I have a love-hate relationship with Martha Stewart. I completely respect her crafting, sewing and general creating abilities. She has an incredible eye and has created an amazing team with which to build her brand and company. Her books have always been beautiful to look at and walking through the aisles of Michael’s Arts & Crafts I want to have that whole wall of crafting stuff mainly because of how pretty it is.
I was introduced to these Encyclopedias of… books a year or so ago. I ended up buying the craft one first (oh Borders and your 40% off coupons…how I miss you!) and quickly realized that the one I had really wanted was the sewing/fabric version. My sweet hubbie got it for me this past Christmas. It’s awesome (you can tell by all the tagged pages!). But, once I started working on a project I realized that this is a Martha Stewart project and it requires some sort of special crafting/creating fairy godmother to appear. Ha!
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But, this is the year I’m going to tackle my fear, anxiety and frustration with the Queen of Craft. I’m committing myself to choose one project each month to create or learn from one of these Encyclopedias and post the results here. We will call them my “Martha of the Month” entries. I can’t promise these will come on any specific day of the month, but if you haven’t become a subscriber to daisyeyes, maybe this will be your incentive!
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January’s project comes from the Sewing and Fabric Encyclopedia. It is a cloth doll and honestly was a booger to make. I can’t blame this solely on Martha though. Every time I go to create some sort of stuffed doll or softie, I become more and more amazed at the talent of so many on the www. Hillary Lang probably being my favorite. That said, this was for a precious friend who is bringing home a sweet baby girl from Africa and was requested by her. How could I resist?
I pretty much only changed a few things from the pattern instructions. I actually used my machine to make a stitch around the arms, legs and neck to pull tightly (she says to hand stitch). I ended up cutting the squares for her feet and hands about 3×3″ instead of her recommended 1×1″. Overall, she came together pretty well. There is really only one snafu on her, but I’m not going to tell you where! It is a ton of hand stitching (which for as much as I love to embroider; hand sewing and sewing on buttons are my least favorite!) but sometimes that is more forgiving than a machine.
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The best thing about this doll though is her hair. I found this tutorial and it was AWESOME! Super easy, made perfect sense and came together just like the tutorial said! The only thing different that I did was I actually stitched down the middle of the hair-line/part to add some extra oomf.
Here is the complete gift. Sweet little doll baby and a onesie made just for her.
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Here are links to all of my projects:
February: a dress for a little girl from a man’s dress shirt
March: ribbon trimmed bulletin board
April: the beginnings of a school memory book (making the pages)
May: sweet embroidered napkins with vintage buttons
June:
July:
August:
September:
October:
November:
December:
Filed under: applique, crafting, handmade, martha of the month, patterns, sewing Tagged: adoption, africa, encyclopedia of craft, encyclopedia of sewing and fabric, handmade dolls, martha stewart, rag doll Image may be NSFW.
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