Salaric

I bought this bunny soft toy in the Pound Shop in Cheltenham – it came with some pens and was white with brown lines on it to mark where you should colour.

This was a nice easy project to do with my little girl – we did it together making sure we covered as much of the rabbit as possible! She chose the colour scheme.

The pens really did appear just to be felt tips and obviously you need to be careful of colour bleed – ie the ink keeps spreading out after you finish colouring an area – the resulting rabbit has a slightly fuzzy look around the edges becuase of this. The colours are also not water fast and it runs when wet – but it was a good project for a three year old 🙂

My little girls Pre-School are having an easter bonnet parade so we needed to make Jean a hat. I found a kit in the Pound Shop in Cheltenham and so let my husband and little girl loose with it. I was going to make one from scratch but this kit was actually quiet good though the instructions didn’t match with the contence of the kit.

The kit had a circle that had had a smaller circle cut out of it – this was also in the pack. Two 1 1/2 wide strips of yellow card with tabs along both sides, assorted pom poms (which were the wronge size and colours for the instructions), goggly eyes we didn’t use and a strip of whit card with a ridge to bend at the end and two bunny teeth drawn on. There was also a blue think strip of card and PVA white craft glue, not too mention white bunny ear shapes out of card and pink card to cut the ear middles out off. I suplimented the kit with one white large pompom, a small pink pompom and three black fluffy pipe cleaners.

My husband made the hat up with her. First off they took the yellow strips and folded down the tabs – the ones on the top facing one way the ones on the bottom facing the other.

They then put glue on top of all of the bottom tabs and squidged the hats rim on, this was a bit fiddly as the strips where in two halves so , glue had to be attatched to the ends of them as well to make them stay in place as the side of the hat. Alaric had to hold it all together for awhile until the glue was tacky enough to hold. He then added glue to the top tabs – which were folded into the centre of the hat, he then placed the yellow circle on the top. It then had to be left for a bit to dry.

The blue ribbon was also in two strips which they glued around the hat. It then had to be left for an age to dry properlly.

In the mean time they cut out the pink bits of the ears which are upside down elongated tear drops. The pink card wasn’t really big enough for what in the instruction suggested so the ears look a bit odd. They glued the pink ear inners onto the white ears and left them too dry.

We also decided that glueing the small black pompoms into two slightly larger pompoms would make better eyes than the goggly eyes so they glued the ‘pupils’ onto the ‘eyeballs’ and left the whole lot to dry.

Once the glue was dry they glued the ears on the back of the hat so that they stuck up in the air and the teeth on the front so that they hung down over the edge of the rim.

They then glued on two white large pompoms for the rabbits cheeks (the kit came with one white and one yellow pompom :/) and a small pink pompom for the nose.

Alaric then cut the pipe cleaners in half coiled them into curls and twisted the ends together to make two sets of three whiskers. He glued these onto the face next to the cheeks and glued the pompom eyes on.

Me and my little girl made these easter eggs for two purposes – her ones have been writen on the back of and sent out as invites to the easter egg hunt and my ones have been stuck up around the house as decorations. They could also be used to stick on the front of cards to make festive easter cards.

First of all I drew an egg shape – this can be done by drawing two circles next to each other – one has to be smaller than the other – I then joined the two circles with two straight lines. I then cut out around the egg shape and gave it two my dad.

Dad then used it as a template, drew round it on different coloured card and cut them out for us.

I then gave them to Jean one at a time, poured some PVA white craft glue into a pot and gave it too her with a paint brush. I then gave her shapes I had punched out of card and scrap paper – mostly rabbits and ducks, a hug tub of glitter confetti and some glitter 3D paint pens.

Mainly Jean painted her eggs with glue.

Sprinkeled the glitter onto them.

Shock excess glitter off onto another sheet of paper so that it could be re-used.

And then left them to dry. She also added the glitter glues and 3D paints but squidged them all with her finger and then added more glitter from the shaker.

A few rabbits and ducks were stuck on but not many.

I personally experimented with drawing shapes with the PVA and then sprinckling them with the glitter – I did a heart, thick horizontal strips, think horizontal strips, a flower, a cross, spots that look like a paw print, a zig zag shell crack and then used the glitter pens to draw an orange glitter concentric spiral, a flower, and a blue irridescant wiggle.

This is a very simple project, Jean enjoyed it and I think the results are quiet nice.

Today is Ada Lovelace Day – a day in which to blog about women in technology who have inspired you or who you admire.

Craft and technology are inextricably linked so I have hunted down Mary Dixon Kies the first female to be given a US patent for a weaving technique that was important to the New England economy in the 1800’s as she came up with a way of weaving straw with silk or thread. This was a revolutionary new technique that boosted up the hat making industry.

