Salaric

This boring looking brown book was brought to me by my husband’s aunt. She said it was full of pressed flowers and that I could use them for my cards and things as she had seen me collecting flowers to press. I looked at the frail book and asked where he had got it from, ‘Oh he probably made it,’ was her response and when I looked at the way it was held together with a sort of canvas along the spine, you could tell it was homemade!

However it was not full of pressed flowers – no it was full of the loveliest flower pictures that he had drawn and painted. Here are the pictures – I hope to be able to get proper copies of these made at some point for a set of postcards we could send to people which I think would be nice. His name was Maurice Saxon Snell by the way for those who are interested. I really do like these pictures.

I think the neat clear handwriting is something to be savoured as well and puts me in mind of Beatrix Potter and her botanical illustrations.

I have been doing the Astronomy and Astronuatics badges with my scout group and as part of it felt that they needed to understand what was in the solar system and where so I made a solar system out of card which they had to put in order.

I then got them to add the things that were missing such as the asteroid belt and comets! Some of them made their own version of it to take home.

For the planets Neptune and Uranus I cut out one green circle and one blue circle, and one blue and one green oval that were about twice as wide as the discs. I then drew a smaller ellipse in the ovals – these touched the top line so when I cut them out it left two ‘broken rings’. Uranus and Neptune are the two smaller gaseous planets and have rings, they tend to both be sort of icy colours so I decided to reverse the colours. They also have rings but this is a relatively recent discovery.

Using pritt stick glue I stuck the rings on with the ‘broken’ bit of the ring behind the planet. This gave them a sense of perspective and helps you to visualise that the ring goes around the planets.

For Saturn I drew a larger yellow circle and cut out an orange ring. Saturn and Jupiter are the larger gaseous planets and tend to be the more warm colours, Saturn is also famous for its rings!

I glued the ring in place on Jupiter.

I then wanted to add in the stripey type banding that you see on these planets – this is their atmosphere and how it moves about. I chose brown for this and drew a circle the same size as the yellow circle I had initially used for the planet. I then cut it out. Once I had the brown circle I cut sections and bands from it and stuck them on the planet. I should have done this before I stuck the ring on but never mind!

For Jupiter I took a sheet of orange paper that had a pattern of smudgy red lines on it; these represent the storm belts on the planet. I then simply cut out a yellow oval for the ‘red spot’ a storm that has been raging for a stupid length of time and which is very big. I know it’s called the red spot but it doesn’t look that red to me and a red oval didn’t actually look right on the orange and red card.

For Earth, which is one of the small inner rocky or terrestrial planets, I drew a small circle on some pale blue card. I then cut out some green card in roughly continent shapes and put white card on the two poles – to represent the ice sheets – though if warming continues I may have to revise the planet.

I cut small circles out of red card for Mars, orange with red smudges for Venus and brown for Mercury. I then covered Mars and Mercury in glitter from glitter pens and 3D paint. Red for Mars, silver and gold for Mercury.

For the Sun which is the star at the centre of our solar system I drew the largest circle on yellow card with orange smudgy lines on it.  I then cut triangles around the circle to represent the heat rays and light coming off instead of just cutting around the circle (the foot belongs to my little girl who was ‘helping’).

I then used gold and bronze glitter pens and yellow and red 3D paint pens to decorate the sun.

The scouts added in moons and asteroids which was fun, oh and Pluto which is still being argued about but is considered a plutonian object now rather than a planet or asteroid. Or was last time I checked!

If you made the planets double sided I think you could make a lovely planetary mobile out of them!

RUSSIAN DOLL

I rather liked the idea of a russian doll. You know, the ones that open to reveal a smaller one inside. So I thought I might try making one.

I mooched out to my shed and scrabbled about in my box of bits of wood left over from other jobs until I found a nice piece of mahogany. Well yes it was a nice piece of wood even though it was a little on the thin side.

I attached it to the bowl turning plate of my lathe. That’s the gizmo, er plate, with the holes in to allow it to be screwed to the wood. Then I fitted it to the headstock, the bit attached to the motor that spins the wood, and tapped the tailstock into the centre of the wood and tightened it.

The large gouge is the best tool to make a square piece of timber into a round piece of timber. It’s the chisel with the half round blade. Then the skew chisel makes the round piece of timber into a smooth round piece of timber. That’s the flat chisel with the angled cutting edge.

Next I marked the workpiece with the measurements needed for the finished article. Nice and easy so far. Yes? Then I used the parting tool to cut the job in half, more or less. The parting tool is a chisel that is pointed if you look at it from the wide part of the blade so the narrow part of the blade has a fairly thin cutting edge.

Then came the interesting bit. Or the worrying bit. Or the frightening bit, depending on your point of view. Yes it was time to hollow out the doll. I moved the chisel-rest to the correct position and used the narrow gouge to make the hole and because it was the top of the doll I left the bottom of the hole curved. Then I used the parting tool to cut a recess on the inside of the doll to allow the top of the doll to be fitted to the lower part. I measured the recess with a ……… gauge.

