Salaric

For my husbands 30th of birthday we decided on a Logains Run theme – the film has the death age fixed at 30 (the book at 21) so we made lots of things including hand crystals out of LEDs etc… I decided I wanted to be the robot/cyborge Box but more in lines with the one in the book – this wasn’t as easy to do as I would have liked so I ended up creating a fusion out fit. This is how I made the head/mask.

I used a balloon as a former for paper mâché – this was pieces of newspaper shredded and dipped in a solution of watered down PVA/white craft glue. I put Vaseline on the balloon first to make it easier to remove once dry ie it stops the balloon actually sticking to the paper mâché.

I did 5 layers of paper mâché and used a piece of card taped on for the nose. To keep track of layer I use grey/white newspaper and the pink newspaper (Financial Times) but you can just wait for each layer to be dry before you start the next – I only ever do 3 wet layers at a time as thicker than that can lead to buckling of the structure when drying issues with drying.

I then drew the shaped of the eyes and used a stanly knife to cut the shapes out.

Jean then decided to try it on and we reasoned it was good to go and I covered it in a layer of silver paper – I think of this as a neat coat of paper mâché but it can also be called decoupage.

Once dry I painted it with a layer of more concentrated PVA to give it a nice strong top layer.

It was then time for some finishing touches – I wanted metal springs for the eye brows and hair so I got some metal wire and popped it on my wire twister. I did close even springs for the eyebrows and loose slightly larger and messy springs for the hair. The wire twister is easy to use but you can do the same thing using a rode or pencil even.

The Mouth was also a coil of wire but I put the already coiled up wire wire back onto the wire twister to give it a second coiling.

I then used a bradle to punch holes into the mask where I wanted the coils/springs/wire to be attached and taped them on the inside to make sure there were no spikes ends to catch myself on.

My little girl made this hanging flower at her preschool for Father’s Day – it is very simple and quiet effective.

It is a yellow card disc 12 cm or 4 3/4 inches across (diameter) on one side – the back there is a smaller circle with the message I Love my Daddy becuase he takes me to the park. The other side has tissue paper discs stuck on like petals in blue, purple and yellow. They are 7 1/2 cm across or 3 inches, with a blue card disc or circle in the middle saying Number One Daddy. There is a whole punch whole at the top through which a fluffy white pipe cleaner has been pushed through and twisted to itself to make a hanging loop!

She also made him this card – it is simply a piece of orange card folded into a greeting card with a picture Jean has drawn cut out and stuck on. The picture is Daddy in Green Felt Tip 😉

We also made him a Rocket cake which will appear on Salaric Cooking shortly! And in its defence all I can say is that icing isn’t like painting and polymer clay!

Last year my little girl came home with this car card for her Daddy on Fathers Day. It is literially the shape of a car cut out of folded red card with the roof acting as a ‘hinge’ so the card opens. She then painted it (with red paint!) and the nursery school drew on the windows and wheels. Very easy and effective – Jean enjoyed making it and it is still up in pride of place this year!

Cheltenham is famed for its festivals and has a Science Festival ironically as I am a trained scientist (geology) I found out about the Science Festival last year from a poet!

This year there was an ecological art space organised with the Environment Agency where the Biologist and Artist Dr Lizzie Burns and her friend Matt where helping people explore the natural world through art. Getting children especially or so it seemed to me! to think about the world and our impact of the environment.

My little girl had a great time painting our garden onto the big white column just outside the Environment Agency Cafe. I had to label things as being 3yrs old some of the things were not that obvious. There were pots of clay and a watering can of water to make a ‘paint’ out of the clay and then lots of paint brushes!

Lizzie said it was great to work big like this and I felt it contrasted very well with Matt’s seeds – he had a table with different types of seeds on it – wild banana, seeds that float on the sea, a tub of 20 different tree seeds and so on. He then gave the children the option of making seeds out of clay themselves or drawing some. There were two colours of clay red/brown and white clay.

