"The old Dutch clock it told me so, and that is how I came to know."  When I was a little girl, I was fascinated by all things Dutch.  There were so many little bits of imagery and what-nots to keep my eyes noticing as new ones popped up.  My mother owned a pair of porcelain Dutch shoe earrings, and two jeweled brooches.  One of a boy, and the other of a girl.  These were studded with faux pearls.  My mother bought me a small enameled pin of two Dutch children.  There were wonderful illustrations in children's books of Dutch children.  And windmills!  Tulips!  This faraway country and its beautiful traditional imagery kept my imagination full of wonder.  And, of course, the exotic Chinese imagery fueled my imagination, too.

But more than those, the wonderful books my mother bought us to treasure were as much a part  

of my lap, as the cats who cuddled with me.  The Bumper Book, illustrated by Eulalie Winifred Banks (1895 - 1999), was my favorite.  Eulalie was an English-American illustrator who lived to be 104-years-old.  She began illustrating the children's pages of women's magazines at the age of fourteen while living in England.  By eighteen, she'd illustrated her first children's book, Bobby in Bubbleland.

In 1916, she married RAF captain Arthur Wilson and emigrated with him, first to Canada, then to the United States.  While Arthur worked as a radio engineer, she began illustrating stories, tales and nursery rhymes.  Her specialty was anthropomorphic animals.  The second world war saw her returning with her daughter to England to continue her work illustrating book, postcards and calendars.  During this time she received a special mention from the queen.

After the war she returned to California and continued to

work into her old age.  

Among the stories and poems within The Bumper Book, was a particularly silly one called The Gingham Dog and the Calico Cat.  I think I was more impressed by the imagery than the story, as it was clearly not as gentle as tale as the others.  The original title of this poem by Eugene Field (1850 - 1895) was The Duel.  In his short life, he became known, to his dismay, as The Children's Poet.  Also the author of Winken, Blinken and Nod, I've found his children's poetry to be thought provoking.  As we well know, nursery rhymes of old were commentaries of the times that only adults would appreciate (understand).  Yet, they rhymed, making them easy for our developing minds to enjoy and memorize.  And they were illustrated for a child's delight and so became sentimental and precious to us.  I would love to find out what prompted Field to pen The Duel, and its only in my decidedly wild imagination that it could have been written about an incident 

he witnessed, or innocently sprung from a child's stuffed toys in the nursery. Regardless, the story remains a staple in children's poems from long ago.  There is no sweetening the story, but one can be mollified by the ridiculousness of two stuffed toys going at it.  

When I was poking around, shopping for nursery planters, I came across one of a gingham dog, and that was it.  Had to have it.  Had to do something with it!

I pulled out my minty copy of The Bumper Book and once again poured over the details of Eulalie's charming illustrations.  I also poked around on Pinterest for other illustrations and found a surprising number of ways this poem was enjoyed in the past.  From story books, to greeting cards, to patterns for your own stuffed toys. Inspired by it all, I set out to create my own version through the gingham dog planter I'd purchased.

You work with what you have, and in this case, it was a burgundy red and white gingham doggy with a dark blue bow around its neck.  I think one of the greatest challenges I had with this piece was in creating pleasing colors around this planter. As it would be displayed somewhere among my dolls, I chose to celebrate Eulalie's illustrations, while making the imagery my own.  

It isn't easy translating watercolors to wool.  Possibly even more difficult than the doll costuming I create from illustrations.  Also, with every stitch hand sewn, and with the amount of detail I add, it becomes seriously tedious work.  At times I could only work on each piece for an hour at a time.  And, this is okay, because I do these things as "something to do".  Something to pick up and work on when I'm playing.  

I began with the cat.  She is made from The Felt Pod's printed felted wools.  I bought several colors for future uses, and the blue seemed to blend best with the overall theme.  While browsing through Pinterest, I found a vintage pattern for a gingham dog and calico cat.  I'd included them in this journaling for your pleasure and use.  

While deciding what fabric to use for the cat, I was first looking at vintage cotton floral fabrics.  "Calico", to me, was always a tiny floral print.  So I went online to research a bit, as I really wanted to create each character out of wool felt.  What I discovered, surprised me.

