Salaric

For World Book Day my little girls pre-school was having a Come as a Story Book Character Day so I had to think up a costum. We decided on Alladin and I set to work making an Alladdins lamp complete with genie.

For the lamp I used:

• News paper preferable two colours so you can keep track of layers

• PVA white craft glue

• Scrape card – the sort junk mail comes on!

• Cellotape

• Scissors

• Tissues or loo/toliet roll

• Hot melt glue gun

• Pencil

• Paint brush

• Pots to put water, paint, glue in – old yogurt pots or dip containers are good for this

• One small balloon

• One cup or sturdy pot

First off all I blew up a small balloon to the size I wanted the body of the lamp to be. I then placed this in a cup to stop it rolling around. I laid some of the newspaper on the table as a working surface and then tore up some to make a pile of pink paper and a pile of white paper. Becuase the size of the lamp was quiet small I tried to make sure that my pieces of newspaper where not bigger than 2 cm. This is to give a smoother finish over the curve of the balloon.

I made a mix of PVA white craft glue – mine is quiet thick so I mike it with about five times the amount of water as I have glue. It takes a bit of stirring to get it a good consistancy.

I then dipped the news paper pieces in the glue water mix, smoothed off any excess liquid and placed it on the balloon. Making sure that the tied off end of the balloon was in the cup I covered the large end of the balloon and worked my way down until I had covered about 2/3rds of the balloon. This would give me a bowl shape without the balloon being there – where the sides of the bowl would curve in again.

I made sure the area I wanted was completely covered and waited for an hour before applying the next layer in a different colour of news paper. I waited an hour as otherwise the already existing layer is so wet it slips about underneith the new layer your trying to lay down. You can also only do a maximium of five layers a day otherwise it doesn'[t dry properlly. Once there are a few layers on already you can do upto three layers before leaving it the hour to dry though this did still cuase a kind of crenulation/wavey effect on the papier machie bowl around the balloon.

I did fifteen layers which took three days. I was running tight on time so I popped the balloon on the fourth day but this really wasnt enough time for it all to have dried properlly. This ment that it slighly stuck to the balloon when I popped it – peeling off about three layers in some places inside – this was soon remedied by smoothing the paper back down with a PVA’d finger.

I was then left with I nice bowl shape – this would be the body of the lantern.

Once the inside was completely dried as well I cut a 1 cm strip off of some card in our scrap paper pile and cellotaped it into a ring that was a good size to be the rim at the bottom of the lamp.

I then cellotaped the rim onto the bottom of the bowl/body of the lamp.

I then turned it over so it was standing on the rim and cut a slightly wider strip for the handle, and cut the remaining card into a rectangle to roll into a tall incomplete conical shape for the spout. I wrapped cellotape arround the tube of card so that it stayed in the shape I wanted.

I then cellotaped the spout to one end of the lamp.

I then made two folds either end of the wide strip of card and cellotaped it on the other end as the handle. I struggeled to try and make look not like a teapot :/

I then covered the rim, spout and handle with more papeir machie – this included screwing up some strips into ‘balls’ to act as padding to build up the shape – especially on the top of the spout where it meets the body of the lamp.

Now it was time to make the lid.

My dad drew around on of my cups for a circle which he sliced to the center off then pulled on side of the slite over the other and taped it to make a shallow cone. He also cut a strip of card which he then cut little triangles out off along its whole length giving it a cerated edge.

He then folded the strip round into a loop and folded the triangles in so that they could act as brackets to glue them onto the disc. This will make the inner rim of the lid that fits into the top of the lantern so he had to do some measuring.

I then layered on the paper strips on the lid layering out from the centre. I also build it up on the inside in the way I had the rim on the bottom of the lamp. This ment that on both the top and the bottom of the lamp’s lid I had over hung the edge with paper. I also had to wait for one side to dry before I did the other. I found the shiny card made it a bit difficult to make papier mache stick in the first place. I put five layers on each side of the lid.

Once it was thourally dry I trimmed off all the over hanging paper.

I then checked that it did actually fit the lamp.

I wanted a nice worn matallic texture to the lamp, even though my daughter had decreed it needed to be pink! So I decided to cover it in tissue paper to get a crinckeled texture. I did this by laying the tissue on in one two or three sheets, dry and then adding the watered down PVA with a thick paint brush. Dad had also made a ball of papier mache about 1.5 cm tall which I covered – this would be the bobble/handle for the lid.