There where lots colouring pens and things avaliable for the children to colour there seeds and decorate them if they wished – my three year olds seeds were basically clay blobs with no colour on them but hey she tried 🙂

I am myself known (on twitter at least! plus in various poetry and science groups) as the Artistic Scientist or the Scientific Artist – you choose because I can’t/wont! So I was very excited to find someone who not only is trying to cross the percieved boundaries between these two areas but is being active and successful with it. She runs workshops on lots of fun things using art to interest people in science and to explore science giving it back the sense of adventure that is often lost in modernity.

She also makes fantastic molecular jewellery which is an idea me and Ella (Chemist come writer/poet/photographer) during our undergraduates but we never got around to doing anything about it – the closes I got is making tertiary and quarternary structures out of my wire working and thinking about protiens :). Lizzies work is bueatful and she embroiders ties and things.

If I had more money than I currently do I would get some of the jewellery for Ella as a congratulations presant on completing her PhD! (Ella if I ever get out of debt name your molecule!).

My Geo-Vases are probably the closest I come in the visual arts to this kind of thing (not sure that loo roll hubbles and pompom comets count!).

I made this set of six napkin rings as a wedding pesant for my cousin to go with a dinner service set, place matts and table cloth and napkins.

I used pink, blue and white irredescent glitter craft wire that I bought from the Works in Stroud – unfortunatly this chain of shops has been closing down so I got the last two packets they had so decided that I would make the napkin rings in three colours. Each packet had three coils in of wire in it – one of each colour.

The only other equipment I used was Artistic Wire’s Wire Worker – which has several sharft of didfferent diameter and cross sectional shape – ie long sticks of either plastic or metal that are either round rods or triangular prisms or square cross section. These fit into a handle that allows you to twist and wrap the wire around the shafts very easily. It also has holes in the handle so you can poke the wire through and twist it round the handle so it doesn’t slip when you initially start work.

And wire cutters.

Unfortunatly the wire that I had was thicker than the bead making wire you normal use with this as I wanted the napkin rings to be sturdy. The wire would not poke through the wholes with out skimming off the glittery outer – which was actually Fabric!

So I had to hold the wire in place and wrap the wire around the square shaft slowely – I find you can’t really just twist the wire quickly around anything thats not round as you have to press the wire onto each flat side of the square (or triangular shaft) inorder to get the square shape. Also you have to be careful to make each twist of the wire sit net to the last on the shaft.

Once all the wire from the coil was on the shaft I eased it off – the result was a sqaure twist spring or coil.

I gently eased the coil into a slightly looser spring until it was the right length to wrap round into the napkin ring. I pushed the two ends of the spring together so that the coils over lapped. Making sure it was sucurely fixed I cut the ends of the wore off and bent them into the inside of the spring so there were no sharp ends sticking out.

I then did this with the other five coils of wire I had – I discovered that the first one I had made was a looser spring than the subsequent ones but apart from that it was easy to make them all about the same size.

I have unfortunatly ended up in hospital recently but this turned out to be quiet a creative thing to happen – first off I ended up writing poetry and a short story for my duaghter and then I scetched an idea of the view from the hospital window (drawing with a canular in is a bit of an issue as bending arm is not really ideal :/). It was a sketch of what was there as such but the bits of the landscape I wanted to keep for a future picture and possible story. In biro in a reporters note pad – and its not very good!

But it also ment I got to see my Art teatchers work – Gloucester Royal has a lot of art and stuff lurking I assume to cheer up the staff and patients – in one of the main walkways by the reception there is a section of wall that is pieces of plaster moulded into various shapes – including two feet places above the end of a wooden bed sted – giving the illusion of a plaster patient asleep inside the wall.

The 3D topical relief on this piece of work lent it a depth and the plaster casts where of various things like stethoscopes, and vials, plus a doll and her foot steps 🙂 He’d told me in class that he had turned up at the hospital with bowls of sand and mixing stuff for the plaster – set it up on tables and then got passers by to stick objects into the sand and gently take them out again. He then poured the paster of paris in to the impression in the sand. Eventually it hardened and he took out the casts – they are coated in sand most of which he brushed off leaving a little to bring out the definition of the finer detail of the object.

