Salaric

Spiral snakes are very easy to make and can be hung up around the place as jungle or halloween decorations. When I was little my Welsh grandmother used to make a variant of these for Christmas (less snaky 😉 ).

Draw a circle and cut it out – pre cut circles save a lot of hassle when doing this project with small children.

Draw a spiral and then add snake makings and face to it – this can be done with pens and pencils or with stickers or ink/paint stamps or even embossing for a more subtle patterning.

Then cut around the spiral. There are many templates that you can by or find for free download on the internet but I find free hand ones work just as well 🙂

To add string either punch a whole and tie the ribbon or thread onto it or use tape. They will dance and move in thermals air currents.

A few years ago I donated a piece of my art work – yesterday it was returned to me – as it had spent the last couple of years sitting in a store room. The piece is called The Cricket Gear and was the first piece I painted for my GCSE’s. I was 14 and it took me a terms worth of lessons plus a holiday of painting on the kitchen table to do. I had it in mind as a present for my Granddad but unfortunately he died before it was released from the school (they kept several of my pieces for a while and the teacher even offered to buy them off of me!)

It is framed behind glass so I can’t get a good photo of it and it is somewhat sun faded compared to how it was. It is a picture I would be annoyed to paint now – I look at it and see mistakes but at the same time I know it surpasses stuff I have seen for sale for alot of money.

I’m not sure how I feel about the return – I am hurt as I think any artist would be to be honest but at least it is no longer sitting in a store room. And I wonder about art and society – my husband points out that it is hard for people to tell the difference between a print and a painting and that even hand painted stuff is cheap as cheap from other countries and is bulk bought in. I put a lot of work into this piece and part of me was arrogant enough to feel that I was leaving a legacy by donating it.

Fortunately this as happened at a time when there are many brilliant things happening to me in the creative world so it is not as devastating as it could have been. Also I feel like I am being childish in being upset – I can’t expect people to want my stuff after all.

Of course my mother is over the moon as she had been annoyed I’d given it away in the first place and has a place set aside for it on her wall.

I had my second and final week of running Centre Arts in Cheltenham – and boy did we pack alot of stuff in! We had crotchet, knitting, weaving in the circle, mini pompom making, a fantastic turn out for my story tree, weaving paper to make bags and baskets, creating cards, bookmarks and hanging plant pots. We learnt two different types of stitch in bead work and my cake baking improved drastically with feedback on what worked and what didn’t 🙂

These ones even got mistaken for being an art display!

Recipes and decoration how to for the cakes is here.

Here are some pics of what we got up to 🙂

And of course more cake pics.

My little girls loved it all too and proved time and again that kids really can make a noise with anything!

I spent the last week doing craft and writing with people at Centre Arts. And boy have we crammed it in!

We made cards, Olympic torches and medals, decorated volcanos, made leaf garlands, sock puppets, upcycled skirts out of old t-shirts, beaded rings, made hair bands, pom poms, created cardboard looms and wove, knitted and crotcheted, plaited/braided, worked on story ideas and comic book sketches, we made pencil pots, templates and phones.

Here are the photos 🙂

And of course we had CAKE! The who to of which is on my cooking blog.

Jeany has really enjoyed this week and has even been looking after the plant! The baby too has been tiring herself out 🙂 The kids and adults who have come along have all enjoyed themselves 🙂 I shall be running it again next week starting on Tuesday!

The next two weeks from Tuesday will see me running Centre Arts in Cheltenham. Apart from the wonderful art work which deserves a visit in it’s own right! There is information about the excellent courses they run during term time and drop in craft workshops run by me 🙂

Tuesdays I will be doing paper craft and beading

Wednesdays I will be doing Fun with Fabrics

Thursdays is Story Time for the little ones at 1 and creative writing for adults 3-5 kids are welcome as I have lots of stuff to keep them occupied

Fridays is yarn craft and the knitting doctor

Saturdays is Upcycling and Junk Art

There will also be cake and drinks 🙂

My mother made me a monster bag to go with my Muse Monster writing game and various other monstrous things 🙂 It is made from a heavy weight cotton and the face is sheet felt that has been stitched onto it.

I want to continue knitting scarfs in the different stitches in The Knitter’s Handbook.

I want to continue knitting toys for the baby and Jean – I have a How To Knit Toys Book I shall be working my way through – I want to do a knitted alphabet but need to be able to do a lot more than I can currently!

I want to learn to knit all the creatures (that are knits) in 75 Birds, Butterflies and Beautiful Beasties to Knit and Crochet.

Carry on with Berry Bear Blanket maybe even start knitting the bears.

Be able to knit my muse monsters either as stand alone toys or on items of clothing.

I would love to be knitting all our socks by the end of the year!

Harry Potter knits of various sorts.

Go through and sort all the knitting coolness I got for Christmas and my birthday.

Only one of my art and craft challenges but a large one that needed a post all of it’s own. I am going to be knitting socks!

Yep you heard me 🙂 I have a large list of books on my amazon wish list – I am cueing patterns on ravelry, I am turning all my husbands existing socks, plus our odd sock pile into sock monsters and pets and glove puppets. He wants knitted socks – he will have knitted socks – my little girl wants knitted socks too but she want lace knitting for her socks so she will have to wait! (I haven’t just spent the last few months trying not to knit wholes only to go and put wholes in on purpose!) And as for friends who want to pay me :/ Well they will have to wait until I’m good at sock knitting!

Specific socks for hubby so far are ones with QR codes (those black and white squares – he has one of his personal url and also I want to turn his Haikus into QR codes too!) and then there are of course chunky hiking type socks which will involve cables (gulp – as if the knitting with two colours for the QR ones isn’t bad enough).

I would also like to knit a bunch of ‘house elf’ socks with Hogwarts/wizard themes on them.

If I manage all that I may then look at lace knitting etc… as a) Jeany wants some and b) I want some funky knee highs.

Wish me luck!

We turned this server box into a halloween play house for our child. Any large cardboard box will do.

First off Al claimed inside the box and tapped up the bottom so that the house would have a floor – there where two reasons for doing this – 1) so that it would be a contained play space and 2) to give the play house more structure integrity. Also you can use tape to make a larger structure out of smaller pieces of card if you do not have a large enough box.

Using a stanly knife we cut the door and window – scoring one side of the door so that it was still attached so it could be opened and closed – similarly the window was cut so that it would be a shutter using a pre-existing whole a thumb whole to open and close them.

We then put tape around the edges to reinforce and to cover up the rough edges of the corrugated cardboard.

This was the base – we then made it tall enough for our child to stand up in using more card and the hot melt glue gun.

We then decorated the inside and out with them which will be covered in another post.

This play house lasted a couple of years and finally died being used in the garden as a Wendy house when I forgot to bring it in and there was a storm!

I started a series of blogs called The Monster Blogs and have been making monsters of various types ever since.

This is the first of a group of felt monsters I plan to make – this is Green Monster – he is a Revue Monster who specialises in Horror, Fantasy and Scifi. (once I sort the server out there will be a how I make the monsters but I thought you’d all like to see the individual monsters as they get made too!)