Featuring a collection of crafts, scrapbooking, stencils and more including free crafts and free patterns. Make your own old-fashioned ornaments. Print the designs ... gather up your supplies ... Create some Christmas magic! Find a collection of period stencils for wall decorations. Use our alphabet illustrations to create your own children drinking mugs.

Scrapbooking
The popularity of scrapbooking is not a new phenomenon; “keeping a scrap-book” was a popular 19th century pastime, especially for women and children.

Scrapbooking: A Look at a Victorian Scrapbook
Explore the pages of this rare Victorian child's scrapbook filled with a lively assortment of multi-hued scraps, trade cards, and greeting cards – including series and sets.

Civil War Era Antique Bag
For modern day use, this bag is very easy to be worked up. The embroidery can be eliminated and a useful bag can be made of plain materials, such as denim, wool, canvas, or even leather. So when your food store asks, “Paper or plastic?” go green with a stylish reusable Victorian bag.

Lavender Basket
Create this charming Victorian craft – a lavender basket from 1860. You will need a small wicker basket, a few yards of narrow pink, blue, or violet ribbon and, of course, some lavender brought in from the garden.

Sewing Baskets / Work Baskets
The Victorian lady was seldom without her work box or sewing basket. They were inexpensive to construct — crafted with leftover circular cheese boxes, cardboard, velvet, silk ribbon, and fringe.

 Victorian Shopping Bag
Paper or plastic? How about neither? Go green, Victorian style, with a stylish reusable shopping bag from the 1880s. Ladies Home Journal featured this double shopping bag in 1887. These bags were designed similar to the early 19th century silk miser purse (with the opening in the middle) only much larger and were carried over the arm.

How to Make a 19th Century Purse
During the early 1800s, women carried small bags or purses such as this, called reticules, to hold money and small personal items. Introduced in the late 18th century as a replacement for the pocket, reticules were customarily in the form of a pouch with a drawstring. Instructions are provided for two reticules from the early nineteenth century - add your own trimmings or embroidery to make your own period accessory.

Victorian Hair Work
During the mid-nineteenth century hair work became a popular drawing-room occupation, as fashionable as the much-practiced knitting, netting, and crocheting. 

Autograph Victorian Bed Quilts
Each autograph was written in black ink on a diamond-shaped piece of white silk and placed over a diagram of white paper then basted at the edges. Each piece was the center of a group of colored diamonds, formed in many instances from “storied” fragments of dresses.

Victorian Craft: Tiger Embroidery
The Tiger Berlin pattern was distributed in an 1861 ladies’ magazine. This embroidery pattern is for a piano stool or footstool that can be worked in cloth or velvet, with chenille or wool. As well, the design can be done on canvas, the ground filled up with a color to highlight the figures.

Bed Quilt Pattern
Colorful Victorian design for a bed quilt.

Border for Curtain
A fun craft provided in an 1883 lady’s magazine features several bird motifs to be embroidered as a border on window curtains.

Pattern for Smoking Cap 
Needlework pattern for a gentleman's smoking cap.

Victorian Hat, c1890 
Create the perfect hat for your Victorian dress. Provided are directions and images from an 1890 magazine to create a velvet Victorian hat.

Victorian Slipper in Beads & Berlin
A design for a Victorian slipper from 1859. The motif is composed of the wild rose, the heart’s-ease, the lily of the valley, and the forget-me-not. It is worked on a fine canvas, with a mixture of beads and wool.

Peacock Fan
With these simple directions, create an elegant Victorian fan originally featured in an 1883 women’s magazine.