Castle Maquette: Gallery

Under Construction

Someday this page will be filled with a vast portfolio of my work, the better to help you decide whether or not I'm the custom doll clothing sewist for your project!

Right now, there are just sidebar links to a couple of otherwise-private Imgur galleries, with work going as far back as 2003 in the Dollhouse section.

The dollhouse gallery is a big part of my history as a sewist! When I was thirteen years old, I built a dollhouse kit. We got it for 50% off at Michaels, back when Michaels carried a lot of 1:12 scale miniatures. I painted it, wallpapered it, floored it-- well, Mom cut the linoleum-- furnished it, and, at doll shows, I looked for dolls to live in it. Porcelain dollhouse dolls were easy to find, back in those days; companies sold molds and dollmakers poured, fired, and painted dolls. However, those dolls came in two forms: kits that were bald, naked, and often times not even assembled, or lavishly-dressed beauties permanently glued into their clothes. As I had mostly had Barbie dolls up until that point, permanent clothes were just not on.

So, armed with a basic knowledge of running and whip stitches, my junior-high-aged self settled in to teach myself how to sew removable dollhouse doll clothes. Fancy Victorian stuff.

By the time I was twenty, actual professional miniaturists were impressed with my work, because as it turned out, nobody else was doing that. Sewing where you had to and gluing everywhere else was the standard! But that wasn't how I played with dolls, so it wasn't what I made for myself... and it wasn't, when I thought maybe it would be a good idea to get a resale number and a table at a miniatures show, what I sold.

So even though I made some unfortunate decisions with regard to historical research and occasionally stereotypes I didn't yet know were negative, I'm very proud of the dollhouse gallery as a body of work.

The 1:4 scale gallery is largely clothing I've made for Tonner Doll Company dolls; I was very passionate about my collection for a few years, and as it turned out, the tricks I'd come to rely on to make sewing work for dollhouse dolls made working on dolls three times their size feel easy! ... Took longer, of course, because I never did learn how to use a sewing machine (when your longest seams are four inches, it's not worth the set-up time), but I have set in sleeves for three-inch tall toddlers; sewing for 16-inch dolls never made me feel like any full-scale sewing technique was going to be impossible.

Not an imgur gallery, but I would also like to link to the Stuff I Made tag on my sporadically-updated doll collecting blog; there are things there that will someday be here, and some things there that may not fall under the purview of this site that I'm nevertheless really proud of (Castle Maquette is limited to Medieval, Fantasy, and Medieval Fantasy; Hat Plays Dolls features an awful lot of Monster High. Which is not to say those two circles of the Venn diagram can't overlap, just that they usually don't).