Cigar Box Doll Bed and Postage Stamp Quilt

The other day as I sat there looking at my stash of vintage cigar boxes, and my other stash of vintage postage stamps* I couldn’t help but think how they would work so nice together. Eventually, with my old box, stamps, printable cotton fabric sheets, and some digitally scanned images, I created my own fun piece of folk art– a charming little doll bed.

I began with the box, trimming away the lid. Digging into my box of vintage game pieces, I found the perfect bed legs and attached them to the bottom of the box. I trimmed off a bit of the box lid and attached the large section to one end of the box as a headboard. I used E6000 adhesive for both the headboard and legs.I gathered a load of colorful stamps, laid them out in a grid and scanned them. Here are the digital images made from the stamps, feel free to use them for your projects (just please don’t sell the images- they’re supposed to be free.) Click on each to snag their slightly larger images.I printed the red stamps and the multi-colored stamps to printable cotton sheets. I sewed the two pieces fronts facing in, leaving an unsewn section open to turn the piece right-side out. Once turned, I pressed the piece at the seams, stitched closed the hole, then stitched between each row of stamps vertically and horizontally.

Here is my tiny two-sided postage stamp doll quilt.

I created a pillow from a vintage envelope image I shared HERE and addressed to Little Miss Dolly. I printed the front and back envelope images to fabric and stitched them together complete with flap and stuffed with fill.I printed a handwritten letter image that I shared HERE to the dimensions of my cigar box and used it as the top of a little mattress sewn and stuffed with fiber fill.I tucked the mattress into the cigar box and made up the bed with the quilt and pillow.If you create a similar project, you may need to do a bit of sizing of your images in Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or other image editing software to get them to the dimensions needed to fit your own cigar box or for other projects. Be sure to let me know if you make something with the stamps, I’d love to see it.*A very special thank you to JSIM reader, Tracey Ireland, that sent me all the beautiful stamps used in this project (and also in THIS fun project a while back!)