Salaric

I made this castle with my two year old daughter for her nursery’s “Prince and Princesses” week. For ease, I have split up how we did it over three posts – this being the middle one, they are:

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

I started off with the above masking tape and cardboard castle and then used watered down PVA white craft glue, tissue or loo roll, a baking tray, tin foil and an oven.

Jean helped unravel and rip up the toliet paper, a task which she enjoyed greatly. This resulted in some frustration at the end when I said we’d finished making the castle. She asked to make another and I stupidly said we didn’t have any more loo roll innards etc. To make another one she then promptly unravelled the last of the toilet paper to make an ‘all gone’ that we could use to make another castle!

The PVA water mix was about 4 parts water:1 part of PVA and stirred thoroughly. We then dipped the toilet paper into the mix and literally slapped it onto the castle. I found that I had to use a square of tissue paper for each of the turrets, or as they were at the time, sticking-up lolly sticks.

Once the castle was completely covered in the PVA-soaked tissue I covered a baking tray in foil and carefully moved the castle onto it. I realised that the thickness of tissue would mean it would not dry in time for Jean to take it to nursery and I had read a book that said you could bake paper mâché in the oven. So I put the castle in the oven on 120 degrees C setting.

This, it turned out, was a bit too hot so it got turned down to 100 degrees C for a second cooking. I left it on for about 45 minutes, and the next morning I put it on again for about 2 hours at 80 degrees C. It had got slightly singed but seemed ok.

What I hadn’t planned for was that it had become glued to the tin foil, so I cut a panel out of the back of one of the boxes that Jean’s Christmas presents had come in and simply transplanted both castle and foil to the cardboard once it had cooled sufficiently. I then turned the castle upside down to neaten up the tin foil on the underside and to fasten it with brown parcel tape.

Me and my two year old made this castle for her nursery’s “Prince and Princesses” week. I have split how I did this into three posts called:

• Making the skeleton of a castle
• Making a tissue mâché castle
• Painting a tissue mâché castle

This is how I made the ‘skeleton’ or framework of the castle:

We used one small box (about 15cm across) that electronic components had been delivered in, four loo roll innards or tubes, masking tape, scissors and wooden lolly sticks.

We cut strips of masking tape and then taped the lolly sticks around the loo roll innards but with the lolly sticks slightly proud of the top of the tube, to make the turrets of the castle. The loo roll tubes were going to be the towers. Jean helped a lot with the taping.

Once all the lolly sticks were in place I wrapped the whole thing in masking tape to get rid of all the tatty ends – which, as a two year old was helping, there were a lot of.

We repeated the process with the other three loo roll innards until we had four towers ready and waiting.

I then attached the towers to the corners of the box using the masking tape – this was actually quite fiddly and they still moved a bit precariously after I had fixed them to the box.

To try and make it more secure and because at this point I hadn’t yet thought about doing the paper mâché, I covered the entire structure in masking tape as I thought it would make a better surface to paint.

I ended up with a masking tape tower.

My dad made me this lucky mascot hedgehog during one set of my exams. This is his write up on how he made it:

Some years ago I made a hedgehog for my daughter. Not a very interesting one in my view but she seems to like it.

I started with a thin flat piece of apple wood, left over from another job. It was about two inches (50mm) long, one inch (25mm) wide and one quarter of an inch (6mm) thick.

First I drew a sort of cartoon hedgehog shape on the surface. Then I took it to my bandsaw where I very carefully cut off all the bits which were not part of the hedgehog shape. I said “very carefully” because the thing I was cutting was very small and the blade on a bandsaw is very hard on fingers that get in the way. Don’t try and rush the job with any power saws.

If you do not have a bandsaw or jigsaw then a hand-held fretsaw works just as well.

I sanded the little rascal first with medium and then fine sandpaper before giving it a wipe over with white spirit to remove any dust. Then it received two or maybe three coats of yacht varnish to help keep it clean.

The realists among you may be tempted to add eyes, mouths and little black shiny noses with some black paint and an artist brush before the yacht varnish.

I say “go for it matey”.

(He forgot to paint the face on it before yacht vanishing and is therefore in crisis about it!)

Last weekend I went to an art exhibition in the cloisters at Gloucester cathedral. The paintings were of parish churches in the area and were lovely clear watercolours with some well-defined outlines in what looked to me like fineliner pen.

Some of the paintings were on sale to raise money for the parish the church in each picture belonged to. The exhibit unfortunately only ran from April 05 2008 to April 12 2008. The artist himself died last year at 89, his name was Alec Brown and he lived in my home village.

The paintings were part of a monumental task he had set himself of painting every church in the Gloucestershire diocese. He got about over halfway with something like 240 paintings out of over 400 subjects/churches. Apart from this project he painted over 2000 pictures – mostly of churches!

