Cute little ghosts and lights - Page 9 & 10

Page 9 was mostly about small fiddly repetition. I foolishly continued my trend of avoiding felt (partly I'm not sure I had enough, and partly I just I dunno I didn't wanna) but turning inside out 9 tiny adipose was hard work. 

The ribbon was fairly quick to sew into the number shapes although pinning them into shape was a pain as they are so small. It was also fun to use up little bits and create a colour sequence. I actually think they look more like little ghosts or like the stay puffed marshmallow man out of GhostBusters as well as adipose and I quite like that they have character and therefore aren't identical.

So that was so quick I thought I'd add in Page 10! 

Ood are a fan favourite character and I knew I really wanted to make the communication globe light up as it does in the tv series. I experimented with those keyring lights before I found that an LED light for a bike (small one) would work perfectly inside.

When the light shines you do see some of the yellow plastic I didn't quite manage to cut away but I love how it looks all the same. It was fun making the ood as the fabric for the head was already naturally wrinkly and the ribbons made short work of the tentacles. A quick and easy page to put together

Shiny shiny robots - Page 8

When I reached the Cyberman I had hitch in that I didn't have a grey or shiny fabric that I wanted to use, I don't have a lot of grey generally anyway really. I had had a scrap of some shiny silver stretch that I'd used a while back for a helmet for Thor but  that was all gone and there wasn't a grey I was happy with available in my stash. So I sent out a call and I was really lucky - the friend who gave me that last lot of shiny silver had some more she could give me to use. I also got some other bits of grey from other friends. Which is always useful to have alternatives. 

The design called for movable arms and legs so I made these double sided covered over cardboard for stiffness. I didn't have any grommets or anything like that so I just used a bit of stitching at a very limited point, a bit like a button to give the limbs some flexibility. 

The fabric was stretchy which was harder to deal with but really the worst thing was the metallic thread.

There are I'm sure metallic threads out there that don't give you the urge to scream at some point, but in my experience the only ones I've had are fabric threads wrapped in a metallic substance. 

After a while pulling it through a material the outer less flexible metal will shift differently (or not shift) leaving you with a bare thread. 

He came out rather nice I think if I do say so myself, kind of cute, and again with the long running theme of the designer, clearly downplaying the scary with the "Posing" aspect.

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.

The Doctor is very very late

So in about 2012, a friend was going on about the Doctor Who Quiet Book. Well we all were, it was really cool. I was reading The Mary Sue A LOT back then and they had an article all about it (Doctor Who Quiet Book Mary Sue article). She wished someone would make it. I wasn't really into sewing much back then but I said I would do something smaller and she found a Doctor Who Plushie. This lead to a lot of  other plushies, which really opened the gateway to a lot of much large projects which you can find on this blog.

Fast foward to now, I've made a lot of large projects, my friend has a new baby and I'm like "I could totally make that book she wanted. It would be easy!". To my delight the pattern was still listed on Etsy, although the woman had changed her online name from Bantam BB to SpaceBat Designs (pattern for Doctor Who Quiet book on Etsy). And I mean it was 9 quid, why wouldn't I?

As I write, I've finished all 12 pages, and overall, it's been very quick really despite the fact that I only finished the previous project in June and I'd not even used much felt. I think what sped things up was that I'm only lightly tinkering with the pattern, and the patterns are larger than some of my previous projects. With my own projects I have to make a lot more decisions than just what fabric or materials am I using. It's been a lot of fun.

The Cover

So on to the cover page. The first choice I made was I was going to embroider on the title of the book rather than cut out felt letters or other fabric. I also decided that I would use the font and colour scheme of the newest Doctor. To do this, I found a picture online and traced it onto the interfacing, then retraced it backwards. I'd planned out my backing fabrics and the cover was set to be blue velvet. I got a bit overexcited and melted it a bit on the edges. I'm not very good at remembering past mistakes as this was not my first time slightly melting this fabric.
The embroidery for the lettering I used was the graded colour kind between a pale yellow and an orangey colour. I ran out with a tiny bit to go, but managed to colour match. Essentially it was fairly easy.

The tiny tardis was a bit harder without some actual blue felt, I was using a navy cotton I had lots of, but being small, it didn't take long.

To finish off the design and make it look more like space, I foolishly decided to try and use up some more of this awful embroidery thread that has gold coloured metal wrapped around it, which is hell on earth to sew with, but all in all for a few stars it was fine!

