Salaric

This ghost was incredibly easy to make, my little two year old loves it and drags it around by its string. I used:

• One empty minni trifle pot but a large yogurt pot would do just as well

• One square sheet of white packing paper, this had a slight greese proof shiny quality to it, the size doesn’t really matter as long as it will cover the pot you are using – too large a piece of paper may make things a bit unwieldy. I think this paper came with some electronic components but any thin paper or material will do.

• One black circle just a bit smaller than a two pence piece – I used a shiny black plastic sequine type thing that would normally be used in card making.

• Two goggly eyes, I chose relatively large ones. They where also self adhesive though peeling off the backs was a bit fiddly. But you could just glue some on.

• A pair of scissors

• Some black string – I used a cotton yarn as I had lots of that lurking around the place.

First of all I squeezed out a spiral of PVA white craft glue onto the minni triffle pot – on the outside of the pot which was standing upside down on the table. I then placed the white paper square over it so that the centre of the paper was over the centre of the pot. I then gently pressed the sides of the paper onto the sides of the pot. I had to hold it cupped in my hand for a while to let the glue soak into the paper and hold it in place. I then glued the googly eyes and mouth onto the ghost.

Once the glue was dry I carefully poked a whole with the scissors at the top of the ghost – this was for the string which I poked through and then tied a knot in so that it would pull back through easily. That was it – really simple.

I found a big pack of 3D paint pens in Costco for about £7 so I have been having a lot of fun with them, seeing what effects you can get and exactly how they dry. In the pack there are 40-plus different pens, ranging from three types of glitter, metallic to neon! They are also washable so useful for children’s art projects.

The paint dries raised, hence them being called 3D paints.

I made this fireworks card as an early experiment.

First of all I got a piece of black card with little bits of silver glinting off it – again this was a Costco purchase and was an extra in a card activity pack I bought there. It is actually meant to be mounting card and so is therefore slightly larger than A4. To start with, I folded it in half along the long side of the sheet to make a nice ‘card’ shape.

I then picked a nice pastel brown colour for the wood at the base of the bonfire. You have to unscrew the nozzle of these pens and remove a little blue plastic plug; you then replace the nozzle. To draw with them you squeeze the tube and the paint comes out like runny icing. I drew the shapes of the logs – when I initially drew them they were a lot more defined – but the paint flowed together again, giving everything a slightly more chunky and organic look.

I waited for the brown to dry a bit before selecting a pastel orange for the flames of the bonfire; the brown had dried a lot darker than I had expected from the initial colour of the pen, but I thought it still looked ok.

I drew the shape of the fire with a few little offshoots and then began to fill the outline in – I only needed to draw a series of lines in the fire shape, getting smaller as the paint flowed and merged together to give a uniform appearance.

I then left it to dry.

To my horror I realised that the brown hadn’t dried a lot darker but that the paint was drying transparently and the paper, of course, was black. The same was happening to the orange, with the result that instead of a nice vibrant fire I had a big shiny patch that looked black!

However, I decided to continue as I reasoned that it was salvageable. I decided to add fireworks in the sky using the glitter pens, whilst I waited for the fire to completely dry.

I left the glitter to dry and discovered that it doesn’t dry raised, unfortunately. But I then used red, orange and yellow glitter for the fire utilising the already-transparent paint as a guide! This worked really well.

I would, however, say that the paint takes far too long to dry, rendering the pens useless for groups like Guides and Scouts, but probably fine for places where you can leave the projects to dry overnight etc…

I made Boris the blue and yellow spider back when I was a young leader at my Guide Troop. I was given lots of fuzzy pom-pom type balls in various colours and sizes, several sheets of coloured felt, some pre-cut felt shapes, scissors, and lots and lots of sticky glue – PVA or white craft glue. Then they left me to it with about ten girls.

I chose a pre-cut piece of yellow felt that I thought was a suitable shape for the legs, and then glued a 5 cm blue fluffy ball onto it as Boris’s body. I found a 5 mm beige ball which I stuck on for the nose, and then drew some eyes in pencil on some paper that I cut out and glued on. I also had to make eyes for all the guides!

