Salaric

I was once upon a time a geologist and have mapping pens still kicking around, I also have lots of old maps of various sorts (some are the sort you frame most aren’t), and I was poodling around on Pinterest and saw some fun map projects and there some little creatures I had been meaning to draw for a while.

So I have started work on a series call The Maps of The Imagination which are going to be for sale at The True Believers Comic Festival. Pretty much there is only going to be the actual drawings rather than any books.

This is a photo – I need to get around to scanning at some point 🙂

This is also only the beginning of the map projects 🙂

I found this tutorial on Youtube – there will be a few more of these as well 🙂

As I frantically knitted purses and creepers and dolls and baby cubes over Christmas and hubby worked on his tea cosy, we had a realisation – we have been working with the same stitches that we learnt 3 odd years ago within the first few months of taking up “yarn crafts” as part of our wool wedding anniversary.

I can knit purl, garter, rib and moss and he can crotchet little tubes and that is it!

All the projects we have done are just variants on these!

It’s time to expand – I tried think of a project that would help us with this. The obvious one is to just knit squares and turn them into a blanket but I currently have two blankets on the go and to be honest it just will not be neat enough and more importantly – the different types of stitches come out different sizes so the squares would not fit together nicely and it would need a backing for the more holey structures and so on.

But then I thought about what else we have been meaning to do this year – cheese making and soap making have been on the list for over a decade!

Soap making!

Yes soap making – if we make little soaps then we need flannels or as some people call them face or wash cloths. We can knit squares, maybe add edging and use and give them away with the soaps.

Perfect 🙂

One manga style colouring in sheet of Ada Lovelace as free download this coming week 🙂

Colouring Sheet

To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 🙂 A celebration of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.

So I woke up at like 5 in the morning with the idea of painting a flamingo in water colours which is the medium I currently experimenting with.

I found a photo, sketched the flamingo and then painted, I’m finding that it is easier to paint if I don’t think about the process as such.

I have great big chunky needles I knit on and have taught countless numbers to knit with their fingers – something I called French Knitting whilst growing up, though other call peg dolly knitting that and I call peg dolly knitting, knitting Nancy as that was the name my Nan’s called it. My mother saw me with the HUGE needles and informed me I would be better off using my arms, I looked at her in disbelief but she assured me it was something they used to do when she was young.

So we scheduled a – we’ll try that next time you visit. In the mean time friends have been posting this amazing tutorial to my Facebook wall.

You can guess what has just added itself to my to-do list can’t you 🙂

Glue – we used a latex based glue like copydex
Buttons – a mix of sizes and colours namely, pink, green, yellow
Patterned cardboard – we used graze boxes as they tend to have nice grass and flower patterns on them and are just the right size to cut up for these pictures
Scissors
Piece of ribbon or cording for the handle
Gold paint pen

Cut out two rectangles of card, select which one you want for the background of the picture and which one you want for the frame. Make sure the are the same size. For the frame cut a 2 cm strip along the bottom stopping 2 cm from the edge, turn scissors 90 degrees and cut a strip 2 cm wide up the edge until 2 cm from the top, turn 90 degrees and cut along the top again stopping 2 cm from the edge, now turn scissors again and cut down the side until you get to the first cut. A smaller rectangle of card should now pop out leaving you with a frame – put this to one side for now.

Lay out the buttons you have chosen in the shape you want, check that it will fit within the frame and then glue them in place.

Cut a piece of ribbon or cord for your handle and glue it in place – ribbon works better as the frame can side flat over it. An alternative is to stick the handle on the back but you will have to wait for the picture to dry before you can do this. Glue the frame in place pinching down over where the hand is – cloths pegs can help as mini clamps if it is being problematic.

Draw or write with paint pens – I did a wrote Spring and then drew a spring as an exclamation mark.

This is my creation – the toddler spilt her milk on her one, it was a sheep and she had given it gold ears.

For Christmas I was given purple ribbon wool which opened up into a kind of edged netting. The scarf took three balls of the stuff! Using a crotchet hook I made a chain or dutch lace. When I was coming to the end of one ball I simply over lapped it with the beginning of the next.

Tying off the end I then went back to the beginning and hooking through the loops my chain stitch had provided and did a second lot of chain stitch making it a bigger puffier ruffle!

I made this one very long as a kind of bower type thing or you can fold it in half to make an elegant ruffly scarf. Now my only issue is stopping my 8 yr old from running off with it!

For this tissue box I used PVA glue watered down – 5 parts water for one of the glue, graphs and circuit diagrams cut out of an old technical manual (pages have to be thin and not glossed for this to work well), and a tissue box that I picked up in a cheap shop in Cheltenham. It would be relatively easy to make the box yourself if you have a jigsaw etc…

I cut out the pictures I wanted to use – large graphs for the main background, circuit diagrams and pictures of transformers for the images. I used a paint brush to paint the watered down PVA glue onto the box, then I painted a picture at a time with it and laid the ‘painted’ side down on the box. Using the paint brush and my fingers I smoothed any wrinkles in the paper out.

To make it extra neat and prevent flacking edges, I wrapped the paper up underneath the bottom edge of the box and made sure it was smoothed off on the in side, I tried to avoid edges of pictures occuring at corners and edges.

For the hole where the tissues will come out I cut little slits into the pictures along one edge before pasting them on. For the more curved bits I the lines into the picture radiating for the some point on the edge of the picture. Both these ways of cutting the edge of the picture gave me flaps I could glue into place though the hole in the inside of the box.

For the corners I cut the pictures in half up until the middle of the image so I ended up with a piece of paper with two ‘legs’. I then pasted it onto the box with the legs sticking up from the sides I folded them over one at a time so that one leg sat over the other.

I then left it to dry raised up on some plastic cups. For a longer life I am going to attempt to vanish it.

This bat was made by my pre schooler at nursery and it is a quick easy craft – there is a cardboard roll like those inside of loo rolls and kitchen towel which has been covered in black card, a circle of card with eyes added for the face and flappy wings cut out of the same card, string added so that it can be hung up 🙂