Guide to Advent Calendar with links

It's over and done, but for anyone who wants the full list, here it is

1. Annunciation - Mary has her pregnancy foretold by Angel Gabriel - large scene ( First Sunday)
2. Joseph is warned by an angel not to divorce Mary - large scene
3. Visitation - Mary visits her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist - large scene
4.  Census document - Mary and Joseph must travel to Bethlehem to participate in the census - small scene
5. A suitcase represents preparation for the journey - small scene
6. Crossed keys represents things you take on a journey, and the keys to heaven of St Peter, head of the first church - small scene
7. Mary and Joseph begin their journey - large scene

8. John the Baptist and and Isaiah predict Jesus coming "make straight the way of the Lord" - large scene - large scene (Second Sunday)
9. Parable of the pearl without price (Matthew 13:45-46) - small scene
10. Priscilla and Aquila, key figures in the early church- large scene
11. The whale that swallowed the prophet Jonah - small scene
12. Noah's Ark - large scene
13. Deborah - prophet and leader in the old testament - large scene
14. Joseph and Mary stop at an oasis on their journey - large scene


15. Wise men watch the star in the east - large scene (Third Sunday)
16. Adam and Eve - large scene
17.  Miracle of the loaves and fishes - small scene
18. Abraham and Sarah - descendants numbered like the stars - large scene
19. Moses as a baby in the reeds - small scene
20. Vine - small scene
21.  No room at the inn - large scene

22. Angels visit the shepherds to announce Jesus birth - large scene (Fourth and final Sunday)
23. Gifts of the magi - gold frankincense and myrrh - small scene
24. Star above the place where Jesus was born - small scene
Nativity scene - individual parts make up a picture
25. Donkey
26. Ox
27. Joseph
28. Mary
29. Jesus

Parts 24 to 29? How long IS Christmas?

And here again we come back to the key point I wanted in my advent calendar. Advent or preparation time for Christmas is what you make of it and the choices you choose to make as a family or community, but the religious festival of preparation that is Lent is one of the Christian calendar's varying dates.
When Lent and Easter fall varies within parameters related to the moon but Lent is always the same length of time.

Christmas is always 25 December, but Advent varies in length and start date related to the day of the week on which Christmas falls. Advent is 4 Sundays before Christmas. Some of you may be old enough to remember Blue Peter making an advent wreath with 4 candles.

What does this mean? If Christmas falls on a Sunday, that's a full extra week of Advent, and the first day of Advent could be in November.  But if Christmas falls on a Monday, Advent is cut short - it's only 23 days.

So how do you manage that on an advent calendar without continually making a new one? I decided to build in some flexibility which would allow people to both follow the religious way of doing things, or to stick with the commercial generally followed way of doing things. I made each element of the final nativity scene something you could add on individually, or, if you choose you could add them on all together.

So "scene" 24 is the star in the east.
Except as you can see, it's not a star, it's a comet.
Some people have thought that the star seen by the wise men was Haley's Comet and I chose to show it like that, partly in honour of my brother who is an Astronomer and studied Comet like stars!

There's no covering leaf here because you add these elements on, much like Mary and Joseph on the donkey earlier.

So how do you know where it goes? Instead of a leaf, you've got an outline behind. and on the back of the star is the number to match up.

For the star on the light background the outline is in black.

The final "scenes" 25 to 29 are the individual parts of the nativity scene.

I wanted there to be a sense of a big reveal to this section, so I decided that there should be a much larger "door" or "flaps" that should open out to reveal the area for the nativity. Having used the road structure through the advent calendar, it made a really useful place to make the flap for the hidden place. Once I'd planned for the flaps I decided to make the hidden area dark grey - to give the feel of a dark cave or stable.

As this area is dark the outlines to add the figures to are white - with gold for the halo edging for Joseph, Mary and Jesus.

The figures are added on in order of importance, ending with the most important!
25 and 26 are the donkey and the ox that are frequently added to nativity scenes.
27 and 28 are Joseph and Mary, and 29 is Jesus.

So if you want to play it safe and only have 25 days every year, you can add on the whole scene for Christmas day every year.

BUT you have started with Advent Sundays and it varies, on a short year 24-29 are added on all together, and if it's a long year, you can add on each element one by one. And in between you can just add the last few on together varyingly.

The last feature is somewhere to hold all the loose parts - there are pockets on the back to hold the leaves and the different bits that come away. Sadly I don't have a picture.

And with that, my posts are all complete! Good news though - I've another project to catch you up on...it's a lot more nerdy.

