Tiny Empty Stockings

Hello! My name is Rebecca Cobb and I am a children's book illustrator. You can see my work and books here: Rebecca Cobb Illustration

I cannot believe how beautiful the Red Nose Day Dolls are with all their tiny hand-crafted clothes and accessories. I was admiring them from afar and wondering what else they might like when I was very happy to be asked if I could make them some miniature copies of The Empty Stocking. 

The Empty Stocking is the brilliant, funny (and also a tiny bit sad but I can't tell you what happens or how it ends because it will spoil it if you haven't read it) Christmas story written by Richard Curtis. This is very appropriate for the Red Nose Day Dolls because Richard Curtis is the founder of Comic Relief and Red Nose Day so it is the perfect book for the dolls to have as a bedtime story. I was very lucky that I got the chance to illustrate the book and it meant that I had all the pages and was able to make four mini versions for this project.

It took me a long time to work out which pages would need to be next to each other and back to back with each other so that when the book was bound together the story would read in the right order. It also took a while to get my printer to print the back of the pages perfectly in line with the front of them but after a bit of jiggling about and cutting the edges off the paper it worked, hooray!

After cutting out all the doll-sized pages I folded them and sewed them together and then trimmed all the edges to make it neat.

Next I made little cardboard covers with the cover illustrations wrapped around and stuck down.

And finally I stuck the pages into the covers using the endpapers to hold the whole book together.

Now they look just like the original books.........but much, much smaller!

I hope the dolls enjoy their books as much as I enjoyed making them!

The dolls and all their wonderful accessories are being auctioned to raise money for Comic Relief and you can also sponsor them here. Keep following this blog and the Red Nose Day Dolls pages on Facebook and Twitter for more information.