I also cut out a curved piece of yellow felt for a mouth and stuck that on – this was lots of fun and very easy to do. Boris is over ten years old now, hence he looks a bit battered, especially as he came to university with me as a homework aid!

The only thing I would do differently is that I would also get lots of goggly eyes to stick on, as that would be so much easier than having to draw them and cut the tiny fiddly shapes out.

Boris is always a favourite at halloween parties too. 🙂 I feel that it would be a good craft activity to do with children for halloween, as the technique could be used to make cats, bats and pumpkins!

For all of those who know me and would shoot me if this wasn’t on here!

I make little contemporary figurines called Wiggly Pets; they have their own website but it needs a bit of work on it. I will be posting the link as soon as it is ready. They will also shortly be appearing in their own comic strip on an e-zine but more on that later (ie when I know all the fine details). I have sold a few of these little creatures and they are present now in over six countries!

They are made of polymer clay – mainly FIMO soft, which comes in many colours and textures. Next time I nurse the wiggly woos (baby wiggly pets) to maturity I will take photos of them hatching and the different developmental stages.

But until such times are upon us I feel that the wiggly pets would like you all to know about their new community blog which can be found at http://www.wigglypets.co.uk/. They have lots of adventures and wanted to share them with everybody, I’ve taken most of the photos too, which hopefully will soon be available as postcards for people to purchase.

I made this plinth out of fimo (polymer clay) for one of our nice largish glass marbles. I was aiming for a nice marbled effect, plus I wanted it to look strangely organic and mineral-like at the same time.

I chose black fimo and metallic silver fimo in about equal amounts. I mixed the two colours together, making sure I folded the colours together as well as just squidging the resulting blob. This resulted in a nice marbled texture.

I then rolled the whole lot into a fat sausage about 1.5cm in diameter, followed by squishing one end of it onto the table, making it flare out and stabilise the structure. I then pinched out a rim from the other end, using my thumb and index finger – this formed itself naturally into the sort of bowl shape I had intended. Easing the whole lot off the table and signing the bottom, I baked it in a pre-heated over for half an hour at 130 degrees C.

For this design of card you will need:

*One sheet of purple card about A4 in size

*One rectangle of pink thick tissue paper with purple feather pattern

*One pink handbag made out of tea bag paper

*One silver rectangle of card with message on it

*One large pink gem about 1 cm

*Two slightly smaller pink gems

*Two pink gems the next size down

*Three small pink gems about 4 cm in diameter

This card was very simple to make. I took a piece of purple mounting card that is just a bit bigger than A4 and folded it in four. I then selected a pink piece of thick tissue type paper with purple feather pattern and a pink tea bag handbag.

I glued these in opposite corners and then made a corner bracket type border on the pink rectangle, using four different sized coloured gems in three different pinks and lavenders. I put a complimentary gem in the opposite corner – the smallest in size.

Then I carefully placed a silver rectangle of card with ‘Just for you’ emblazoned on it in golf leaf effect, half on and half off the pink paper. I glued this on using PVA glue, but the gems were already sticky.

All of the decorations came from the pound shop so I was highly impressed with the results. 🙂

I painted this picture on black paper/card, A2 size. I painted it during my GCSE’s at age 14; basically I was given a white block of paint, water soluble, and a round paint brush, and I just started painting straight onto the paper. Apologies for the bad photograph.

I started with the pattern on the sleeve of the jumper and progressed from there. I painted over mistakes with black paint, which, if you look carefully at the picture, may become apparent, as the black paint had a slightly more matt texture than the paper and therefore looks like a more solid black.

I was going to give this to my granddad but he unfortunatly died before it was released from the school so I have donated it to the village cricket club as that seemed like the ideal home for it. The photograph is of it hanging in the club in its nice new frame.

Our village was having a paper boat race as a joint event to raise funds for the village feast and the Scout group’s chosen charity Akanyo Voko, so I’ve been having the scouts making and experimenting with lots of different types of paper boats. We experimented with two types of origami boats, including the catamaran, and each will have its own write-up later on. But the style of boats that the kids liked best were ones where you draw circles at various points.

Here are a selection of what they produced with this:

The number of circles was entirely up to the child and they had lots of fun experimenting!

