Salaric

Me and my daughter made these heart decorations for Valentine’s day. I made a template by drawing round a heart shaped token Jean had made at pre-school but for our Valentine’s meal my husband made a second template by simply folding a piece of paper in half and cutting a curve into it. When unfolded it was a symmetrical heart whereas my template was asymmetrical.

My dad then draw about 16 hearts and cut them out of red mounting card. This is slightly bigger than A4 and he found with careful placement he could get four hearts out of each sheet.

I then set things up so that we had PVA white craft glue, glitter confetti, sweet wrappers from the christmas Quality Street Chocolates, glitter pens, foam heart stickers from a Pound Shop Foam Rose making kit and tissue paper in various colours.

Jean painted the hearts with glue and then sprinkled glitter onto them. To save glitter we did this on a sheet of paper and then when we did the next heart that was on a different sheet of paper so that we could sprinkle the previously caught glitter onto it. We also shook each glittered heart to make sure that only well attached glitter remained.

Jean also used glitter pens and her fingers to decorate some of the hearts. She glued sweet wrappers on others and pieces of screwed up pink tissue paper. On one heart she only stuck on the foam hearts which looked quite nice.

I myself made a heart that was completely covered in little balls of screwed up pink tissue paper. This was quiet effective and gave the heart a sort of 3D furry texture.

I then put sticky pads on the back of each heart and placed them around our bookshelves.

My three year old got this Dress up Doll Fairies and Princesses from a party she went to.

I think it is a great piece of paper engineering and it is full of different outfits for the fairies and princesses to wear.

First off you push out the dolls – who unfortunately have the large swollen heads that dolls seem to suffer with these days. Bits to construct the stand pop out too. It is however easy to rip the tags off bits of the stand at this point so I think an adult is really needed, even with older children.

Constructing the stand was a bit fiddly and didn’t really come out as gracefully as I’d hoped.

The doll ingeniously slots into the stand though this does invovle slots in painful looking places such as the top of the head!

As Jean points out they must be cold when you first put them on the stand as they are in their underwear! Jean choose outfits for them which ended up being a bit of a mismatch rather than the nice complete outfits they had in the book – such as strawberry fairies and fiery princesses – they even have mermaid tails!

All four dolls are now made with only one being held together with sellotape. Jean adores them and will spend ages choosing costumes for them. They are not a long lived thing methinks, but fun and the outfits are beautifully designed. There are even versions you can colour in and decorate yourself.

The only other issue I had was that the princesses have crossed legs whilst the fairies do not meaning that the tights and shoes cannot be swapped between them.

I am now on the lookout for more of these books though.

Tony Hart who used to have a children’s programme showing you art techniques and the like has died. I used to watch this programme religiously and feel that I should pay tribute as I’m still using some of the techniques he showed us.

The Wiggly Pets also owe their existance to the presance of two things in my childhood – Tony Hart’s character Morph and his friend, and The Trap Door animation series. I loved the concept of plasticine animation and used to sit and make things out of it for ages as a child – whole roast dinners, characters to eat the dinner, china tea sets, furniture, you name it!

When I was a teenager my dad found fimo which is the consistancy of plasticine and then I found it in different colours and I was away (as anyone who’s read the blog for a while will know!). But the route to even realising I could make things, especially characterisations came from those two programmes.

With that in mind I thought I should honour his memory with this post.

These lovely Japanese stickers and two panels were given to my little girl by a friend. I just love the cartoony shapes and balloon writing style of the characters. There were lots of people and then pink helicopters and the like which my little girl simply adored.

She gave me the purple panel as it’s my favourite colour and she had the pink. These in themselves were little works of art as far as I’m concerned with blossom, a river and a cityscape.

We stuck on numerous stickers and then I stuck them to the fridge.

Here is the url as promised:

http://lovemomiji.com/

Warning: it’s got little animations of the stickers and I sort of got hooked and was on the site for ages 🙂

My daughter was invited to a friend from pre-school’s party. It was his fourth birthday so I thought: what sort of card would he like?

