Clean teeth aren't scary - Page 6 and 7

So the reducing the scariness of the monsters continues here.

Weeping angels are one of the most unnerving of all Doctor Who villians and they are defanged by being all about brushing their teeth.

The grey fabric I used was quite thick and heavy, almost like denim and was a pain to work with, specially making the hands as pockets for the toothbrush and toothpaste.


There's not much to say here other than that, so I thought I'd add in page 7.

I don't have a complete photo of Page 7 - you can see here that it doesn't have the words "Get the Tardis to earth.


The key choice I made on this page, was to try and find out a bit about the colours of the planets and use that to make decisions.

I think I've got colours for Mercury, Neptune and maybe Mars, Jupiter and Saturn here.

Both of these were non complicated pages to do. This tardis being both tiny and double sided was a bit fiddly though.

Dress up dolly - Page 4 & 5

Pages 4 and 5 are a pair. I mentioned this in a video guide but it's very obvious that as Spacebat Designs created this design, she was consciously trying to tone down the fear factor of the scarier characters for a child audience. Here we have Daleks who are pretty scary and they are set up to be dressed up. I also loved this page because the person it was for has a dalek with a feather boa in her house.

 

With any page I think through my fabric choices for different parts to make sure they all go colour-wise, but often I then have to work through the challenges of working with those fabrics as I go along, I only have so much forethought.

So in this case, I'd chosen to continue using cloth for the dalek itself, but I got as far as the balls that decorate the "skirt" and I realised there was no way I had the patience to cut out all the tiny circles of fabric and tuck the edges under to avoid fraying.

I was stuck for a while but then I remembered a broken necklace with beads the right colour and size and it was such a relief not to have a frustrating chore for that detail.

Also I can't bring my British self to use a z in accessorise. It just isn't happening!

As I mentioned the accessories had to have the feather boa, so I adapted the pattern of the scarf to make a nice shape for the boa.

Foolishly I decided to embroider the scarf thinking it was too small to take long and it really took a lot longer than I expected, specially when I was looking into colours and found the official pattern of colours from the original scarf.

The other ones I decided to make it easy on myself, so I used actual beads for the pearl necklace and felt for the other hats and the bow tie was made from ribbon.

The last detail was outlines so you could see where to stash the the different accessories when not in use.

Open the door - let them in - Page 3

This blog is so delayed. Anyway, Page 3 is the Tardis.
One of the things I should mention is the background fabric. Not being blessed with endless yardage of the same background colours I attempted as best I could to mix up the different background fabrics and to not bunch it up too much. I also wanted to make sure I had enough of darker night time-y colours for pages where they should be night time-y.
This one has a shiny black fabric (satin?), contrasting the dark blue velvet of the doll pocket and the front page.

Making the Tardis out of cloth gave me room to do things like make the backs of the doors white - a detail I had never noticed before - also to have slightly transparenty windows. I think there's a little cardboard in the doors to help stiffen them slightly.

The largest alteration I made to the original pattern is that the original pattern does not specify what is behind the doors. I chose this console which I think is 11's (Matt Smith). I don't think I had a reason, I just felt like it. I did toy with doing some kind of swirl of light like when Rose opens the Tardis to save people but I rather like how the console has come out.

A detail that despite it being in the instructions that I messed up is the sign - Police Box. You can see from the two pictures that originally I got it wrong and put black writing on white - a version I did find pics of but nothing definitive, and when I realised mostly it's white writing on black I had to go back and change it.

Friends and past selves...page 2 or inner cover

One of the optional parts of the book was the doll pocket and the dolls themselves. I think I did these quite late in the day and I kind of caved because I'd made lots of plushies before as you can see on this blog.

There was another pattern I could have bought for them, but I decided to free style.

This was not exactly wise as you may be able to see from the pair of them together. The newest doctor is fatter and larger than the fifth Doctor, because I'd had such a terrible time turning him right side out that I increased the pattern.

For those of you who don't know how I do that, I made a pattern and design, and then put together each site of the doll.

I then sew it together right side to right side, then turn inside out and stuff.

If you make the arms too thin, you spend a very slow time trying to get them the right way out, panicking that you will push too hard and make a hole in the fabric.

This is particularly bad if there is a thickened area, like where the hands meet the sleeves.
I survived, if with slightly wonky arms, and narrowly escaped forgetting his lovely celery stick thanks to an observant friend who saw my posted photos.

I haven't got a separate image of the pocket space the dolls are sitting in, but it was a rescue of a piece of fabric I accidentally melted, because me, and I rather like it. It reminds me of the rip in dimensions in one of the 11th Doctor episodes.

Obviously it was a lot easier to make 13 as she was a larger pattern all round.

I don't always make any of the clothes separately and removable, but often longer coats or jackets do get made separately, and I think in this case the lining goes all the way up the back piece, if not into the arms.

Some details in either doll do simply have to be left out because I can't make things that small but I loved adding in the earring and braces.