Equipment needed:

Paper

Scissors (we use safety scissors)

Compass or selection of cups etc… for drawing around

Pencils

I also put 4 copies of my dragon template onto one A4 sheet and printed these off onto coloured card for them to decorate the finished boats with.

The simplest type of boat you can make with this concept is one that has two circles of the same size joined by lines, so it sort of makes a 2D sausage shape. Then you cut around the shape, and to make it into a boat you draw a line to the centre of each circle from the ends. You then cut down this line and slide the bits of paper either side of the slit over each other, and fix them in place either with sellotape or as we found best – a paper clip – that way we could alter the shape slightly if we weren’t happy.

The length of the boat was up to the child, as was the size of the circles, you can also use one large and one small circle to get some interesting effects.

You can also do three circles in a triangle; the two circles at the ‘fat’ end of the triangle can be far apart or closely overlapping.

Four circles we found made a flatter, more stable craft, though you have to cut the circles at an angle of 45 degrees from where the corner would be if it was a square or rectangle. The size of the circles determined the depth of boat.

One of the boys was very innovative and overlapped the slight circles at the front of his boat so much that it ended up with a ‘cone’ for a nose! This actually did float very well when we tested them.

Another pattern was one that had overlapped circles all the way round, in a sort of rectangle. I wasn’t sure this one was going to work but it did! However they sort of curled over to give the boat a protective rim, and other versions of it that he made just had a nice scalloped edge effect if he just left the circles uncut.

One of them made a lovely little boat by drawing the circles overlapping in an eight-petalled flower – this made a round boat that was very sturdy in the water and we felt it was only right should be decorated as a dragon!

The kids decorated the boats in various ways, using colouring pencils and pens, the dragon templates, and gems and glitter.

This is one of my geo-vases that were inspired by my undergraduate petrology classes (looking at rock forming minerals under a microscope).

I made this vase by covering a hi-ball glass in fimo (polymer clay) and then baking it so the fimo went hard.

I created the swirly texture by squidging my selected colours of fimo to make them soft. The colours I used were:

*Red *Orange *Glittery gold/yellow *Green *Blue *White

I then rolled each colour into a sausage, except for the white, which I rolled into a number of sausages as it was to be mixed with all the other colours!

I then took the blue sausage and mixed it with a white sausage, the half and half sausage was then folded in half and in half again, and rolled back into a thin sausage. I then sliced the sausage up into mm thick discs. I did the same for the other colours, mixing each with white to give some sort of continuity to the vase.

I then started at the top of the glass and squidged two layers of the blue and white discs around the glass. I made sure that the fimo was squidged over the rim. I then did two layers of green and white, followed by two layers of gold and white. Then the orange and white – again orange and white. With the red and white, however, I just covered the rest of the glass in it, as it was mostly the base of the glass.

I made sure the fimo on the base was slightly thicker than the rest of the vase as this is where I sign them by slashing my signature into the fimo with a sculpting tool. I then rolled another glass around the vase to smooth the fimo as there are always lots of fingerprints present in the surface.

I then scraped around the rim of the vase to remove the excess fimo whilst leaving the rim covered neatly.

I then baked it in the oven for half an hour (30 minutes) at 130 degrees C.

I made this when I was about fourteen at Guides.

We were given stockings or the legs chopped off old laddered tights and we put a handful of grass seed into where the toes would go. Then we poured in sawdust on top of the seeds.

When we thought we had enough to make a decent head we pulled out a piece of the stocking, making sure it contained some sawdust, and pinched it so it became a little bud, we then twisted it so that the ‘neck’ of stocking material was closed, and tied it with cotton so it would keep its shape – this was the nose!

We then made sure there was enough sawdust in the head and that the nose would end up in the right sort of position. We tied a knot in the leg of the stocking, trying to make sure there was no excess space or the head would be all floppy!

We then sat them in mugs with the knot at the bottom and drew faces on them with felt tip pens!

The idea is that you stand them in water, which soaks up through the sawdust, and the grass grows into hair. I felt that the felt pen would run if I did this so never got around to growing the hair – but I will probably give that a go when my daughter’s a bit older.

This was a fun project and I am thinking it would be a nice one to try with my Scouts in the winter.