I was going to get my daughter to make him something but she was playing in the garden so I decided to make it myself.

I used:

• One piece of blue mounting card slightly bigger than A4
• 3D dungaree trousers with rattly bits in the centre panel
• Nursery building block sticker, slightly raised
• 3D red car sticker
• A black felt tip

I folded the mounting card in half and then in half again to make the card shape. I then arranged the trousers, blocks and car so they sort of zig zaged up the page.

I then took the black felt tip and in clear loopy writing wrote, “Happy Birthday James” zig zagging inbetween the 3D stickers. The card looked very unbalanced in the top right though so I decided to draw a steam train with James as the engine’s name. I then speckled the card with five point stars – each star is drawn in one fluid movement. It took me a while when I was a schoolchild to work out how to draw those stars! It’s best to do a few practices on a scrap piece of paper to get into the star drawing groove I find.

I got this big box of Christmas Craft from The Works discount bookshop in Stroud. It cost me £3.99, which was reduced from about £7. It was full of coloured pom poms of various sizes, pipe cleaners in lots of colours including metallic ones, foam shapes, glitter pens, green and red lolly sticks, and ‘fashion cord’, PVA glue, plus some goggly eyes (these had red and green irises which was a bit weird).

I made some examples of this that you could make out of the pack and then handed over about one and a half big craft boxes minus the glitter pens to my Scout troop to play with. The glitter pens do not dry quickly enough to be used in a Scout troop. They also had the leftovers of the Big Spooky Craft Box from Halloween.

Here are what they produced! Apologies for the poor quality of the photos, I forgot the camera so had to rely on my phone to take the pictures with.

Christmas mobile:

He bent a star out of a silver metallic pipe cleaner, twisted a fluffy red and a fluffy white pipe cleaner together and bent it into a candy cane. For the other two were a foam cut-out Christmas tree and a yellow and gold pom pom. He tied each of these shapes to the lolly stick cross using some of the fashion cord, which was transparent plastic with sliver specks in it. I made the lolly stick cross for him out of two lolly sticks and pipe cleaners. I twisted the pipe cleaners around the middle of the two lolly sticks where I had overlapped them.

Three tiered snowman:

One of them just stuck three pom poms together in a row, starting with a large red pom pom for the base of the snowman, then a medium white pom pom and for the head a small white pom pom. He wrapped pipe cleaners around the joins to make it look neater and stuck on some goggly eyes. He then decided he wanted to make a halo for it which he did by bending one of the metallic gold pipe cleaners into a loop. The excess pipe cleaner he used to make it ‘hover’ about the snowman’s head.

Christmas tree in crisis:

Being impatient for the PVA glue to dry and seeing that I had ‘tied’ my green pom poms onto the lolly stick with pipe cleaner tinsel, one of the Scouts decided to do the same. He liked the effect so much though that he decided that the tree should just be a decoration made out of interlocking pipe cleaners giving it a surreal 70’s sci-fi egg look.

Candy canes:

One of the girls twisted red and white fluffy pipe cleaners together to get the candy cane effect and then cut the resulting twist into four. She then shaped them into little hooks. She really enjoyed doing this and so decided she would make some out of other colours as well. We had some left over stripy pipe cleaners from Halloween and she chose these to twist together.

Pipe cleaner Christmas tree:

One of the girls twisted a pipe cleaner into a Christmas tree shape and then decorated it with more pipe cleaners – generally the metallic type – as tinsel.

Surreal mobile:

One of the boys made this surreal mobile by twisting a red and a green fluffy pipe cleaner together to produce a twist effect; he then looped this to make a circle. Then he made a lolly stick cross in the way I had shown them to and weaved the circle onto this. This gave a fantastically strong frame to work with and was very neatly done. He then made bizarre but cute little creatures from the pom poms, foam shapes and goggly eyes. He then used more pipe cleaners to attach the little creatures to the mobile. It wasn’t very Christmassy but it was really effective.