At the time women wore staw hats in the fields to work and with looming war in Europe imports were being stopped. Mary’s process was imensly important resulting in praise from government albeit through the Presidents Wife. The technique was used for over a decade but the importants of what she did may lay more in the fact that she was the first woman to apply for a patent in her own name.

This set a president and though she is one of only 20 women to have recieved a patent before 1840 she started the trend. Women inventors did not see much point in getting their inventions patented at this juncture in history as they could not own anything or take credit for things in their own right – anything they earned belonged to their husbands so most thought what was the point.

Mary broke this pattern on 5 May 1809.

Unfortunatly for Mary her friends and family fashions changed and straw hats were out resulting in them loosing what they had gained – she died penniless but there is a monument to her in Old South Killingly cemetery and her impact on history is worth noting.

I mixed the green fimo clovers from the first picture with the paper die cast punched green clovers from the second as table confetti for St Patrick’s Day.

For the the paper clover I just used a paper punch but for the fimo I used green glittery fimo soft – this is a polymer clay.

I kneaded it until it was soft, though the red and green glitter fimos tend to actually be too soft! Then I rolled it into a flat sheet about 1.5mm thick. I used a wooden rolling pin – again the strongly coloured fimos tend to stain and nothing used with them should be used for food again afterwards. A glass can improvise as a rolling pin too. Fimo tends to slowly melt plastic so plastic rolling pins are useless.

I then used the two clover shaped aspec cutters I have, to cut as many little glittery clovers out as I could. Each shape was then carefully lifted and placed upon a baking tray which I put in a pre-heated oven for 30 minutes. The oven is pre-heated to 180 degrees C.

Once baked I waited for them to cool and, using a thin plastic sculpture tool, prized any clover leaves off that were stuck to the baking tray.

I know none of these clovers have four leaves and therefore are not the lucky clover that the leprechuans have, but it makes the table nice and green.

The red hearts are fimo too – red glitter and rolled and cut with an aspec cutter in the same way. The aspec cutters I got from Almond Art.

This week I went to Stroud and discovered there were two arty exhibitions on – one of them was in the church by the car park and the other was in JRool Cafe 12 Union Street, Stroud, GL5 2HE.

The one in the church had lots of Christart in it which appears to be contempary religous paintings and the like – some of them were very good.

One of the artists paintings seemed to be more – rural type subject matter which I’m sure I’ve seem at other things around here (probably in Painswick). The artists name was Christine Gaunt and she was running the exhibit when I went in.

The second exhibit was IMPRESS ’09 and is work by Caroline Tate and Annie Hobson. This is part of the Print Making Festival 2009. This was really interesting as they have write ups on the different printing techniques and they run courses. I wish I had enough money to go one some of these as they look fun 🙂

There were lots of prints hanging on the walls including a giant circle of butterflies!

The exhibit is open until the 28th of March 2009.

I went to Tech Adventure at the Trinity Arts Centre last weekend. This event brings together computer programmers, inventors, roboticists and people who generally like to make things.

Obviously I didn’t understand a lot of the technical detail of the projects that people bought along to display but I could see potential there for the arts and craft community. For a start there was a thing called a Reprap which is a 3D printer. This has huge potential and is designed so that you can basically build your own and then then get it to build ones for your friends. It built the shapes up out of plastic thread that was being fed into it. The shapes it can do are currently limited but even they are quite impressive and would have use in craft projects. Then I found out that it’s the same plastic that milk bottles are made out of so it could have huge implications for home recycling.

The man who had brought it was discussing various things such as how to build up shapes with overhangs on them and mentioned the words ‘sugar paste’. Apparently they have a nozzle that does sugar paste to build up support structures to get more intracate shapes and then they wash the sugar paste off. I then got very excited and asked if you could build things like the glass they had there out of the sugar paste – completely – he said yes!

Here are some of the things it made:

This would be fantastic for cake decorating I feel. He said the only issue with that would be that after an hour the sugar paste turns to syrup and the nozzles stop working which is something I think could definitly be worked around, though the shape you are making is perfectly fine!

A little more probing on our part found that though they had not done high melting point things like glass they thought it would be useful for ceramics which is cool 🙂 Also one of the things that really bugs me about the lost wax process in metal casting is that you spend ages making the wax object and you can only get one casting out of it. This machine alters that as you could have the object saved as a computer file and it would build as many as you wanted out of the wax!

There were so many other things there too and the crossover of people who do techy stuff and those who make/draw is phonomenally high. This I believe is because to make craft objects you need to be a sort of engineer even if you don’t realise it and to draw good pictures you need something similar. To come up with your own projects you need to be creative and in order for the technical people to do what they do they have to be creative – creativity is a layer above science and art or technology and craft, or poetry and programming.