Once it was all dry – I used a hot melt glue gun to attatch the bobble.

I then had a white textured lamp ready for painting.

Jean then painted her lamp and the lid pink with a little help.

Once dry we applied gold poster paint with a tissue so that it only went on the raised wrinkels of the lamp.

We then PVA’d it with neat PVA glue as a sort of sealing coat.

The PVA dulled the metallic luster of the gold which was a same but it still had a sort of metalleness about even if it was pink! I also made her a genie to in!

This week I went to Stroud and discovered there were two arty exhibitions on – one of them was in the church by the car park and the other was in JRool Cafe 12 Union Street, Stroud, GL5 2HE.

The one in the church had lots of Christart in it which appears to be contempary religous paintings and the like – some of them were very good.

One of the artists paintings seemed to be more – rural type subject matter which I’m sure I’ve seem at other things around here (probably in Painswick). The artists name was Christine Gaunt and she was running the exhibit when I went in.

The second exhibit was IMPRESS ’09 and is work by Caroline Tate and Annie Hobson. This is part of the Print Making Festival 2009. This was really interesting as they have write ups on the different printing techniques and they run courses. I wish I had enough money to go one some of these as they look fun 🙂

There were lots of prints hanging on the walls including a giant circle of butterflies!

The exhibit is open until the 28th of March 2009.

I went to Tech Adventure at the Trinity Arts Centre last weekend. This event brings together computer programmers, inventors, roboticists and people who generally like to make things.

Obviously I didn’t understand a lot of the technical detail of the projects that people bought along to display but I could see potential there for the arts and craft community. For a start there was a thing called a Reprap which is a 3D printer. This has huge potential and is designed so that you can basically build your own and then then get it to build ones for your friends. It built the shapes up out of plastic thread that was being fed into it. The shapes it can do are currently limited but even they are quite impressive and would have use in craft projects. Then I found out that it’s the same plastic that milk bottles are made out of so it could have huge implications for home recycling.

The man who had brought it was discussing various things such as how to build up shapes with overhangs on them and mentioned the words ‘sugar paste’. Apparently they have a nozzle that does sugar paste to build up support structures to get more intracate shapes and then they wash the sugar paste off. I then got very excited and asked if you could build things like the glass they had there out of the sugar paste – completely – he said yes!

Here are some of the things it made:

This would be fantastic for cake decorating I feel. He said the only issue with that would be that after an hour the sugar paste turns to syrup and the nozzles stop working which is something I think could definitly be worked around, though the shape you are making is perfectly fine!

A little more probing on our part found that though they had not done high melting point things like glass they thought it would be useful for ceramics which is cool 🙂 Also one of the things that really bugs me about the lost wax process in metal casting is that you spend ages making the wax object and you can only get one casting out of it. This machine alters that as you could have the object saved as a computer file and it would build as many as you wanted out of the wax!

There were so many other things there too and the crossover of people who do techy stuff and those who make/draw is phonomenally high. This I believe is because to make craft objects you need to be a sort of engineer even if you don’t realise it and to draw good pictures you need something similar. To come up with your own projects you need to be creative and in order for the technical people to do what they do they have to be creative – creativity is a layer above science and art or technology and craft, or poetry and programming.

The dichotomy between the sciences and arts does not really exist, it is an artifact of our society – good artists tend to be grounded in some sort of science, tech, or maths whether they realise it or not!

I went to a fantastic talk on this at last year’s Cheltenham Literature Festival.

I even read out some of my poetry at this and one more Wiggly Pet also got a good home. It went to the first person to tell me how many programming languages I had in the poem! I actually gave two away though as there was a little boy in a tigger suit who wanted one so desperately.

Another thing that came out of this is that there is a Maker Faire this month – 14-15 March at the Newcastle Science Fair. I can’t go but it looks interesting.

Also it is because of this that I am now considering making special funky cases for computers though as I am obsessed with paper mâché at the moment, I am having to resist the urge to do every project in that medium!

I tend to make, paint and sew seascapes for me, my husband and my little girl. The history of this is to do with my undergraduate degree, a paleobiology module and me explaining colonial organisms to my husband. The particular organism I was taken with is called Bryozoa but I got it a bit mixed up with corals. Anyway my husband and I decided we were a ‘colony’ and I started producing pictures of the colony within an ocean bottom environment.

This is the latest and it was my Valentine’s card to him this year.

I got the card blank from a set of eight card blanks and card toppers from the Pound Shop and the rest, ie the picture, is all cut out of magizines and catalogues. They are stuck on using glue sticks.

