Victorian Doll - new uses for doilies and bits of tatting

Although I want to keep things in chronological order, starting with 1989, I’m jumping time-wise to about 1995 because I promised to explain the Victorian Doll pictured at the top of my blog.

I bought the doll (without the tatted ‘apron’, of course) in the mid-1990s at a toy store. I particularly liked the colors of her dress – burgundy and green – very Victorian!. I knew I was going to embellish the dress with tatting, and it happened that I had started a doily a few months before I bought her. I was tatting the doily to see if I had the discipline to pay attention to the important joins necessary with each motif. It turned out I didn’t quite have the patience to make the doily any bigger, so I have only 20 motifs in the doily, and I put it aside in my ‘unfinished tatting’ stash.

The doily turned out to be the perfect size for the skirt overlay on the doll’s dress. However, as you can see, the doily does not cover the back of the skirt, so I added another piece of ‘scrap’ tatting on the back, as well as to the top front of the dress. Yet another piece of scrap tatting is used for the headdress, finished off with a wisp of a marabou feather.

She’s just a sort of ‘fantasy’ doll, not from any particular time period, but she nicely complements my Victorian tatting display.

Now for the embarrassing part - I have searched high and low and can’t find the pattern for the doily! Possibly the pattern (I believe it is in a booklet of patterns) is hidden away somewhere in my craft room, and I will come across it one day. However, I generally keep all my tatting books together, so I can’t imagine where it could have gone. If you know where this pattern can be found, please let me know!

The message of this post is: Find uses for old or new doilies! You can frame them, of course, or mount them on throw pillows. Smaller ones (coaster size) can be medallions on towels or pillowcases or can be showcased on top of fancy velvet boxes.

As this is my first post with photos actually in the post itself, I'm going to close here and see how it worked out. I'll be adding another new post soon..