Red Christmas tree monster:

This started off as a red Christmas tree because he couldn’t find three green pom poms but soon mutated into a monster. Like the Christmas trees he stuck three pom poms onto each other, large at the bottom, then medium and then a small sparkly red pom pom on the top. He used the lolly stick as a base for the moster, stuck on the yellow foam holly leaves as wings and then stuck on two goggly eyes, one green and one red, and just to make it more monster-esque, one eye is below the other rather than them being next to each other. He also used a pipe cleaner as a sort of belt for the monster.

Spiral pet:

This was again incredibly simple but very cute, if not very festive. One of the girls twisted a fluffy red and green striped pipe cleaner into a flat spiral (so that it was two dimensional and didn’t go up into a cone shape. She then just simply stuck two goggly eyes into it – again one red and one green to match the stripes I assume.

Red spider/octopus:

One of the girls made this by just sticking two red pom poms together, one slightly larger than the other, and then twisting a red fluffy pipe cleaner and a green fluffy pipe cleaner around its body (the slightly larger pom pom) as legs. She then stuck the googly eyes onto it, again one red and one green.

Pipe cleaner reindeer:

This is a little pipe cleaner reindeer. I unfortunately thought it was a dog which she fortunately took in good grace! She twisted the body shape out of a gold pipe cleaner. She actually cut it into three pieces to get the body and ears which were little folded loops and the the two sets of legs which were just bent into two sides of a triangle. She then stuck on a small sparkly red pom pom for the face and a tiny white pom pom for the tail. She then added on the goggly eyes.

Spiral decoration:

One of the boys made a set of these spiral decorations. He twisted two pipe cleaners of contrasting colour together, this was a much looser twist than those used for the candy canes. He then bent the result into a loose spiralling curl with a loop at the top for attaching string so that it can be hung up.

Eyes in the back of my head:

I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of this one but wished I had. One of the boys got a black pipe cleaner and then pom poms of varying sizes in white and red and cut holes through them so that he could thread them like beads onto the pipe cleaner. He managed all but the very smallest pom pom with the safety children’s scissors, the last one had to be done very carefully with the small scissors on my pen knife. He then positioned them along the pipe cleaner, the ends of which he bent so that they would loop over his ears like glasses. He then stuck a goggly eye on each pom pom and put it on so that the ‘eyeballs’ were staring out of the back of his head. It was so clever! I couldn’t stop laughing – again not very festive but a good laugh.

To make this doily angel I used one paper doily (I got a packet of 74 from the £1 shop), one large white pom pom, one silver metallic pipe cleaner, two medium goggly eyes, one white fluffy pipe cleaner, one piece of red foam sheet, yellow felt, sellotape, scissors and PVA craft glue.

I cut the doily in half and with one half made a cone, which I fixed with sellotape low down so that there was an opening at the top. This made the body of the angel. I then used sellotape to fix the other half of the doily on as wings. This was a bit of a mistake as I should have waited until after I had attached the halo etc. Double-sided tape would be ideal for this sort of thing but as I never have any what I do is I make a loop out of sellotape with the sticky part facing outwards – this works really well for me.

For the angel’s head I took a large white pom pom and cut a slit into it using the scissors, then I squidged some PVA glue into it and pushed the white fluffy pipe cleaner into the glue filled hole. What you should do here is wait for the glue to dry before carrying on, but I cut a mouth from some red foam sheeting I had and then glued it and the eyes onto the white pom pom.

I then cut out some hair from the yellow felt; this was a bit tricky and I found that adding a fringe meant the hair fitted the globe shape of the head much better. I also had to fold and glue a ‘pleat’ or flap at the back of the hair in order to make it fit. I then glued this with some difficulty onto the head. I had to use clothes pegs as ‘clamps’ to hold the hair in place whilst it dried. I think that I would have been better off making the hair out of wool or string in hindsight.

