Cutting board
• Masking tape and coarse sandpaper, maybe

PROTIP: In order to make the paper mache stage less fiddly, you could paper mache all the individual components FIRST, then assemble at the end. Alternatively, rather than paper mahce, you could just glue cardstock on to each component, then glue together at the end.

First thing is to make the base of the bed. So measure out some cardboard, 140mm long by 70mm wide. Glue them together, back to back, and allow glue to set.

(I've merged several posts, because I'm sick of this dumb project. I should have made it in 1:24 scale or smaller. Seriously, I overcomplicated this project so much, what a 鈍臭い)

I've mentioned before how much I want a dolls' house. Not a toy one — I do have one of those, although don't ask how that came to be — but a proper collector's one. And though I could afford to buy one, having more money than sense, I can't justify spending £1000s on one (have you seen how much the furniture costs?), especially when you can make a real-life house for £150.

In any case, I still want one. I've actually been planning on making a paper mache tower for YEARS now. There are long panels of cardboard festering away behind my wardrobe, for seriously. But I never did get round to it. So a few weeks ago, I felt like I wanted to get on with it, so I looked up paper mache dolls' houses online to see if anyone else had done it. And I came across only one site that mentions it, and that's lolasminihomes. Looking at that, I learnt some tricks to making my dolls' tower, only now I am more ambitious. Why make a tower when you can make a restaurant? Heck, why make a teeny-tiny restaurant when you can make a BIG restaurant with LIVING QUARTERS above? You see, I never do things by halves — and then set myself up for disappointment, because I always get bored halfway through and give it up. So how far do you reckon I'll get into this project before I get bored?

The other problem with doing such a big building is WHERE THE HECK AM I GOING TO PUT IT? My room is already jam-packed and it doesn't help that I have to share it with my two idiots -- I'm talking about my birds.

Birds who will also mess all over my dolls' house, meaning even if I do find space for it in my room, it will have to stay covered all the time just to not resemble the bottom of their cage (seriously, they can projectile poo, it's crazy).

Anyway, just to bring this whole blog back on topic, I used Sims 2 to plan out a basic design, so here it is:

Another baby, another book needed to save the records. The ready-made books are not really suited. It looks a bit silly when you have to cross out references to christening days and godparents and first Christmases and so on. So I thought, why not do it on the cheap and make it myself? And that way I can include only those things which will be relevant. So this is how I went from this...

... to this:

So it was simply a case of Continue reading →

I've been making more stuff for the dolls:

A prom dress for Millie (she's not really Millie, she's Florry, but never mind) and boots to match Molly's dress.

The problem with these dolls is there is so much variation in their body size (yes, yes, I know, don't start). I just mean that when it comes to making clothes, this prom dress fits quite snugly on Millie, but falls off Mimu because she is so scrawny.

Here are Molly's new boots. They only gave me one of those buttons in the pack, so she has to make do with one buttoned shoe, and one button-less.

I'm planning on making Mimu a more mini-me-like outfit (since she is actually a mini-me from when I had pink hair :'( Not sure where I will get the mini chains and zips for the combats from, though :S

So as you would not know, the inside pocket of my bag had come undone on one seam, leaving my keys to keep falling through and resulting in much fumbling around the inner lining of my bag to locate it.

So it was left to an old t-shirt to provide the new fabric of the bag's pocket and I'm pretty proud of it, considering the sewing machine used to break when I so much as looked at it.

So with what was left of the late T-shirt, I decided to make a new outfit for my dollies (I have three now). Since Molly was the tubbiest, I used her for the size, and here is the result:

The sewing machine didn't last long after I'd finished my bag pocket, so the entire of this dress was hand-stitched and made my eyes feel all goggly.

Unfortunately I didn't plan the dress all that well; that's why the seams are so weird, because I had to try to find a large enough piece of fabric to make the back.

The dress isn't quite finished as the shoulders aren't actually attached to anything. I've ordered some buttons from eBay to make shoulder straps to the back.

I mentioned in a previous post that I've been learning crochet recently. I found it a lot more complicated than knitting and it took me a while to figure out the technique, but I'm totally with it now. Here is the first thing I made that came out:

Headband pattern by epicdabundance.
Flower pattern by happyberry.

Made more:

Flower pattern by happyberry.

And a matching set for my niece and her dollie: Continue reading →

I've been into knitting on and off since about the age of 8 — mostly off. A few years back I did make a scarf and a few arm socks (arm warmers, really), but the knitting bug is back and I've been a bit more ambitious this time round.

The book I used to learn: Usborne Knitting from Start to Finish.

Starting off with...

Pink and black scarf for Mimu on the left. I kept wondering why my scarves always curled. Unfortunately the book doesn't mention that stocking stitch will always curl to a greater or lesser extent unless you border it. For things which are going to be seamed though, it's fine. The collar on the right was supposed to be a baby hat, but it all went wrong. My moss stitch turned into ribbing and the rest of it was all of a muddle. It ended up turning into a dress, and when that failed too, it turned into a woolly collar.

I thought, never again with the hats, but found a simpler pattern and...