Category Archives: Christmas

“I’m a Santa Helper”

“I’m a Santa Helper”, says my Little Darling, Gina. She is indeed wearing all of the jingle bells and whistles to get herself noticed by Santa Claus. Gina even has a tiny present to add to the pile for good little girls and boys.

Gina’s hand knit sweater dress is made from Peruvian Highland wool in winter white. The “fur” trim at the hemline is knit with mohair/silk. The asymmetrical waistline embroidery depicts holly, berries, and blue spruce branches. Of course, Gina cannot help Santa without a Santa hat. This one is in deep red wool with a hand made pom pom, jingle bell, organza bow, and a heart bead decorating the tip of the hat.

The red bell decorations continue on the bracelet, necklace and as a decoration on Gina’s tiny gift.

For more information on Gina’s “I’m a Santa Helper” ensemble, please visit the “Shop What’s New” page at cindyricedesigns.com.

Portraits of Talyssa

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We had such a gloomy and wet day here. I didn’t know it would turn out to be such a great day for some natural light photos. Talyssa was the doll that I happened to pick up. I thought that I’d share them with you.

There are quite a few windows in this room, but since it is a rather large room the only near light was coming from the window on my right side; I was about 12″ away. To slightly blur the background and keep her face in focus I used an f/stop of 4, ISO of 400. It was almost too dark in the room to take these without a tripod because the little red “shaky camera” icon would sometimes appear (depending on what I focused on, light or dark).

I can’t believe how different she looks in this natural light!

Thanks for stopping by!

Live and Learn When Things Go Wrong

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What do you do when you are working on something, putting your heart into what you are making, and then, something goes wrong?

I was really sad and oh, so disappointed. The hours I spent knitting and embroidering this sweater flashed through my mind as I looked at the stains that a new strand of beads had left behind around the buttonholes. I tried dabbing the worst stain out with water, then tried a tiny bit of Shout, the one stain didn’t budge, so I didn’t even try with the others.

Well, how bad are the stains? Not too bad, in my opinion, but the sweater is not perfect now. 😞 I know that I don’t have it in me to remake this sweater and the stains are very faint, so the sweater isn’t ruined. I removed the offending beads and replaced them with glass beads. If the sweater is buttoned, the stains are totally covered up. And, (ha ha) unbuttoned in a darkened room they are unnoticeable. Hey, I gotta laugh or I’d cry!

But seriously, see not too bad.

Here is the sweater with the new glass beads sewn on and the sweater buttoned up.

And, here is Talyssa during the photo shoot when everything was going perfectly, or so I thought. I liked Gina’s “Ivy and Holly” ensemble so much that I decided to make Talyssa one of her own.

Now, for the learning part and in case you were wondering about these beads. These beads were labeled as “Dyed Bamboo Coral”. I wanted to better understand how this happened and how I could test beads , so I took the strand and rubbed it on an old wool sweater and sure enough there was a faint pink stain left on the wool. Needless to say, I will be staying away from dyed beads.