Cheltenham Hackpace is having an Easter Crafts day on Good Friday Apr 14th 2017 from 10 am, there are lots of activities and we are taking our upcycled basket making 🙂
Hackspaces are a community workshop, skill share and create space and is a grass roots movement that is spreading globally.
Colour, fold, cut and stick a range of little paper friends complete with story boxes and mini theatre with changeable backgrounds using a combination of origami, puppet design and paper craft construction. Create shows and character play to take home with you – suitable for all ages and skill levels.
Repurpose fabric, egg boxes, broken jewellery and more to create fantastical headwear and other accessories such as unicorns, dragons, fairies, lions, festival fashions or anything else your imagination can think of! Part of the Upcycling and Junk Art workshop series. Suitable for all ages and skill levels
I made these cute little page corners or book marks, I do do some cutting to make the teeth but you can also just make them with patterned paper with no eyes and cutting.
Materials:
1) Square paper – the size of the square affects the size of the page corner you produce and some papers fold better than others, I used small origami paper.
2) Eye stickers – I just bought a roll of these and origami paper often comes with face stickers of various sorts but you could also draw eyes onto the paler coloured papers or draw them on white card/paper and cut and stick them on. With pens be a bit careful as not all will stay nicely on the slightly shiny surface alot of the origami papers have.
3) Scissors
4) Colour pens/pencils – optional for drawing your own monster skin textures or messages on the inside.
Method:
1) Fold the the square piece of paper along the diagonal so that two corners meet and it forms a triangle.
2) On edge of the triangle is where the fold is and the tip of the triangle is like two pieces of paper, fold the two tips along the folded “closed” edge so that the meet at the “open” tip, so that it is now a square or diamond shape depending on which way round you have it.
3) Allow the two little arms/folds you’ve just made to pop up as they wont want to lay flat, underneath is a diamond shaped area, fold the tip of this diamond up so that it meets the original folded edge i.e. the tip/triangle shape between the two “arms”. Make sure you on fold the top piece of paper from the “open” tip. Now the diamond shape should be made out of two triangles one being a flap you’ve just folded. This flap can be either on the outside in between the two arms or you can tuck it inside. Left on the outside it can leave a visible stripe if your paper is different colours or textures on each side.
4) Now fold the two arms in half tucking them up inside the little top triangle of the diamond so they wrap over the fold you’ve just made pinning it in place. You now have a little pouch with a triangle at the front and a diamond at the back. Stop here if you don’t want monsters!
5) Add eyes or other decoration.
6) Using scissor or crimping shears cut most of the single sheet of that sticks out from the triangle with a zigzag edge for the teeth.
7) If you want to hide a message in it then make sure you don’t stick the eyes over the gap in the arm folds and unfold it, write your message and refold.
8) Give as gift or pop onto the corner of the page you need to keep tabs on 🙂
These can also be used as mounts for photos in albums or to create home made frames.
Junk Music – is an upcycling and repurposing workshop, with a selection of pre-made instruments for experimentation and play created from rubbish and thrown away items. They can also make and decorate their own instruments to take home including but not limited to: tin can drums, rag bound drum sticks, tub shakers, bottle top rattles and spoon clackers. Suitable for all skill levels.
Happy New Year everyone 🙂
New Years mean resolution making, this is what we have done this year – it is a resolutions and goal setting jar.
Needed:
Large jar A4 coloured paper (one colour for each person contributing to the jar) Scissors or paper gillotine Loom bands/small hair bands/small elastic bands pencil (preferably small) Small draw string bag
Divide the A4 sheets into 8 rectangles each, this can be done by either measuring or folding each piece in half three times. The write the resolutions or goals onto the small rectangles, you can include action plans or tick lists if you wish. Then roll up the small piece of paper and secure with loom band and place in jar.
If there is space left in the jar put spare rectangles in there with small pencils and bands contained in a small bag so that people can continue adding goals through out the year. Leave in prominent place so that you do not forget your goals, and take our for review on a regular bases. For those who don’t want others to read their goals stickers can be used as seals instead of bands and “do not read” can be added to the finished scrolls.
This weekend is the virtual launch party of my poetry, music and art album Within and Without. It went live at 10 am this morning 🙂
There will be give aways and postings of links, explanations of the recordings, videos and more. I am running a Facebook Event, a Google Plus Collection as well as blogging across various platforms 🙂
I will be going until 11 pm Sunday evening!
Within and Without is an on going art, poetry and music project that I started several years ago. This is the first part and contains the visual poem A Stranger Dream which is also a colouring in book I have produced. Some of the colouring in sheets or art visuals are included in the download along with art work from a sister book not yet released that goes with the track Winter’s Heart.
The whole download costs £1 and comes free with any merch purchase you make. If you wish to just just purchase the merch you can go to my Etsy shop.
I hope you all enjoy the work.
On the plane on the way out to South Africa I saw the sky turn into lines of colour and the land drifting in changing bioms below – this led me to imagining the adventures we would have and I painted this picture at the hotel when we arrived. Followed by the one below which depicts the orange cloth clogs, the girls cuddlies and the blue blankets they gave us on the plane as well as the landing gear.
I’ve been trying to do more quick simple line sketches to catch the shapes and movements. These are just in what ever note book I happen to have at the time, being trained in field work I have a tendency to want to annotate all the pictures and have to keep reminding myself that it is not needed!
These are some of the ones I did in South Africa, I wish I’d done more but tended to be chasing small people and making sure they did not climb into lion dens (which the youngest did actually attempt :/ ).
We visited alot of rescue centres and sanctuaries so not everything I saw and drew was native to South Africa – like these Hopper Penguins.
I painted this as a present for my inlaws – it is their garden and cat Wallace. I loved how the light shone through the palm tree in the morning whilst we were staying with them and how the plants frames the mountain.
It’s Simons Town South Africa for those who want to know 🙂