Calico fabric is a plain-woven textile, made from half-processed and unbleached cotton fibers.  It's a coarse, rough fabric, but not as sturdy as denim, nor as fine as muslin.  Calico is generally very cheap due to its unfinished nature.  The printing has nothing to do with the nature of the fabric.  So, a polka-dot could just as easily be calico in nature as a floral.  Done.

Snipping out little bits of wool felt for the kitty's eyes and nose were just the beginning of the effort.  These, I'd dab a bit on glue on to fasten to the toy, then carefully stitched them on at the edges.  Each color, each piece of wool is hand-stitched on.

The China plate was next.  I used the color theme and design from Eulalie's drawing, a mix between both sides of the illustrated poem.  Little mountains, a lake, green hillsides, the red walking bridge, and the figure carrying a bundle of wood.  I included two flying birds into this tiny piece.

The fun was in creating the face.  "Oh no!", is the expression and I added arms raised in surprise.  To make it more my own, I added jumping legs with traditional Chinse slippers on the feet. 

This piece had me looking at vintage China plates to see where Eulalie may have gotten her ideas.  Some are quite beautiful.

Oh, were I to live in a castle!  I'd have room after room of collectibles, and among them, a cabinet of beautifully painted plates.

Then the old Dutch clock was made.  He was no doubt the most difficult to do as I embroided his Delft painting all freehand.  You simply cannot draw on wool, and certainly not this tiny.  The old Dutch clock measures 2 3/4" x 2 1/4".  The most difficulty was in making tiny embroidered circles both in the plate's eyes and mouth, as well as the numbers like 8.  Certainly I could have used one embroidery thread rather than two, but the result would not have been as visible and bright.  

I began with cutting out the white shape of the clouds and land, stitched that onto the blue of Delft painting, then embroidered the images of the Dutch girl tending the goose and the windmill. Trust me, there was a lot of pulling out stitches and redoing in all these pieces.

The old Dutch clock is a gear driven clock with weighted pull chains and pendulum.  All of this all intrigued me further so I had to do some studying up on clock works.  My sister had a cuckoo clock with weighted pine cones on chains that used to fascinate me as a child.  The little German people in their home made of timber, with painted details of flowers.  sigh  Anyway, I couldn't find more on the subject than that the weights help the movement of the hands in the clockworks.  Clocks are another fascination for me.  I need that castle!

Legs on the clock would not work since he has his pendulum and weighted pine cones beneath him.  Sometimes I truly wish I wasn't so detail oriented, but then the work would not be "mine".

Finally, I attached the China plate around the dog with a chain, and strung bead lettering of "gingham" and "calico" around his front to back.  One other addition was that of the tablecloth. I needed something to frill and fill the planter's hole and created a

tablecloth from scalloped lace.  This lace was pleated, sewn, then pinned into the floral block I cut down to size and pressed into the dog to assemble the characters.  

Floral block is that green stuff that florists use in floral arrangements.  It holds water well and keeps the stems firmly upright. I'd tried using the crinkle paper filler first.  Then tried Styrofoam pieces stuffed into the center.  Nothing held the characters properly.  I don't know what made me think of floral blocks, but they work and are the best.

I hope you've enjoyed this journal on the creative process of this piece.  I've added lots of imagery below of different angles of the nursery planter, other Dutch clocks, and two beautiful China plates, and more.  Inspiration, amusement and historical enjoyment.

My thoughts turn to Easter now, and springtime.  I'm done with filling these planters for a while.  They take an extraordinary amount of time, and I miss sewing for dolls.  I've already been decorating for Easter and some of my dolls are dressed for the holiday.  Holidays come and go so quickly and I hope to enjoy them fully, and for as long as I can.

Happy springtime wishes, Melissa  

Close up detail

Close up detail

From The Tall Book of Make-Believe

From another book Eulalie illustrated

Eulalie Winifred Banks (19895 - 1999)

 

Esme's Sunflower of Ukraine

Just for today.  Just for now, and the next few minutes, let's celebrate the sunflower.