I then took the silver pipe cleaner and bent it into a hoop, making sure I had about 2cm worth of spare one end, and the rest of the pipe cleaner spare at the other end so that I could twist the two ends together. I then used the long tail of pipe cleaner coming from the hoop to attach the halo to the white pipe cleaner by twisting it around. This was not very elegant but as I’d already stuck the wings on there wasn’t a lot I could do. I think it would have looked a lot better if I’d been able to attach the halo under where the wings attached at the back.

I then slid the head on a pipe cleaner into the hole at the top of the angel’s body, where I discovered the head was too heavy and kept flopping forward. To solve this, I stuck the white pipe cleaner to the front of the angel’s ‘dress’ (on the inside of course!).

I think the lacy bit around the edge of the doily worked really well for the wings and smock; I also think that this technique could be used to make choir boys and peace doves. I’m sure there are a miriad of other things I could make with them as well.

If I had had a pink or beige pom pom I would have probably used that instead of the white pom pom, as it was just too ghostly-looking for me to be entirely happy with, but I think it’s just get-away-with-able because it’s an angel and not a choir boy.

These candy canes were really easy to make and I think quite effective.

I used one red fluffy pipe cleaner and one white fluffy pipe cleaner.

I twisted them together to get the classical red and white striped look of a candy cane.

I then cut the resulting twist into four and bent them into little hooks.

I made this pom pom Father Christmas in an effort to show my scouts what Christmassy things they could make with various craft bits and pieces.

I used: one large red pom pom, one slightly smaller pom pom, two small black pom poms, two small white pom poms, a tiny white pom pom and a medium white pom pom, a thick black pipe cleaner, medium thickness white pipe cleaner, one thin red pipe cleaner, a red metallic sparkly pipe cleaner and two self adhesive googly eyes. I also used PVA craft glue and a pair of scissors (as I chop the pipe cleaners with them, the scissors need to be sturdy and not be good dress-making scissors, as it will blunt them).

(in case you where wondering about the hand in amoungst the santa bits – that would be my two year old ‘helping’)

For his body I stuck the large red pom pom and the slightly smaller red pom pom together> I then stuck the medium white pom pom onto the slightly smaller red one as his head. I then made the mistake of gluing his arms on around the waistline (ie where the large red pompom and the slightly smaller one met).

I stuck the two goggly eyes onto the face and then cut a small 5mm length of the thin red pipe cleaner and curved it into a smile shape and stuck that onto Santa’s face. I left the whole lot to dry for a while. I then decided that he needed a black belt, so I cut a 10cm length of the thick black pipe cleaner and stuck it on around the join between the two red pompoms. This was when I discovered it had been a mistake to glue to hands on, as the belt needed to go underneath them. I had to thread it through and as a result, I don’t feel it was as neat as it could have been. That done, I thought that he was still missing something vital so cut a short piece of white pipe cleaner (approximatly 2.5cm) and stuck that down the centre of his chest as fur trimming of his coat.

For Santa’s hat I cut a third off a red sparkly pipe cleaner and twisted it into a conical spiral (a spiral that gets smaller as it goes up). I then cut a small hole in the tiny white pom pom, which I filled with PVA glue and stuck the end of the pipe cleaner in. I then left it to dry for a while.

I then glued the hat on Santa’s head. He looked almost right but he needed boots, so I glued on the two small black pom poms as feet.

I think this would have worked better with a larger range of pom poms, such as pink ones for the face and hands, meaning that I could have done white trimming on the hat and ‘sleeves’ of the coat.

My friend Carina has won the runners up prize for the UCL grad schools ‘Research Images as Art/Art Images as Research’ competition. The pictures were all on display in UCL and were pleasant to walk around – some of them were stunning but a lot I felt were a bit contrived.

Carina had four lovely images made into one of the black lava structures she had observed on one of her field trips – she does volcanic hazards. I felt really happy as I had been one of the people she consulted as to what images to submit!

The website unfortunately still only has 2007’s winners on it but they are worth a look!