First off, I solved this halfway through asking, but it took me some looking, so I figure I'll post the question, if for no other reason than that it will spread news of the book.
I read an excerpt of it in an anthology of children's novels, possibly a list of classics. One of the stories excerpted was "The Haunting" by Margaret Mahy. I remember there was also an excerpt set in a factory, or maybe a washing location with a machine, which had some rather vivid descriptions of what happened to little boys' limbs that got caught in the machine. I suppose it might have been from The Mangler although my impression was more of historical fiction than something supernatural, and I'm 90% certain all of the other stories were intended for children.
Anyhow, in this story, a group of children, with at least one boy and one girl, I think all related, staying in an old house, find some plates with an owl pattern on them. One of the girls either peels the surface off of the plate (I have this vague memory of a passage where she scratched at it with her fingernail and it peeled off like cellophane) or traces the shapes, and she starts assembling little paper dolls based on the pattern, I think setting them on a mantelpiece. The odd thing about it is that, as she creates the dolls, the patterns on the plates start to disappear, and then the dolls themselves. At the end of the excerpt, the children were divided on whether something strange was causing things to disappear or if it was due to a maid, who disapproved of them getting into old things in the attic.
If indeed, the disappearances were not mundane, it seems a fit for the site.