To me the pictures held a sort of enchantment, linked with the fact they seemed somehow reminiscent of my field sketches for my undergraduate course, which was in geology. There seemed to be something so crisp and defined in them, bringing out the detail which probably was not all that evident in real life. They looked like the paintings of an engineer or scientist to me. Most of them also had a very flat view as if you were looking at them straight on rather than from a slanted angle. This is something my friend Ella (who is a fantastic photographer) is always telling me makes a good photograph – it appears to also make for good paintings of picturesque churches in the darkest reaches of the British countryside.

I did discover that the artist had indeed been a surveyor and that he did not start painting watercolours until he retired which, considering the accuracy and beauty of the pictures, is absolutely amazing!

I have to confess though that the subject matter was not one that I would feel inclined to hang on my walls, but I would send them on postcards and greetings cards to people. Alec seems to have had the same thing in mind and sold these sorts of things to raise money for various charities. In fact, he had sold over a million prints of his pictures to raise money for various causes and as a result was awarded an MBE.

I made this card for my cousin’s 21st birthday. I used a sheet of blue card with pink textured smudges on it that I got in a pack from Costco. The sheet was slightly larger than A4. Additionally I used yellow, green and iridescent glitter 3D paint pens, also from Costco.

First of all I folded the card in four to make it a suitable size, then using the yellow pen I wrote the equals sign and 21 to show that she was now 21. The paint pens work a bit like icing a cake, so I had to hold the nib of the pen just above the surface of the paper rather than having it touching. The 2 came out a bit too gloopy and the danger with this is that I found the surface tension of the paint makes it sort of suck paint back into itself so that the paint in thin lines gets sucked into big blobs at the end of a line.

I then added two yellow spots nearer the bottom of the card as the centres of two flowers. I then took the iridescent glitter pen and added the flowers petals, trying to make sure they didn’t touch each other, nor the yellow flower centres.

Then I used the green pen to add on the stems of the flowers. I did the leaf separately to avoid it sucking in all the paint from the stems, and I think this worked quite well.

My brother made this trojan helmet out of a cardboard box for a fancy dress party he was going to. He used one cardboard box that was left over from our house move and some gaffer tape, masking tape, wood glue, newspaper, black acrylic paint and a silver paint pen.

First of all he measured how far apart his eyes were and where his nose was in relation to them and his mouth. Then he drew them on to the cardboard box, making sure there was plenty of space for the rest of the helmet around the ‘face’ he had drawn on. Because of the shape of the helmet, he drew a line coming down from an imaginary triangular shape around the rectangular eyes – roughly at a 45 degree angle – so that when he was cutting it out he could cut through this bit and slide the cardboard over itself in a sort of pleat to allow a more 3D shape. Similar pleats had to be put in at the back of the helmet.

He cut out the facial area first and made sure it fit properly by putting it over his face and folding the cardboard appropriately. The mouth area isn’t a hole like in a normal mask; instead it finished in a sort of lip just above the mouth and has two panels descending down each side.

He cut out a rectangle for the nose with the long side of the rectangle coming down the face, but he only cut three sides of the rectangle, leaving it hinged at the top. He then formed the cardboard into a nice helmet shape. The thickness of the cardboard helped a lot with this as it was double-walled and folded in a nice, smooth way. He taped it all together and then made the sides for the nose so that it stuck out from the helmet.

The fan on top was two identical pieces of card cut into a sweeping point with a triangular insert at the front to give it a flared look. He again taped this together and taped it onto the helmet. He re-enforced the inside with a t-section of cardboard from a cereal packet, which he again taped in place.

Checking everything was securely in place he then glued newspaper over some of it to smooth out some of the joins, and painted it with the black paint.

Once the paint had dried he used the silver paint pen to add detailed adornments like android-esque lines on the face and swirls on the fan bit.

This was amazingly effective and it is actually really sturdy.

I made this pressed flower card for my friend who was having lots of stomach problems. The previous spring I had collected a few petals and leaves from various plants in our garden and pressed them in the book that had inspired the whole project – a pressed flower book I had picked up in a Red Cross book shop. I pressed the flowers by putting them between sheets of tissue paper and kitchen towel, as I like the texture this gives the finished petals. I don’t think this would work for whole flowers rather than individual petals.

Blotting paper is the best thing to use for pressing flowers, but this was one of the first projects I had tried since being a child. I used copydex glue, a fineliner and a card blank with an oval cut-out in it. I got the card blanks from The Works in Cheltenham.

I looked at the petals I had and thought that some of them would make a nice picture of a woman on a hill with long flowing hair. I was thinking wild innocence dancing on the stormy hillside in a sodden pink dress.

I started off by folding out the card so that I could get to the panel behind the oval cut-out. I stuck on the hill, which had been a large white petal, then I stuck on the hair, which had been the petal of an orange-coloured poppy.