I can remember when my husband and I first moved to Auburn, California.  We'd lived in Silicon Valley amidst traffic and the growing congestion of the high-tech industry.  I grew up there in Sunnyvale.  Back then it was fruit orchards and canneries, like Libby.  We could walk down the street and pick sweet apricots and cherries from every front yard where the trees were ignored.  We bicycled past orchards of fruit just begging to be sampled and savored, and it was a child's life. 

Time and tide, and I found myself living on 4.5 acres in what seemed at the time, the middle of nowhere.  At least that's how it felt after escaping the city.  My husband learned how to garden when he was just a boy, and his grandfather's farm was a haven to him.

One of the first things we did to the place, was eradicate all the blackberry and star thistle, and he built us a garden where we could grow our own vegetables.  It was thrilling and novel to me as each year I could help cultivate pumpkins to spread around the yard and home at Halloween.  We still grow corn in summer, and it was fun to build corn shocks for fall to put those pumpkins around.  But the loveliest and most wonderful plant we ever grew was the sunflower.  How tall they grew!  So brilliant and strong.  I loved watching as squirrels and birds alike fed merrily on them.  

I was never one for drying them for the seeds, and they were perfect summer color and nutrition for the wildlife around us.

Sunflowers were cultivated in North America as far back as 3000 B.C.  They were originally developed for food, medicine, dye, and oil.  Later, they were exported to the rest of the world by Spanish conquistadors in the 1500s. 

Tsar Peter the Great was so fascinated by the sunflowers that he saw in The Netherlands, that he took some back to Russia.  They became popular for their oil, and by the early 19th century, the northern countries were planting millions of acres of sunflowers every year.

Sunflowers were already Ukraine's national flower before they emerged as a symbol of resistance.  This came to pass when a widely shared video clip appeared showing a Ukrainian woman berating Russian soldiers, telling them to put sunflower seeds in their pockets so that flowers would grow after they died in battle.

Quickly, the beautiful sunflower was being drawn, painted, made into emojis, turned into beautiful art, again, and who knew better of the sunflower's magical appeal, than Vincent Van Gogh, himself?  Many poems have been written of the sunflower as its quality of following the sun from morning till

night, turning its lion mane head in the process.

I was having another sleepless night and thinking what next I could do to soothe my weary mind and dig deep in a project that would bring me comfort.  A little lightbulb went off, and tiny, 6" Esme, popped into my mind with the creating of a sunflower dress for her.  I saw it all in a split second from the blue Valenki boots to the band of red roses on her head.

So that morning I got up, pulled my wool colors together and snipped a sunflower petal off one of the faux sunflowers in the arrangement on the side table for a pattern.  Esme would be needing a new floral gown anyway, as spring is here and her holly outfit needed to be retired to her box.

I made this up on the fly using her panty pattern to make her another olive-green pair, and constructed a brown bodice to support the brilliant yellow petals.  Each little petal is machine 

stitched with ribs, then each petal was sewn at the base in a pinch.  I pinked a green band and sewed it to the bodice, then hand-stitched two rows of the petals on.  

I was so surprised when the machine stitching allowed the petals to be formed upwards to float.  Creating this costume for her gave me a little bit of peace and purpose, and she can stand on my shelf as hope for the future in sunflower glory.

I've been collecting some beautiful art works to share on FB each day, and I'd like to share them with you now.  I hope the brilliant colors lift your spirits as much as they do mine.

"Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.  It's what sunflowers do." - Helen Keller

Love,

Melissa

Gorgeous watercolor by Ukrainian artist MisTery

A little Victoriana

Once upon a time...

Ahri on the banks of Kyiv

 

March Madness - Little of This and That

What's today?  Oh, the ninth.  Right.  As I was assembling these photos for you and composing a posting in my mind, I realized just how higgledy-piggledy this all seems.  Well, it's been that way for me for the last - almost month.  Five more days and it will be a month since I last posted.  I've not been in touch with some of my closest friends for weeks.  I seem to be slogging my way through the days and trying to maintain an upbeat attitude. I get on this website to write a posting and see that someone has left.  Am I that boring?  Maybe what I need is a designer to revamp this blog.  Make it brighter.  I'm hesitant to explore doing this myself because I've wiped out world grids messing with this computer before.  For the time being, I must let the images be the magic.

