Salaric

I made this card for mine and my husbands 5th wedding anniversary. I used a card blank from The Works and selected three hearts from a collection of paper shapes cut in different papers. I went for the sort of black, blue, purple feel as they are his favourite colours. I attached these with sticky pads. I also had some wedding stickers which come out as silver out lines which I used one the out side and inside. These stickers are good as you can get writing and things – though peeling them off of the sheet without stretching them can be an issue – they also don’t always say everything you want so I had to write in some of it using a black fine liner pen.

I then composed a poem which I carefully wrote out on the inside of the poem – about our last five years together. I really wish I knew how to do calligraphy but I don’t so it was again just written with my fine liner.

This framed picture of her foot print was my little girls valentines presant to me and my husband. It is framed with cardboard and has a parcel ribbon (the stuff made out of a sort of papiery plastic) as a loop on the back so you can hang it up 🙂

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.

Me and my daughter made these heart decorations for Valentine’s day. I made a template by drawing round a heart shaped token Jean had made at pre-school but for our Valentine’s meal my husband made a second template by simply folding a piece of paper in half and cutting a curve into it. When unfolded it was a symmetrical heart whereas my template was asymmetrical.

My dad then draw about 16 hearts and cut them out of red mounting card. This is slightly bigger than A4 and he found with careful placement he could get four hearts out of each sheet.

I then set things up so that we had PVA white craft glue, glitter confetti, sweet wrappers from the christmas Quality Street Chocolates, glitter pens, foam heart stickers from a Pound Shop Foam Rose making kit and tissue paper in various colours.

Jean painted the hearts with glue and then sprinkled glitter onto them. To save glitter we did this on a sheet of paper and then when we did the next heart that was on a different sheet of paper so that we could sprinkle the previously caught glitter onto it. We also shook each glittered heart to make sure that only well attached glitter remained.

Jean also used glitter pens and her fingers to decorate some of the hearts. She glued sweet wrappers on others and pieces of screwed up pink tissue paper. On one heart she only stuck on the foam hearts which looked quite nice.

I myself made a heart that was completely covered in little balls of screwed up pink tissue paper. This was quiet effective and gave the heart a sort of 3D furry texture.

I then put sticky pads on the back of each heart and placed them around our bookshelves.

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.

For these heart beads I mixed up the appropriate colours to create the textures out of fimo soft (polymer clay). I then rolled each texture into sausages of fimo and cut them into millimetre-thick discs. Following this, I aligned these into a wonky square and used my finger to squidge the discs together. I then took a straight high-sided glass and used it as a rolling pin.

I had to keep moving the sheet of fimo I was rolling, otherwise it sticks to the glass or the worktop. Once the sheet was uniformly thin (as much as you can get a uniform thickness by hand – some people use pasta machines for this but I have not tried this myself yet) I used medium-sized aspec cutters that I got from Almond Sugar Crafts.

I then used a paper clip I had bent out of shape to poke a hole just below the point where the heart plunges at the top. Following that, I carefully placed the heart beads onto a baking tray and baked them for 30 minutes at 130 degrees C in our kitchen oven. These look good on earrings and on ribbons around presents. They are a great way to use up spare bits of fimo and for adorning things for weddings and Valentine’s day. If you don’t put a hole in them they can be used as generic craft bits or as re-usable table confetti for romantic meals. The polymer clay also survives second bakings so the hearts can be added to other projects.

This was my first card I made for my husband (then boyfriend) for our first Valentine’s as I had no money for a card but had a lot of card about for making posters. I was surprised to find he still had it as it has been through two house moves and a flood!

I used one sheet of black card, pale lavender card and shocking pink card; I also used pritt stick and a pair of scissors.

I folded the black card in four and then decided I was going to use the resulting blank card in ‘portrait’ orientation rather than ‘landscape’. I then cut the heart out of the lavender card. I did, however, draw it out first before doing this, hence this heart is a bit more symmetrical than a lot of my hearts! I then decided that it would look far too girly to put the heart straight onto the card (I was worried about how I could make the card a Valentine’s card without it being very frilly and feminine). I then glued the heart on the shocking pink card and freehand cut out an explosive abstract border made up of irregular zigzags.

