Work in Progress | Cindy Rice Designs

Good afternoon! Just wanted to share with you what I am doing today. I have four dress/hat sets that are in progress for Amelia Thimble dolls. Currently I am sewing the beads on for buttons and weaving in ends. Then they need a fine water mist and time to dry (to set the buttonholes). Then they are ready for the fun stuff, embroidery.

Amelia wanted to hold up one of the little elf dresses for you. She is so helpful, isn’t she? This one is knit out of over dyed alpaca/silk light red lace weight yarn with a kid mohair/silk lace edging that looks like white fur trim. There is another elf dress to be embroidered; this one in red merino/silk yarn. A sky blue and light pink kid mohair/silk dress and hat set are also waiting to be finished. Oh, and I have six other sets completely finished! I will get those photographed soon…!

I’ve come to love hand sewing and embroidering on this June Taylor quilt board. (You can see it in the background.) I also use it for blocking my knits. It is padded so pins can be stuck into it, the color allows me to find things easily, and the fabric is a coarse cotton so beads and needles don’t roll around. I can also set it on my lap if I want to work in a chair or on the sofa. It is 18″ x 25″ which I find is a good size for a spreading my supplies out. The link goes to a site where I found one in this size. I purchased mine many years ago at a local sewing store.

Back to work for me. Hope you enjoyed seeing what I’m working on today.

Been working away… I have some work in progress photos to share with you before everything is completed and put on my website.

A collection of balls of yarn that I recently used for a sweater that I knit for Tonner’s Patsy doll.

I used a few of these miniscule buttons for the sweater’s decoration too. These are too small to actually use for buttons, but they make cute decorations. The jar is only about an inch tall!

I love striped sweaters, but the ends, oh, the ends that are left for weaving in. That I do not like. As my striped sweater gets closer and closer to being completed, instead of being excited, I feel a sinking feeling. Those ends are multiplying like crazy. Ok, this is silly, but I had so many loose ends from this sweater that I had to count them. Ten stripes times two ends each, times three sections (two sleeves and one body) equals 60 ends!

Finished!!! Yeah!!! This is my scrap bowl after getting all those ends woven in and snipped off. What a feeling of accomplishment!

I had some scrumptious new lace arrive in the last couple of weeks from England. This is a very fine cotton cluny lace and oh, so beautiful! I love it so much. I have more coming next week…a narrower lace and ecru in color. This is a winter white color with a 3/4″ width.

And, last but not least, here is a picture of Patience’s new sweater on the blocking board. You can see the coordinating dress fabric and embroidery floss that I have gathered for this project. I ended up not using all of the colors of floss though. This happens quite often. My projects most always deviate from my well thought out plans. I find that what I thought would look nice, in actuality looks pretty bad. In this case the browns and darker aqua didn’t work. The finished outfit ended up being much softer in color. I am very happy with it and can’t wait to share pictures of Patience modeling her new outfit for you. Of course Amelia Thimble has a coordinated dress too.