Salaric

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 Easter we tend to have an annul easter egg hunt and obviously baskets are needed to collect the eggs so I picked up several easter kits from the Pound Shop and in one of them was the bits to make a chicken basket.

The basket is made from a piece of stiff yellow paper which is a middle square with two chicken reliefs coming out the side and two other squares with side flaps coming out of the ends. Basically she decorated the two chicken shapes by squeezing white craft glue – PVA all over them and sprinkling sequines over the glue.

Once dry we folded it up and used cellotape to fix the flaps onto the sides of the chickens making the inner square the bottom of the basket – we decided cellotap would hold up better to the forces of having as many chocolate eggs as could possibly fit, rammed into it!

Jean was definate that it needed a handle though so I took a pink fluffy pipe cleaner and pushed each end through a chicken eye (these were wholes pre-cut into the chicken shapes and is no where near as gruesom as that sounds!) I bent the ends so they could twist around the main bit of the pipe cleaner above the eye making a handle.

To my suprise it survived the easter egg hunt!

My little girls Pre-School are having an easter bonnet parade so we needed to make Jean a hat. I found a kit in the Pound Shop in Cheltenham and so let my husband and little girl loose with it. I was going to make one from scratch but this kit was actually quiet good though the instructions didn’t match with the contence of the kit.

The kit had a circle that had had a smaller circle cut out of it – this was also in the pack. Two 1 1/2 wide strips of yellow card with tabs along both sides, assorted pom poms (which were the wronge size and colours for the instructions), goggly eyes we didn’t use and a strip of whit card with a ridge to bend at the end and two bunny teeth drawn on. There was also a blue think strip of card and PVA white craft glue, not too mention white bunny ear shapes out of card and pink card to cut the ear middles out off. I suplimented the kit with one white large pompom, a small pink pompom and three black fluffy pipe cleaners.

My husband made the hat up with her. First off they took the yellow strips and folded down the tabs – the ones on the top facing one way the ones on the bottom facing the other.

They then put glue on top of all of the bottom tabs and squidged the hats rim on, this was a bit fiddly as the strips where in two halves so , glue had to be attatched to the ends of them as well to make them stay in place as the side of the hat. Alaric had to hold it all together for awhile until the glue was tacky enough to hold. He then added glue to the top tabs – which were folded into the centre of the hat, he then placed the yellow circle on the top. It then had to be left for a bit to dry.

The blue ribbon was also in two strips which they glued around the hat. It then had to be left for an age to dry properlly.

In the mean time they cut out the pink bits of the ears which are upside down elongated tear drops. The pink card wasn’t really big enough for what in the instruction suggested so the ears look a bit odd. They glued the pink ear inners onto the white ears and left them too dry.

We also decided that glueing the small black pompoms into two slightly larger pompoms would make better eyes than the goggly eyes so they glued the ‘pupils’ onto the ‘eyeballs’ and left the whole lot to dry.

Once the glue was dry they glued the ears on the back of the hat so that they stuck up in the air and the teeth on the front so that they hung down over the edge of the rim.

They then glued on two white large pompoms for the rabbits cheeks (the kit came with one white and one yellow pompom :/) and a small pink pompom for the nose.

Alaric then cut the pipe cleaners in half coiled them into curls and twisted the ends together to make two sets of three whiskers. He glued these onto the face next to the cheeks and glued the pompom eyes on.

Me and my little girl made these easter eggs for two purposes – her ones have been writen on the back of and sent out as invites to the easter egg hunt and my ones have been stuck up around the house as decorations. They could also be used to stick on the front of cards to make festive easter cards.

First of all I drew an egg shape – this can be done by drawing two circles next to each other – one has to be smaller than the other – I then joined the two circles with two straight lines. I then cut out around the egg shape and gave it two my dad.

Dad then used it as a template, drew round it on different coloured card and cut them out for us.

I then gave them to Jean one at a time, poured some PVA white craft glue into a pot and gave it too her with a paint brush. I then gave her shapes I had punched out of card and scrap paper – mostly rabbits and ducks, a hug tub of glitter confetti and some glitter 3D paint pens.

Mainly Jean painted her eggs with glue.

Sprinkeled the glitter onto them.

Shock excess glitter off onto another sheet of paper so that it could be re-used.

And then left them to dry. She also added the glitter glues and 3D paints but squidged them all with her finger and then added more glitter from the shaker.

A few rabbits and ducks were stuck on but not many.

I personally experimented with drawing shapes with the PVA and then sprinckling them with the glitter – I did a heart, thick horizontal strips, think horizontal strips, a flower, a cross, spots that look like a paw print, a zig zag shell crack and then used the glitter pens to draw an orange glitter concentric spiral, a flower, and a blue irridescant wiggle.

This is a very simple project, Jean enjoyed it and I think the results are quiet nice.

I made this little Easter basket for my husband’s birthday; it is made of fimo and is about 7cm in diameter. The fluffy chicks came from the Pound Shop.

These are the colours I mixed for the browns to make the twigs: dark brown, yellow, orange and beige.

I then rolled a sphere of the beige to make the base of the nest with.

I then began to flatten it into a disc.

I then rolled sausages of the different brown fimos – these are the twigs!

Then I pressed them gently around the edge of the base, making sure that the first ones arched a bit in the middle, leaving ‘free space’ to allow interweaving of the twigs.

I then chose three bright fimo colours – pink, blue and yellow, for the Easter eggs to go in the nest.

I sliced up the colours and then arranged them so that each egg would get one piece of each colour in different orders and patterns.

I then rolled the three colours into a sphere. I applied slightly more pressure to one end of the sphere whilst rolling it, in order to get the egg shape.

I only did three eggs in the end, as I thought it would look better when it was less crowded and with some fluffy chicks instead!

Ta da!

I made this Easter bonnet from fimo. There was no specific reason behind this project, I just had some extra fimo and in fact was going to make it into a pot but whilst shaping it, it turned mysterously into a hat!

First off I rolled the black fimo into a ball.

I then began shaping this ball into a hat shape. I did this by initially making a depression on the top of the ball and then pinching around this depression with my thumb and forefinger whilst rotating it.

I then had a satifactory hat shape!

I decided that I wanted a nice ribbon and some flowers on the hat (I did consider Easter chicks and the like, but the hat is actually quite small, so decided that though it might be a bit more Eastery, it was also a lot more fiddly).

I rolled a thin 0.5mm diameter sausage of yellow fimo for the ribbon and I also rolled some little balls of fimo to be the middles of the flowers. I then flattened the sausage of yellow fimo and fitted it around the hat, making sure the two ends overlapped and were shaped so that they looked like ribbon blowing in a breeze.

Warning, fimo and other polymer clays are quite brittle and therefore thin structures like the ribbon will be relatively fragile. This is why I made sure the ribbon would have contact with any surface the hat rests on.

I decided that three flowers would look good and rolled 2 balls of blue fimo about 2mm diameter, and one of pink. I gently used the pad of a finger to squash these balls into little discs.

I then placed the yellow bits of fimo in the middle of these discs and gathered them up in three to four little pleats around the yellow. This makes very effective little flowers.

I then put the flowers on the hat by gently pressing them onto the ribbon.

However, it looked over the top so I took two of the flowers off and the result was a lot more eye-pleasing in my opinion!