Obviously a lot of the casts weren’t any good as they had bubbles and things in them and Mark said some of the things people decided he should try and cast couldn’t really go up! :/ But he viewed it as a community project and I personally think its one of the best pieces of hospital I have seen and as I’ve used to go to Chelsea and Westminster hospital that is saying something!

For our Cub pack we made up a large Shark Infested Puzzle Solving Game but of corse that means we needed some sharks so we set about making some!

Need:

corrigated cardboard – an old cardboard box will do nicely!

Sturdy scissors or a stanly knife

Tape

Black Sack, paint or paper – if using paper you will need glue as well

Cut out the fin shape – this is two curves making up a sort of curvy tapering triangle shape – think rose thorn. Then bend the bottom inch or around 2.5 cm of the fins base up to create a ridge for sticking it too the base. If you are having trouble folding the cardboard then use a metal ruler and a knife to score but not cut all the way through, this will make the cardboard easier to fold.

Cut a rectangle to fit the fin – this will be the base and as such you can scale the shark fins to what ever size you want though bigger fins will need thicker card and smaller fins thiner card.

Tape the fin to the base.

Cut a black bin liner up into panels you can wrap around and tap to the fin.

We used clear cellotape for this and thick green packing tape for the structure of the fin.

And you have a shark fin ready to play! If you paint and vanish it or use a glue to attack the bag then the fin becomes waterproof too! (well to a certain level!)

Here it is at the village hall awaiting the fin fun!

For World Book Day my little girls pre-school was having a Come as a Story Book Character Day so I had to think up a costum. We decided on Alladin and I set to work making an Alladdins lamp complete with genie.

For the lamp I used:

• News paper preferable two colours so you can keep track of layers

• PVA white craft glue

• Scrape card – the sort junk mail comes on!

• Cellotape

• Scissors

• Tissues or loo/toliet roll

• Hot melt glue gun

• Pencil

• Paint brush

• Pots to put water, paint, glue in – old yogurt pots or dip containers are good for this

• One small balloon

• One cup or sturdy pot

First off all I blew up a small balloon to the size I wanted the body of the lamp to be. I then placed this in a cup to stop it rolling around. I laid some of the newspaper on the table as a working surface and then tore up some to make a pile of pink paper and a pile of white paper. Becuase the size of the lamp was quiet small I tried to make sure that my pieces of newspaper where not bigger than 2 cm. This is to give a smoother finish over the curve of the balloon.

I made a mix of PVA white craft glue – mine is quiet thick so I mike it with about five times the amount of water as I have glue. It takes a bit of stirring to get it a good consistancy.

I then dipped the news paper pieces in the glue water mix, smoothed off any excess liquid and placed it on the balloon. Making sure that the tied off end of the balloon was in the cup I covered the large end of the balloon and worked my way down until I had covered about 2/3rds of the balloon. This would give me a bowl shape without the balloon being there – where the sides of the bowl would curve in again.

I made sure the area I wanted was completely covered and waited for an hour before applying the next layer in a different colour of news paper. I waited an hour as otherwise the already existing layer is so wet it slips about underneith the new layer your trying to lay down. You can also only do a maximium of five layers a day otherwise it doesn'[t dry properlly. Once there are a few layers on already you can do upto three layers before leaving it the hour to dry though this did still cuase a kind of crenulation/wavey effect on the papier machie bowl around the balloon.

I did fifteen layers which took three days. I was running tight on time so I popped the balloon on the fourth day but this really wasnt enough time for it all to have dried properlly. This ment that it slighly stuck to the balloon when I popped it – peeling off about three layers in some places inside – this was soon remedied by smoothing the paper back down with a PVA’d finger.

I was then left with I nice bowl shape – this would be the body of the lantern.