I changed from the top to the bottom of the doll ie screwed it to the bowl turning plate and used the gouge to cut the hole. Then used the parting tool to make the bottom of the hole flat and the recess, on the outside this time, the same size as the top. Using the …….. gauge again.

Now the clever bit. I put the doll together and put the tailstock in place, making sure it was a tight fit. Then using the skew chisel I shaped the doll. When you make two parts of one finished article you find that when it is placed back in the lathe it will be out of line and the whole job will need to be reshaped. Allow extra diameter for the waste. It would probabably have been best if I had started with a thicker piece of tinber, as you will realise later.

When I achieved the shape I wanted, more or less, I used sandpaper to obtain a smooth finish. Then I used the skew chisel to cut the doll from the lathe.

Then all that was left to do was paint the rascal.

For the decoration I chose humbrol oil based model paint which is readily available almost anywhere. However most other types of model paint are also suitable for a job like this.

As a base coat I used yatch varnish which provides a really good surface for the model paint which is applied with an artists brush.

I started with the face, which is a vague face shape using a sort of beige colour quite close to the colour of my skin. Then I added the hair, eyes and nose in black, plus a line around the outside of the face. The mouth of course needed red.

The arms were simple black lines with the hands painted on the ends using the same colour as the face. The flower used green for the stem and leaves and red for the petals.

The bottom of the doll, or skirt if you want to be precise, I painted red.

Where did I get all the brilliant ideas for the clever and interesting style of decoration, heaped with the naive interpretation of the human form and the childlike simplicity of features such as the plain hardy face and the delicate detail of the flower.

Yeah, you guessed right, I copied my daughter’s russian doll.

Sadly, I made the thing a bit on the slim side. In other words, its a tad narrow to put another doll inside.

Never mind it can still be used to hold, needles, long pins, short cocktail sticks er um oh tooth picks.

Note : I actaully use it to store errant beads I find lurking about whilst cleaning etc…

Paper Leaf

A while ago we went to Cheltenham museum and as part of one of the exhibits the children could make leaves to hang on a tree. My husband made this leaf with our two year old.

He started off with a green circle of waxy tissue paper and folded an edge into the middle so that part of the edge was on the other edge of the circle, then he folded it in half and cut out a crescent shape. This left a leaf shape. Whilst it was folded in half he folded out from the middle crease, which represented the main middle vein in the leaf. The folds were at an angle and he only made the folds/creases ‘hard’ by running his finger over them near the main vein. This gave the leaf its characteristic shape.

The idea of these leaves was to put them on a ‘alphabet’ tree with something written on them, but I think with different greens it would be a good project to make for summer mobiles and you could even get some twisty twigs to act as a tree to hang the leaves on. Alter the colours to include yellows, oranges, reds and browns and you could have fun with some sort of autumn tree.

For these heart beads I mixed up the appropriate colours to create the textures out of fimo soft (polymer clay). I then rolled each texture into sausages of fimo and cut them into millimetre-thick discs. Following this, I aligned these into a wonky square and used my finger to squidge the discs together. I then took a straight high-sided glass and used it as a rolling pin.

I had to keep moving the sheet of fimo I was rolling, otherwise it sticks to the glass or the worktop. Once the sheet was uniformly thin (as much as you can get a uniform thickness by hand – some people use pasta machines for this but I have not tried this myself yet) I used medium-sized aspec cutters that I got from Almond Sugar Crafts.

I then used a paper clip I had bent out of shape to poke a hole just below the point where the heart plunges at the top. Following that, I carefully placed the heart beads onto a baking tray and baked them for 30 minutes at 130 degrees C in our kitchen oven. These look good on earrings and on ribbons around presents. They are a great way to use up spare bits of fimo and for adorning things for weddings and Valentine’s day. If you don’t put a hole in them they can be used as generic craft bits or as re-usable table confetti for romantic meals. The polymer clay also survives second bakings so the hearts can be added to other projects.

I made this card as a get well soon card for a neighbour who had broken their hip. I used: the picture of the flowers which I had cut out of an old calender, a sheet of brown and a sheet of yellow card, scissors and a pritt stick.

I had cut around the yellow exotic flowers so that they had a slight border to them that was nicely curving with now sharp corners. I then stuck it onto the brown card and cut around the shape again – this time leaving a brown border of a few mm.

I then stuck the resulting shape onto the yellow piece of card which I had folded in half.

I then cut around the shape for the third time, this time making sure I didn’t cut completely through the folded side so that it remained a hinged card and not two separate shapes.

I think it looks nice but isn’t really a card you can stand up as it doesn’t have a flat bottom. Also, I should have left more of the folded edge as it flops a bit too much when opened.

I made this card to send to my friend – I wanted to catch the essence of a summer/autumn landscape. I used one sheet of pale blue card because I thought this would look good as the summer sky in the backdrop of the picture. I then constructed the actual picture out of 3D paint pens: yellow, two types of green and a brown.

I folded the card in half to make a large greetings card.