Step back, step forward, more nativity scenes - 15, 21, 22, 23

Although I concentrated quite a few of the Christmas related scenes in the first week, I didn't want to bunch the rest of them up too much and I also wanted to kind of keep coming back to the nativity each Sunday. The problem was that some of the scenes were really part of the final nativity scene or technically just after it, when the calendar is over with.  I'd already made my calendar 25-29 days because it is based on the 4 Sundays of Advent, not the calendar month of dates.

I did think of extending the calendar even further to include these scenes but I was struggling enough with 29! I decided there would be some foreshadowing and some would be towards the end.

I decided there had to be a Christmas link to all 4 Sundays. Hence Mary and her Angel for scene 1, John's call for Jesus' coming at 8, and then further scenes at 15 and 22.

The easy one to move a little earlier was number 15 - the wise men (and women?).

Obviously they would have been studying the "star" before they started travelling so they could be moved further up the sequence, and depicted in that part of their story. I made sure that their scene would look directly at the star, which was also going to be in the picture as a later stage. Hence the telescope does not look up into the sky.

More map fabric here - I mean it's amazing stuff, and they are planning a journey so why not?

I decided I would try and make one of the figures a woman because why not?  Also stolen from a friend who made me a nativity set from clay with a female wise person.
I also deliberately decided that they would be darker looking people, as tradition says they visited Jesus from Africa, and were definitely from West of Israel.

Just before the final sequence I placed a scene for "no room at the inn" (21).

Here too as I mentioned I decided the innkeeper could be a woman.

I also made use of a map fabric scrap again, to emphasise the inn as a place for travelers and the end of the journey. I like that a negative scene also was not highlighted in a Sunday, which was less deliberate than it was pushed aside for a more interesting scene after.




For  scene 22 I decided I would just have to have the shepherds being sung to early as there was no way to make them have an earlier scene. The angels don't say "Jesus will  be born soon", they say he is born. But I decided 22 was near enough.

Similarly with 23, I decided it's not really a surprise what the gifts of the wise men were, so I just put them as near to the end as possible. They are shown as what they are or represent - gold for kingship, (frank)incense for divinity, myrrh (for his sacrificial death).

Some more randoms - 17 & 20

I guess I could have added this to the random collection post earlier but I didn't want it to go on forever. I suppose the miracle of the loaves and fishes and the image of the vine are both linked into the idea of the central part of many Christian services - communion, but they were mainly chosen as familiar images and stories that I felt an interest in recreating.

If you'll permit me to be harsh on myself, I would say scene 17 - the loaves and fishes is possibly the weakest of all my designs. It's not super interesting or clever, it simply is some loaves and fishes.

Scene 20 - the vine on the other hand is very simple but I just think it came out rather beautifully, specially as, like the pearl without price (scene 9), it was kind of made up to fill a gap sort of late in the day.

One of the things I have enjoyed about the smaller scenes was finding and using as many different leafy, planty related fabric scraps as i could find in my stashes. However, I did get to scene 20 and start worrying that I didn't have any more.


This wasn't strictly true, I did have another leafy fabric, but it had flamingos on it.

So I stitched together two bits to hide the flamingos and I had my last small leaf!

Beginnings and babies - 16, 18 and 19

For now I'm skipping over 15 because it's one of the nativity ones, and I thought these three had a slight thematic link with some randoms interspersed.

From Adam and Eve as first people, to Abraham, founder of the faith, to Moses as baby.

Scene 16 - Adam and Eve had been earlier up the sequence and ended up demoted down the scale to a place that I needed them in the sequence. There's not much to say here about the design. The choice to make them dark skinned is really not specific to them as I wanted all these biblical figures to be nonwhite, moreso here perhaps than with the others. The design is just arranged to be pretty and save me having to work out how to do modest nude people. I did enjoy making the top of the tree 3D though.

 Scene 18 is Abraham surrounded by stars to reflect the line about  his descendants being like stars.

As I mentioned in the earlier post, I chose to add in Sarah because she helped him have those descendants and is therefore important too. God chooses her as much as him.

Scene 19 - Moses in the reeds was just an off the cuff quick sketch that kind of worked out small scale. Not much to say about it really. It was very quick and easy to do.