Once the inside was completely dried as well I cut a 1 cm strip off of some card in our scrap paper pile and cellotaped it into a ring that was a good size to be the rim at the bottom of the lamp.

I then cellotaped the rim onto the bottom of the bowl/body of the lamp.

I then turned it over so it was standing on the rim and cut a slightly wider strip for the handle, and cut the remaining card into a rectangle to roll into a tall incomplete conical shape for the spout. I wrapped cellotape arround the tube of card so that it stayed in the shape I wanted.

I then cellotaped the spout to one end of the lamp.

I then made two folds either end of the wide strip of card and cellotaped it on the other end as the handle. I struggeled to try and make look not like a teapot :/

I then covered the rim, spout and handle with more papeir machie – this included screwing up some strips into ‘balls’ to act as padding to build up the shape – especially on the top of the spout where it meets the body of the lamp.

Now it was time to make the lid.

My dad drew around on of my cups for a circle which he sliced to the center off then pulled on side of the slite over the other and taped it to make a shallow cone. He also cut a strip of card which he then cut little triangles out off along its whole length giving it a cerated edge.

He then folded the strip round into a loop and folded the triangles in so that they could act as brackets to glue them onto the disc. This will make the inner rim of the lid that fits into the top of the lantern so he had to do some measuring.

I then layered on the paper strips on the lid layering out from the centre. I also build it up on the inside in the way I had the rim on the bottom of the lamp. This ment that on both the top and the bottom of the lamp’s lid I had over hung the edge with paper. I also had to wait for one side to dry before I did the other. I found the shiny card made it a bit difficult to make papier mache stick in the first place. I put five layers on each side of the lid.

Once it was thourally dry I trimmed off all the over hanging paper.

I then checked that it did actually fit the lamp.

I wanted a nice worn matallic texture to the lamp, even though my daughter had decreed it needed to be pink! So I decided to cover it in tissue paper to get a crinckeled texture. I did this by laying the tissue on in one two or three sheets, dry and then adding the watered down PVA with a thick paint brush. Dad had also made a ball of papier mache about 1.5 cm tall which I covered – this would be the bobble/handle for the lid.

Once it was all dry – I used a hot melt glue gun to attatch the bobble.

I then had a white textured lamp ready for painting.

Jean then painted her lamp and the lid pink with a little help.

Once dry we applied gold poster paint with a tissue so that it only went on the raised wrinkels of the lamp.

We then PVA’d it with neat PVA glue as a sort of sealing coat.

The PVA dulled the metallic luster of the gold which was a same but it still had a sort of metalleness about even if it was pink! I also made her a genie to in!

This post is a shameless plug for sponsorship for the Race For Life, a friend of mine is taking part in this event to raise money to ‘beat’ cancer.

You can sponsor her here.

And I am placing this here on Salaric Craft as she is saying she’ll crochet cute little thankyou presants for those who sponsor her – and she is an ace crochetter!

In sponsoring her you will be helping raise money towards research into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Thanks 🙂

For Easter we tend to have an annul easter egg hunt and obviously baskets are needed to collect the eggs so I picked up several easter kits from the Pound Shop and in one of them was the bits to make a chicken basket.

The basket is made from a piece of stiff yellow paper which is a middle square with two chicken reliefs coming out the side and two other squares with side flaps coming out of the ends. Basically she decorated the two chicken shapes by squeezing white craft glue – PVA all over them and sprinkling sequines over the glue.

Once dry we folded it up and used cellotape to fix the flaps onto the sides of the chickens making the inner square the bottom of the basket – we decided cellotap would hold up better to the forces of having as many chocolate eggs as could possibly fit, rammed into it!

Jean was definate that it needed a handle though so I took a pink fluffy pipe cleaner and pushed each end through a chicken eye (these were wholes pre-cut into the chicken shapes and is no where near as gruesom as that sounds!) I bent the ends so they could twist around the main bit of the pipe cleaner above the eye making a handle.

To my suprise it survived the easter egg hunt!