I wanted a very representative picture rather than one that was full of detail and I was also new to the paint pens so was concerned that trying to do too much detail just wouldn’t work. I took the slightly bluer and darker one of the green pens and drew grass along the bottom edge of the card – the grass was made up of lots of short vertical lines ranging slightly in size from 0.5cm – 2.5cm. I made sure they sort of wiggled slightly too, to make it look more like grass.

Taking the second green pen, I added on two curving lines to represent the green rolling hills I had seen in the South Downs during my Duke of Edinburgh Award.

I then took the brown paint pen and constructed what I think of as the ‘bare bones’ of a tree. I had it dominating the left hand side of the picture and let it grow organically from my hands rather than thinking about what it should look like. Again I held an image in my mind of the strangely desolate trees I had seen. It has no leaves because I felt it was late summer in a place that was normally quite windy, though the day represented was calm. They also may well have been too ‘busy’ for the card and ruined its composition.

I then took the yellow pen and drew a small circle just larger than a penny and filled it in with the paint. Then I drew slightly wavy lines coming out from the circle, though I made sure they weren’t touching the circle. The paint pens are quite difficult to use at first and it is similar to trying to writing with icing. You have to keep squeezing the pen uniformly, which is difficult as there is steadily less and less paint in there to squeeze out.

The pens dry raised but they also dry transparent which I hadn’t realised and had initially picked colours for the pastel shades, but I was actually happier with the result when they had dried than I had been with the original.

Last year I gave the scouts some sheets of different coloured card, stick on red and orange gems in various sizes, stencils of cars and boats, and various colouring pencils and pens. Here are the fathers day cards they produced. Some of the fathers had birthdays around that time so some of the kids made joint cards for the two occasions. They also had some sheets of felt that I had picked up in the Pound Shop; the glues they used were PVA white craft glue and pritt stick.

Apologies for the state of the photograph, I had forgotten to take the camera with me and this particular one was taken on my husband’s phone.

I made this princess hat with my two year old for a Prince and Princesses week they were having at her nursery, mainly because I had left the little princess/fairy dress she’d been given for Christmas at my parents’ house and therefore had nothing to make her into a princess. The idea behind the hat was that it was one of those big pointy jobs with the material train coming out of it.

We used one paper doily, PVA craft glue, and little carousel horses and hearts I had stamped out of wrapping paper from presents and coloured envelopes from Christmas and birthday cards we’d been sent. We also used masking tape; scissors; purple, gold, iridescent blue, pink and silver glitter paint pens; gold and red twisted cord; and pink silky fabric offcuts from a dress my mother had made about five years previously!

I the started off by folding the doily in half and half again so that I ended up with it divided into four equal quarters. Whilst folded up it looked like a ‘pizza slice’, which I cut the tip off. Once unfolded the doily now had a hole in the very middle of it.

I then cut a slit up to the hole from the frilly edge, and slipped one side of the doily underneath the other and moved it all around until it made a cone. I used a strip of masking tape to secure it in place (I put one strip on the inside of the cone as well to make it more secure).

I then gave the hat, drizzled in PVA white craft glue, to my two year old daughter along with the paper shapes and some offcuts of the red and gold twisted cord. She proceeded to put the shapes on the hat or to give me some specific ones to stick on for her.

Once bored of this she picked out the colours she wanted from our glitter pen collection and proceeded to squeeze glitter all over it. I did have to help her with some of the glitter pens as they need to be squeezed harder than she was capable of.

For the train I selected the pink silky material offcuts I had, and presented them to Jean for her to pick her favourite. I then cut out a rough isosceles triangle.

Once the glitter and glue were dry enough I pushed the point of the triangle of material through the hole in the top of the cone.

I then cut two lengths of red and gold cord and tied them to the sides of the hat as a strap to tie under her chin.

I made this castle with my two year old for her nursery’s “Prince and Princesses” week. I have split how we did it over three posts; this is the last one of the posts. In order they are:

*Making a skeleton castle *Making a tissue mâché castle *Painting a tissue mâché castle

We used a silver craft/poster paint and pots of yellow, orange and black paint we had picked up in Tesco’s. We also had a mixing pot, a water pot, one large children’s paint brush and one small children’s paint brush, plus some tissue to blot spills up! We also had a plastic mat on the floor to work on and a painting apron on the two year old. 🙂

We mixed the paint, which was mostly the silver paint with a little bit of black in it, as well as varying amounts of the yellow and orange in it.

We didn’t completely mix it up as we wanted a nice stony, mottled texture. We then painted the castle.

Obviously, with the uneven texture of the tissue castle, I had to go over it at the end, making sure all of it was covered in the paint. I also attempted to make sure the inside of the towers were painted.

Whilst I was doing this, Jean was washing the brushes out rather militantaly.

We then left it to dry.

Once it had dried I made up a 3:1 PVA glue to water mix, which I painted onto the castle to seal it. This did, however, make the paint run slightly which didn’t really matter with the texture we were hoping for. But it still makes me wonder if I should have mixed the PVA glue with the paint in the first place and reduced the amount of drying time that we had.