I cut the shapes out including:

• Seaweed

• A rock

• Colonial organism like a coral coming out of its tube

• Fish

• Heart

I tend to sit down and chop up a page at a time of magazines into the shapes the colours and layout that the page suggests to me. So for the shapes I eventually chose for this card I just selected from things I’d already cut out.

I wanted a very clean and stylised look.

I started gluing the shapes on, first off the seaweed and the fish hidden in them. I made sure that some of the seaweed overlapped the fish and some did not. This involved peeling up bits that had already been stuck and was essential for the balance of the picture. The rock in the middle was then stuck on.

I then placed the coral onto the rock, making sure that the bottom of the coral overlapped the rock. I then placed on the fish in the background and the blue heart – the heart was purely to show it was a card for Valentine’s day.

These lovely Japanese stickers and two panels were given to my little girl by a friend. I just love the cartoony shapes and balloon writing style of the characters. There were lots of people and then pink helicopters and the like which my little girl simply adored.

She gave me the purple panel as it’s my favourite colour and she had the pink. These in themselves were little works of art as far as I’m concerned with blossom, a river and a cityscape.

We stuck on numerous stickers and then I stuck them to the fridge.

Here is the url as promised:

http://lovemomiji.com/

Warning: it’s got little animations of the stickers and I sort of got hooked and was on the site for ages 🙂

My friend Carina has won the runners up prize for the UCL grad schools ‘Research Images as Art/Art Images as Research’ competition. The pictures were all on display in UCL and were pleasant to walk around – some of them were stunning but a lot I felt were a bit contrived.

Carina had four lovely images made into one of the black lava structures she had observed on one of her field trips – she does volcanic hazards. I felt really happy as I had been one of the people she consulted as to what images to submit!

The website unfortunately still only has 2007’s winners on it but they are worth a look!

I made this cheeky devil card for my husband as we first started going out on Halloween and sort of celebrate it as a sort of anniversary.

I used:

• One shiny black card blank

• One small red pom pom

• Two medium goggly eyes

• Red crepe paper

• Red foam sheet

• One red metallic pipe cleaner

• White PVA craft glue

• A pair of scissors

I started off by cutting out the devil’s body from the red crepe paper; I did this by folding the crepe paper in half and then cutting a sort of ‘tick’ out of it, making sure that the bottom of the ‘tick’ was flat along the fold so the two halves were still connected when I unfolded the paper.

I then glued this to the black card.

I then cut out a circle in the red foam sheet. I then cut out part of the circle to leave a crescent shape in the red foam. These were the devil’s horns. I glued them onto the black card above the body. I the stuck the goggly eyes onto the red pom pom and glued it into place as the devil’s head.

I then cut about a third off of the thin red pipe cleaner. This third I then bent so that it had a small triangle at one end, and a gentle curve along its length and glued that onto the card as the devil’s tail.

The red glittery pipe cleaner was then cut so that I had a long straight bit for the handle of the trident and a shorter piece I could bend into a curve to make the outer two prongs of the fork. I then glued these onto the card.

I went to the Royal Astronomical Society where there was a fantastic glass window which I fell in love with. I have never seen glass in a window done like this – it had the glass textured into a swirl that was coloured subtly with pastel pinks and greens with geometic shapes frosted in. Unfortunately I didn’t get to have a proper look at it as I was enroute to a talk.

I have been entranced by stained glass windows ever since I was a small child and now I have seen a scientific and beautiful stained glass window it has started me thinking. One of the things I want to do when I have the time and the money is to learn how to do stained glass and maybe even glass blowing, though I am a bit scared of that as it can be dangerous and would have to wait until we’ve built the appropriate equipment anyway!

Projects using glass windows that I have so far envisioned:

I would like to put a stained glass window in the bathroom showing a boat and a lighthouse. This I think will be done with leading and no texture to the glass.

I would like to have a wine and cheese board including grapes in the centre of the kitchen window where I plan to have net curtains that swoop either side of the design. I see the grapes as being made of bevelled glass, adding texture and therefore a more three dimensional quality to the picture.

I would like the front door to show scenes of the stream including hills and trees and fields, butterflies, dragonflies and a myriad of other insectile life plus mushrooms and spider webs. For this I think I would really need to find out how to make the unbounded colours and how to texture the glass so as not to completely cut off the light coming in though the door. The door is basically made up of glass panels but I am aware that it might be nicer to completely change the door and have the picture spread across two different mediums, namely wood and glass. I think carving and staining the wood would lend a wonderful depth to the picture but as these are two sets of skills I have yet to acquire it will take a while before this one can be done.