The remainder of February was a jumble of tossing ideas around and continuing to study Elizabeth Andrus's work from her Creative Breathing blog.  It became a bit of an   

obsession, and I continued to try to find out what happened to her.  Why did she stop posting?  I finally, reluctantly, tried the obituaries where I found an Elizabeth Andrus (1955-2021).  Looking closely at the only photo she gave us of herself, it is quite possible she was born in '55.  Was this her?  Saddened, I took a deep breath, thanked her for leaving us this legacy, and picked up some wool felt and my embroidery needle. I adore her nursery toys and her "parade floats" made from 50's kitsch ceramic planters.  They make me smile.  

She also left us some patterns without instructions, and not all the patterns actually match the toys she shared with us.  But it's a start and I wanted to start somewhere and give this a go.  I've been designing doll clothing for eleven years and needle felting for five?, six? years. Time to expand and grow.  I haven't any children therefore no grandchildren, but I wanted to make the ducky on wheels, so decided to make this for a young friend's  new baby.

When you print out a pattern without instructions or a given size of the object, it's a good guess as to how big the item would be, but I always like smaller.  I'm pretty sure given the photo of Elizabeth's duck, that I got it just about right at 5 1/4".  

The basics are wool felt from The Felt Pod, craft buttons and lots of embroidery thread.  Talk about a lot of work!  Each part of the toy is hand-sewn together with a blanket or button-stitch.  Details such as the eyes and cheeks, and the division of feathers in the wings are embroidered.  I think I spent two days trying to figure out just how to assemble it all, but in retrospect, I think its up to the individual how they approach this.  I like wire armature, so pipe cleaners works for me, and one was inserted through the bottom of the head then into the  

body.  The wings and wheels were simply sewn on.

One of the most ridiculous and agonizing parts of creating this ducky, was trying to figure out how to get the beak attached.  Studying Elizabeth's photo as carefully as I could, I gleaned that it was stuck through a slit in the gusset of the face.  How to make it look like a beak?  I'd have to show you how I did that, but basically it was done by pinching the ends and sewing them together.  One beak piece on top of the other, curling the lower one up into the top one, pinching it together and making a stitch, then inserting the beak into the slit.  It took me no less than two days to figure this out.  

While I love the little sailor hat she made for her ducky, I wanted to make this my own.  Since the plush toy was for a little girl's room, I decided to make it a bonnet with flowers sewn onto the side.

February went by in a whoosh and the March winds began to blow.  I love March.  It's that tween month signaling the end of winter and the beginning of spring.  

I grew up in a Catholic household and March was a pretty big deal.  It was the beginning of Lent and that meant giving up something you loved for like three weeks.  I was a dedicated little Catholic and took it all very seriously and gave up television one Lenten season.  I knew how to suffer even then.  

But one of the joys was in Mardi Gras which kicked off the Lenten season.  My mother's family was from New Orleans, so Mardi Gras was a pretty big deal.  We had a seamstress in the family, my mother's sister's husband's mother, who sewed the Mardi Gras costumes, and I got to meet her and see the costumes when I was ten years old.  Today that legacy has been passed down to her granddaughter, my 

cousin, Paula Gorbach, whose last name has probably changed to due to marriage.  But, oh how I remember visiting Granny Gorbach in her tiny home and seeing all those glorious costumes!

Since we lived in California, I waited with bated breath for the box to arrive after Mardi Gras.  My grandmother would send us a big box full of doubloons and strands of beads and other assorted items tossed from the floats.  I'd have my own little Mardi Gras parade once the box arrived and was sorted through, and still today, enjoy the very idea.  And that was in the early 60s when the stuff was GOOD.  What became of it all?