All my ladies - well two of them Scenes 10 & 13

One of the things that started to frustrate me after a while was not just designs I couldn't get right, but I got bored of beards and male characters. Obviously there were quite a few key ones that I wasn't concerned about including, and sometimes the male characters were offstage like Noah, but I wanted some prominent female figures and not just Mary and Elizabeth and Eve, all important but mothers or progenitors. So I went on a search and I found two slightly obscure but significant figures: Deborah (old testament) and Priscilla (Acts of the Apostles). I liked them because their prized features were not entirely about family life:

• Priscilla, with her husband Aquila, was a teacher and early leader of the church and are mentioned equally and predominantly together
• Deborah was a prophet and leader

For scene 10 with Priscilla and Aquila the design was pretty basic. I wanted them in front of a house that they had which was one of the earliest churches.

The sketch here also shows how impatient I am, I was at my parents, so rather than find proper paper, I sliced open some envelopes and used those.

I decided to symbolism this again by using the fabric with writing on it as well as Priscilla with a book in her hand.

The other thing I decided, linking into the "no more beards" thing was that I decided with these Roman sounding names, they either were Roman or they had become Romanised, so I gave Aquila a clean shaven look and left Priscilla's hair uncovered, or perhaps covered with a wig!

I don't really think about scale when I'm making things but it occurred to me at this point that I make very small pics, and I put a 10p coin next to Priscilla's head for scale. It's pretty teeny tiny.

(Bible references for the pair Acts 18:2, 18, 26, Romans 16:3, 1 Corinthians 16:19, 2 Timothy 4:19)

For Deborah (scene 13) I went through several design iterations starting from this idea of Deborah as ordering the leader of her army to go into battle. I started with a sketchy army in action but I quickly realised I am terrible at these kinds of large scenes and also, I had no idea how to do this with fabric.

So I simplified the design to just two figures - Deborah herself and the leader of the troops - Barak.

I then wasn't too sure what to dress him in or what weapons he should carry so I did some googling and found this picture from the tomb of Khnumhotep II of what might be Israelites and I basically stole the whole clothing and bow idea from that.

It was also a key image of her to be seated under a palm tree, and I thought it would be fun if this linked in with a rest stop on Joseph and Mary's journey,  under a palm tree. So I made that key to the placement of those two scenes.

(Bible references for Deborah: Judges 4:1-16; Judges 5:1-31).

Another thing I decided to do to improve the number of women was to add in Sarah to my image of Abraham, after all he would not have had any descendants without her, and to make the innkeeper who wouldn't let the holy family stay a woman as well.

A random collection... 9, 11, 12

I was trying to be very strictly numeric with these posts about the Advent calendar, but it's just not working for me so I'm going to group a bit as it suits me, roughly in order.

Having started with a week of at least loosely nativity related stories for 1-8, and seeded some key elements of the nativity later in the sequence, I then I had to work out what to fill in between. I thought about trying to make some themes - prophets, beginnings but I didn't really find that very inspiring. I definitely wanted the other stories to be visual so that it would be easier to design, and ideally where possible to be familiar stories. Unfortunately as well, sometimes what you can draw is not what you can sew and as well when I chose to change one element others also changed or got moved. There was an overall design to consider as well as individual ones which also altered things as I went along.

Scene number 9 for example, in one set of notes seems to have been planned as Adam and Eve. But by the time I did my full drawing had turned into the wolf lies down with the lamb (Isaiah 11:6) - the reference about the peaceable kingdom, Adam and Eve having been moved elsewhere in the design and sequence.

I just couldn't make this work as anything at all design wise, and very late on I eventually I just chose a story I kind of liked and would be to create - the Pearl with out Price parable in Matthew 13:45-46. You can of course make links to the Christmas story, baby Jesus as hidden jewel in a cave. And the parable itself is about the pricelessness of God and his wisdom but I did mainly choose it because I liked it and I liked my design.

Once I chose this one, I wanted a fake pearl to put on. I was very touched to find that my Dad insisted on bringing me a large pearl bead from a collection he has from some old project.

With scene 11 I have an early notes that just says "tree", and then it became Jonah and the Whale, because it's fun and who doesn't like drawing whales? It also moved position from higher up, to lower down the design.

It was one of the easiest to do, alongside the pearl without price.

Scene 12, I have an early note saying Moses in a basket, which later moved elsewhere, and then Daniel in the lion's den, which I also just didn't like drawing, the lions looked like pet cats. So I looked around for a replacement and eyed up another of my designs, which I realised that I had drawn it far too small to execute - Noah's ark. So I made it a larger design to fill this spot. The design was much enhanced by a beautiful blue map fabric I had in my stash.