The dichotomy between the sciences and arts does not really exist, it is an artifact of our society – good artists tend to be grounded in some sort of science, tech, or maths whether they realise it or not!

I went to a fantastic talk on this at last year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival.

I even read out some of my poetry at this and one more Wiggly Pet also got a good home. It went to the first person to tell me how many programming languages I had in the poem! I actually gave two away though as there was a little boy in a tigger suit who wanted one so desperately.

Another thing that came out of this is that there is a Maker Faire this month – 14-15 March at the Newcastle Science Fair. I can’t go but it looks interesting.

Also it is because of this that I am now considering making special funky cases for computers though as I am obsessed with paper mâché at the moment, I am having to resist the urge to do every project in that medium!

Dad’s been moping about his Welsh ancestory lately so I thought I’d better cheer him up. I decided we would celebrate St David’s day on the 1st of March as he is the patron Saint of Wales. The symbols of Wales are daffodils and leeks due to some historical battle and I’d picked up a foam kit in the Pound Shop in Gloucestershire. This kit makes daffodils in a vase.

I started by constructing the blue vase; this came as six foam shapes but was actually very tricky to push together as some of the shapes where just slightly misaligned. Eventually I got there and it is a simple and pleasing shape.

The kit comes with foam heart sitckers in two sizes which I then stuck onto the sides of the vase in a horizontal line.

Then came the making of the flowers; this was actually incredibly easy.

First off all I found there were three different foam shapes that made up the flowers, plus a leaf shape. The outer petals, a middle piece that was like a serrated disc, and a long rectangle that had a hole in one end and a rounded off corner at the other.

I pushed the outer petals onto the green fluffy pipe cleaner.

I then slipped on the middle foam ‘disk’ and pushed the pipe cleaner through the hole in one of the long rectangles of foam. I pushed enough pipe cleaner through so that I could bend it over and twist the pipe cleaner to itself underneath the foam shape.

I then rolled the foam rectangle around the twisted pipe cleaner centre forming the ‘trumpet’ part of the daffodil.

I then moved the foam disk up the pipe cleaner and slid it over the bottom of the rolled up tube of foam – this holds the ‘trumpet’ of the daffodil in place.

I then moved the outer petals up so that they came up over where the pipe cleaner twists onto itself and so that it was flat against the back of the other two parts of the flower. The double thickness of pipe cleaner helps it all to stay in place.

I then threaded on the foam leaves. These had two holes in them to help the leaves sit nicely on the pipe cleaner, however during the first attempt I made at this I put the leaf on upside down :/

To finish the flowers I bent the pipe cleaner so that the head of the flower part was at a right angle to the stem.

I made all of the flowers with different colour combinations as there was orange, white and yellow foam flower shapes. I then placed the whole lot in the vase and presented it to my dad 🙂 This was easy to do and I’m going to get my scouts to make daffodils in a similar way.

I tend to make, paint and sew seascapes for me, my husband and my little girl. The history of this is to do with my undergraduate degree, a paleobiology module and me explaining colonial organisms to my husband. The particular organism I was taken with is called Bryozoa but I got it a bit mixed up with corals. Anyway my husband and I decided we were a ‘colony’ and I started producing pictures of the colony within an ocean bottom environment.

This is the latest and it was my Valentine’s card to him this year.

I got the card blank from a set of eight card blanks and card toppers from the Pound Shop and the rest, ie the picture, is all cut out of magizines and catalogues. They are stuck on using glue sticks.

I cut the shapes out including:

• Seaweed

• A rock

• Colonial organism like a coral coming out of its tube

• Fish

• Heart

I tend to sit down and chop up a page at a time of magazines into the shapes the colours and layout that the page suggests to me. So for the shapes I eventually chose for this card I just selected from things I’d already cut out.

I wanted a very clean and stylised look.

I started gluing the shapes on, first off the seaweed and the fish hidden in them. I made sure that some of the seaweed overlapped the fish and some did not. This involved peeling up bits that had already been stuck and was essential for the balance of the picture. The rock in the middle was then stuck on.

I then placed the coral onto the rock, making sure that the bottom of the coral overlapped the rock. I then placed on the fish in the background and the blue heart – the heart was purely to show it was a card for Valentine’s day.

My three year old came home from pre-school with a cuddle token – this was a simple heart shape cut out of paper with a promise written on it in felt tip pens. She promises to cuddle her mummy 🙂

She also made us a Valentine’s card out of orange card folded with a large white heart she had ‘coloured in’ stuck on the front. (It is behind the meal my husband cooked, which is written up over on Salaric-Cooking).

Then we made the heart decorations which I’ve already posted about here.