So, this year I dressed my American Girl, Cecile, in her Mardi Gras fairy costume.  Bernie wore her costume by Kathy Filanowski.  Sylvie got dressed in Ruby Red Galleria, and Violaine Perrin wore Integrity's Masquerade.  Just having fun over here and making the days count!

March is well under way and its kite flying time!  It is also the month to celebrate Ireland and St. Patrick's Day.

With the ducky done and sent on her way, my thoughts turned to my next project which was to make my first Nursery Planter.  I've struggled over what to call these little seasonal decorations and Nursery Planters seems the best description.  Retro Nursery Planters, Polly Planters, Jolly Planters, Parade Planters, and the like, were some of the names I came up with.  In short, you take a vintage planter, fill it with little wool plush toys and assorted ephemera and stick it somewhere to brighten the corner. I've a long way to go towards creating really cool ones, but we all have to start somewhere.  And what I did during the time I was working on the ducky, was buy a few of these 50's kitsch planters.  They can also be called nursery planters as many of their themes revolve around baby things.  Some are downright adorable!  I could go nuts collecting them, and actually sort of did.

While considering what I could use for St. Patrick's Day, I found this pig and barrel planter, and felt it would be a winner with the green ribbon around the barrel.

This little piggy is 5 1/2" tall to give you some idea of scale when seeing what I did with him.

I did some Pinterest poking and found this darling image of a little piggy riding a cart of gold coins pulled by other little piggies.  Pigs and coins have long been a popular European theme for bounty and riches.  So, when you see them on New Year's cards and even Chinese New Year's images, this is what they represent.

Elizabeth had made a little leprechaun early on in her crafting.  He was so darned cute, but there was no pattern for him.  She would later give us a pattern called Elizabeth's Leprechaun, but she used this pattern to make her St. Patrick.  Took me awhile to figure all this out.  She only ever shared photos of what she created, but never talked about them or how she made them.  It's all been rather a puzzle.  Inspiration at best, which is how much of this should be.  Pure inspiration.

What she did with her original leprechaun and other early works, is she fixed them to Mary Engelbreit boxes and boxes of her own

making.  It's been interesting to see the progression of expression she took.  I'm not sure others would be able to pick up on this, but that's what I do.  I study and study and study, then approach the concept.  Do something similar, but make it my own.

So, this little piggy's first prop was my own little leprechaun.  You can see in the photo of Elizabeth's St. Patrick's Day toys, how I came up with my version.  Hers was sewn in pieces meeting at the center, and my approach was to only sew with side seams.  My leprechaun has the wire armature like the Chinaman, and this works for me.

He's carrying a little shillelagh and is perched on the side of the barrel in a patch of grass and wildflowers.   An anthropomorphic shamrock springs up from the barrel with a happy face, and little gold coins spill from the barrel down

the front of the barrel.  These were made double sided and strung together with thread, from sparkly gold scrapbooking paper.  The grass filler is that crinkle paper grass and I bought it in several colors for other nursery planter projects.  

I strung together letters to spell Erin Go Bragh, with wooden shamrock beads strung between the words.

To give the nursery planter a fuller look and a desirable one from behind, I added green gingham bows in two sizes.

This is a happy piece.  The nursery planters should be joyful to look at and a bright spot in any corner.  They'll display well with dolls or books, or on any shelf for knick knacks and wot-nots.  One doesn't have to go to the lengths of creating pieces for them, as filling them with pens and pencils, painting brushes and sewing notions are lovely uses for them

as well.

March is a month of renewal to me.  So many changes are occurring in my life and not all of them are welcome.  I could scream and cry and kick the doors but spending my time creating things that make me and others smile seems a better way to spend that time.

I am not immune to what is going on in the world right now.  I grieve and weep for the lives, both human and animal, in Ukraine.  There is nothing I can do to change this, so I remind myself to stay on task and keep my spirits light for those around me.

I hope the winds of March keep your spirits lifted like so many kites.  I hope the greening and coming of spring bring for you a sense of peace and renewal.  Stay strong.  Love deeply.  Be wonderful.

Love, Melissa 

Elizabeth's St. Patrick's Day pretties.

In like a lion, out like a lamb.

The other side.

Bernie

Violaine