For the living room window I would like to produce a picture of the old water mill next door to us complete with waterfall and flowered rock garden; I even managed to photograph a rainbow over it once which I feel would add a certain enchantment though I am aware that many people may feel this is completely over the top. I think that the waterfall would look very nice in textured glass of some kind. I would want to get in as many of the features without over crowding it as I could. My husband’s grandfather put a lot of the features in like using the old mill wheels as tables and stuff like that so I really want to capture the essance of the place.

The window at the back of the house that overlooks the the stream I feel should be kept mainly clear as a) I do not want to cut the light coming into the room down too much and b) it is the window that is great for watching the birds through on a bird table we have there. But I think that a border round the edges would look nice. A bat in one corner with the moon and clouds fading down to mushrooms and leaf litter with a hedghog snuffling about one side and a leafy tree with birds and ivy and insects, a mouse snuffling about the other. Again I think this is going to have to mostly be unbounded by leading with textured glass being used.

In my daughter’s bedroom I would like to put a storybook scene on the window but with children I don’t think doing anything permanent is a good idea so I am wondering whether I can do the picture on some sort of sheet that I can attache and detach when she wants a change but in a way that we get to keep the pictures. This way the pictures could grow up with her and reflect her interests etc…

The window that faces out to the front of the house in our bedroom I would like to simply paint with barge paint style flowers and designs in a nice border.

On the other window I would like to fade from deep blue through magenta purple, through pink and melon yellow with a silhouette of sand dunes a few palms and a camel trail, with a fine sliver of a crescent moon high in the sky of the picture and a few glinting stars, possibly actually metallic. I have always loved this style of picture and for some reason since I was about 13 have wanted it in my bedroom!

The large double doors at the end of the office I feel should show the fundamentals of maths and computing.

The middle window would show mechanics in motion.

My window would depict a paleo-landscape with trilobites and ammonites.

I’m not sure if any of this is possible and will probably never get the chance to even try but it’s nice designing the project and maybe I’ll get round to at least doing the concept sketches. 🙂

I went to the Victoria and Albert Museum in London or the V&A as it is known to the locals. I didn’t have a purpose as such, I just thought that as I needed to kill a couple of hours and was in South Kensington it might be nice to wander around in there.

I decided to look at the Raphael Cartoons 1515-1516, The Arts of St Peter and St Paul lent by her Majesty the Queen.

On first entering the room I thought I was in for a great treat as I looked at the large pictures dominating the walls of quite a big gallery but there was dim lighting and the pictures themselves were very dark – I assume the dim lights were to protect them. The lighting there was also caused great glare and reflections from the protective screens they had in front of them. It was also stiflingly hot in there which I would have thought would be bad for the pictures.

The one I really wanted to look at but couldn’t really see any of at all was a tapestry of The Miraculous Draught of Fishes, this is apparently woven in wool and silk with metal thread and was made as a copy of the painting.  As far as I could tell from the write ups Raffaello Sanzio 1483-1520 had made the copies in tapestry form at the request of Pope Leo X, however from further reading I have discovered that Raffaello is Raphael and is responsible for the paintings and they were painted with the idea of turning them into tapistries to rival Michelangelo’s ceiling in the Sistine Chapel.

I would have loved to have got a good look at them and it seems a shame that they are hanging there and are still not really accessible to the public when they should be. The thing that always bugs me about art galleries and museums that I have visited is they never have the postcards for the things I want postcards of.

I found that there is a shop below the gallery in the Painswick Centre which sells the most amazing stuff (can you tell I’m not local) made by the Gloucestershire Guild of Craftsmen. There really were the most fantastic knitted foods, and glass bowls that I would have loved to be able to afford – I was tempted by the smallest one which was about £17 I think. In the end I bought a strawberry. I then got into a conversation with the young man behind the counter who informed me that the main exhibits were round the back and that it was the Guild’s 75th anniversary!

I went off to look at the Guild’s stuff. There was an entrance fee – I can’t remember what it was exactly but I think it was along the lines of £3. The stuff was amazing, from wooden furniture that really were works of art to knitted sculptures, to more amazing glass work. I picked up a lot of postcards, some of which it turned out were business cards and so were free!

They are there every summer if I remember correctly. They are also sensible and have a website!