My plan for these blog posts is to show you each room in detail individually and talk you through the process of putting them together. Then the final blog post will have all the PDF files with the patterns for the rooms and accessories in. This way you'll be able to find them all in one easy-to-locate place and can look at the room-posts on an ad hoc basis.
So, the kitchen...
I wanted there to be a lot of 'playable' features for the kitchen as well as lots of storage space (just like a real kitchen!), so I used a lot of features like pockets and flaps. To make the pockets (shelves and bin) or the flaps (cupboard, fridge, and oven doors) I always seed along the appropriate number of edges (1 side for the flaps and 3 sides for the pockets) using back-stitch and the occasional reinforcing straight-stitch at a different angle and on the edges.
Here's the open fridge-freezer with some food/drink accessories tucked in. How decorative you want to go with the cupboards is up to you - you could just leave them as a plain block for a more modern look or go rustic by using decorative stitching to embroider on extra details. For the fronts of my cupboards I used back-stitching to free-embroider by eye but only through the first layer. For the fridge-freezer, I did this through both layers to emphasise the separation between sections. To make the flaps more structurally sound, I always used two layers of felt and blanket-stitched them together. You might also notice that there's a tap with 'running' water, I'll show you how I did this a bit further down in the post. The cooking plates on the hob were just black discs of felt sewn on with back-stitch. The draining board was also just decorative back-stitch in a contrasting colour of embroidery thread. If you can find tiny buttons, these are great for making tap handles and oven dials.
I also made a plate, a pot, and a frying pan using two layers of felt with blanket stitching and decorative/reinforcing back-stitch. The main part of the frying pan and pot also function like a pocket, allowing you to put the food inside them.
You can also open the oven door (and bake a baguette!), to make this feature I recycled a thin sheet of plastic and sewed it inside the opening of the white flap, between the two layers, before blanket-stitching them together and back-stitching it onto the page.
To start, cut out all the large blocks and lay them out on the page. The page itself is just a 20cm x 20cm square of pre-washed & ironed fabric with its inner 18cm x 18cm square marked out inside that. This is then laid out over a similarly sized square of felt (I used green felt as that was what I had the most of) and carefully pinned together to prevent pockets gathering between the layers when sewing on the furniture. I also made sure to leave quite a bit of extra space beyond the marked out square's edge for trimming down when attaching the bias binding.
Once you're happy with the look, take away the pieces that will form the flaps, then pin on and sew on the base layers and their pockets (sewing the pockets on through all the layers will also reinforce the whole room's structural integrity).
Then blanket-stitch the layers of your flaps to one another and complete any decorative stitching that you want to do. I recommend sketching out the decorative stitching on a piece of paper first so that you can see what it looks like before copying it by eye. Once finished, sew the flaps onto the page through all the layers and do a couple of extra stitches at each end of the flap to reinforce them. Don't worry about loose threads on the back of page as they'll eventually be covered up when you back them or bind the pages together.
To make the tap, fold over a section of (6-strand) embroidery thread and knot it at the top where it loops, before cutting the second length to the same size as the first. Always start longer than you need as you can trim it to the right length once you're finished.
Then use a needle or pin to separate out the 12 individual strands of the thread so that they form one neat tassel.
Then place it behind the felt shape used for the tap, place both of these onto the page and use back-stitch to sew through all the layers of the page, ensuring that you fully surround the knot of the tassel when you sew through and around the internal shape of the felt tap.
Finally, sew on a small decorative button in an adequately matching colour to make the handle for your tap, and you're done!
So that was the kitchen. In the next post, we'll look at the dining room:
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