I then stuck on the arms and upper torso of the woman – this had been a small white heart-shaped rose petal. I then stuck a pink foxglove petal over the bottom half/pointy bit that’s joined to the flower. This made the formal dress of the dancing woman and was exactly the right shade of pink.

I then stuck on a small ’rounded corners’ triangle for the woman’s face, this had been a small burnt orange fading to red colour before pressing, and now is a lovely deep red.

Once the glue was dry I folded the card back up so that the picture of the woman was trapped in the oval frame and around it at the top and bottom I wrote, “MAY THE LADY DANCE YOU BETTER…” with the fineliner.

I made this card for a friend’s birthday; as her birthday is in spring and our garden was abundant with ox-eye daisies, ordinary daisies and various flowers that I don’t know the name of (but might well have been purple and lavender daisies), I wanted to make a spring flower card.

I used a sheet of blue card with pink blurry lines running around it; I think they look like little clouds scudding across the card. I then selected a blue, lavender and white iridescent glitter pen and a 3D yellow pen.

I started off by folding the sheet of card into four to make an appropriate greeting card; I then squeezed out eight little yellow dots in roughly three columns down the card. These were to be the centres of the flowers.

I then took the glitter pen and carefully added petals to one of the yellow dots. It then became apparent that I could not fit petals on all of the dots so I initially did three flowers.

I then discovered that I had to be careful not to get the petals either too near each other or the dots, as the paint sort of fused together.

I then added another three flowers, making two columns. I felt that the two spare dots looked a bit odd so I added lots of other dots which I felt looked right.

My husband’s aunt made this fish glass panel at a day course run by a man called Rod Friend who now lives in Spain running residential courses that I would quite like to go on at some point as I have quite a few stained glass projects up my sleeve!

First off, Barbara drew the picture she wanted with colouring pencils and then made the picture up out of random bits of glass that were cut in assorted sizes, though mostly square or rectangular in shape.

These were all arranged and stuck down, and then some ‘black stuff’ was put over it to hold it all together.

The panel itself is quite nice and depicts fish in the trout pond behind our house, I think. This has helped me to think that it is possible to make my own windows, which I have been wanting to do for a while now. It means you get very personal designs that actually mean something to you.

This vase was partially designed from leftovers and partially based on mineral textures you find in rocks. It was made using a Sainsbury’s Basic’s glass; orange, egg yoke yellow, mint green and forest green fimo soft. I also used another glass with straight sides as a rolling pin, a chopping board, a plastic sculpting tool with an angled flat blade, and a penknife – plus our oven and baking tray.

To make the green swirls I actually used the off-cuts from around a Christmas tree cookie cutter. I was using the tree shapes primarily, and then when I saw the off-cuts I thought they would look perfect as the sort of ‘veining’ you get in mineral formations – though I must say here I was thinking more about how rocks look in thin slices under the microscope with various filters on them. I was also working with meteorites specifically at the time and so had unusual patterns lodged in my head that begged to be used artistically.

To get the texture I simply cut up the dark green fimo and then squidged it all back together to get it in a nice manageable consistency; I then did the same with the light green. I rolled the colours into two different sausages which I then put next to each other and rolled together. Then I folded the two tone sausage in half and half again. I rolled it into a smooth shape, pinching the ends where I had folded it off, in order to make beads and shells. I then cut the sausage into discs about 1.5mm thick which I arranged into a sort of wonky square. Obviously there were gaps between each of the discs but I used my fingers to try and squidge the discs a bit without distorting the colours too much. This sort of fuses the edges of the discs together.

Once this was done I took a high-sided glass and used it as a rolling pin, making sure that I moved the now sheet of patterned fimo around, otherwise it sticks to the glass rolling pin or the surface that you are working on. The rolling action helps fuse the discs into a sheet nicely – some people use a pasta machine to roll sheets of fimo but I have never tried this personally, so have no idea how well it works.

As I said earlier I then cut out Christmas trees from this and used the off-cuts for this vase. I had lots of bumpy stripes which I wrapped around a glass as a series of rings – I wanted it to be quite natural-looking so the rings were quite irregular. A bit of gentle pressure with a finger pad meant I could blend the fimo into nice continous rings rather than having an abrupt and obvious join, but you have to be careful not to blur the colours in doing this.

Once I had done this I made an orange and yellow fimo sausage which I again cut into discs, but this time I put the discs straight onto the glass and squidged them, smoothing over the bits where they touched each other and the green rings. I covered the entire glass at the rim, overlapping the edge of the glass so that the fimo disc went inside. Once it was entirely covered I took the sculpture tool and ran it around the inside of the glass to get rid of the excess fimo – this left a nice neat rim around the top with a clean interior. I then signed the bottom of the vase and using another high-sided straight glass, I rolled around the vase to help remove fingerprints. Then I placed the finished vase onto the baking tray.

I then baked it for 30 minutes at 130 degrees C.