I then stuck this onto the black card and was very happy with the effect.

I made this card for my friend’s wedding but it would make a good engagment or Valentine’s card or possibly a birthday card for a girlfriend or some such.

For this card I used a sheet of pale blue card, magenta/purple card, pale pink card, eight iridescent leaf sequins, PVA white craft glue, pritt stick glue and scissors.

I started by folding the pale blue card into four, I then cut out a heart about 7cm in height from the magenta/purple card. I stuck this onto the centre of the card using the pritt stick.

I then glued on the iridescent leaves in pairs as they make nice little hearts like this. I had to use blobs of PVA to glue them onto the card. I then had to leave it to dry lying flat on the table top. I made four of these little hearts which irregularly border the large heart in the middle of the card. It was at this point I decided something needed to be in the middle of the large heart. I did initially try another iridescent heart but decided it didn’t look good.

Instead I cut out a small pink heart from the baby pink card. I then stuck this onto the card using the pritt stick.

Our one year old presented us with this, or rather the nursery staff did when we picked her up. 🙂

It’s a simple idea; they’ve cut out two sugar paper (mounting paper – thick, not sure if it counts as card or not) by folding the pieces of paper in half to get nice symmetrical hearts, one larger than the other.

Using poster paints, Jean then decorated the outer pink heart with her little fingerprints in a concentric pattern in blue, yellow and red paint.

They then stuck the smaller yellow heart in the middle with the valentine’s message neatly written on it.

Being her parents we thought it was the best thing ever and it’s gone straight up on the wall. 🙂

I make fimo vases by covering glasses in the stuff! I always check new types of glass by giving them a dummy run in the oven with no fimo, just in case they crack.

For valentine’s day I made this heart vase:

I started off by mixing up blue and pink fimo; I do this by rolling each colour into a sausage. I then put them next to each other and roll them into one sausage – now half blue and half pink in cross section. I then folded the sausage in half, rolling it in my hands so it smooths into a nice sausage. I repeated this two times to get the desired interlacing of blue and pink fimo.

I then cut slices from the sausage – I try to go for 1-2mm, but it doesn’t need to be that accurate if you do not want a regular pattern. I then place all the ‘discs’ of fimo next to each other in a very distorted square; then I use my fingertips to squidge the discs together. A hi-ball glass then serves as a rolling pin and I made sure I rolled in different directions to try to get the pressure even across the glass. Otherwise you end up with a wedge of fimo – thick at one end and thin at the other.

I also picked the sheet of fimo up and turned it over regularly, otherwise it sticks to the surface it is being rolled on. I sometimes have to use a modelling tool to help me lift up these sheets. A thin, flatish blade is best. I use the rule of thumb that if the sheet starts to distort when lifted, then rolling it any thinner will make it too thin and useless.

I then selected one of my heart cookie cutters (metal), and I chose the wider of the two for purely stylistic reasons – ie I was going to use a tumbler glass which is short and wide, so I thought the shorter wider heart would look better! The heart is approximately 8cm wide.

I cut a heart out of the blue and pink fimo sheet and then gently laid it on a glass. Making sure I was happy with the position I gently pressed it onto the glass – checking that as few as possible air bubbles remained between heart and the glass (you can see this by looking on the inside of the glass) by gently pressing it on. Be careful not to press too hard or you will distort the heart’s shape!

I then baked the glass – 130 degrees C for 30 mins (1/2 hr).

I then got some grey granite mix fimo with glittery flecks in it; I squidged it about first to make it soft enough to handle. I did the same with same yellow/gold glittery fimo. I then rolled them into sausages and cut discs off them. So I now had grey stone fimo discs and yellow fimo discs.

I pressed the grey granite discs in around the heart to give it a nice border and I then decided that it would be better to have a mix of the yellow and granite. So I scrunched all the yellow up again to make a sausage, which I mixed with a grey granite sausage. I only folded it about four times to get the effect I wanted. I cut it into discs and then put it on the vase around the pre-existing grey layer, blending it into the fimo already on the glass.

I then thought that two verticial strips either side of the heart would be nice, so I mixed up some sausages of metallic gold fimo and dark blue, folded them together and cut it up into the little discs. Making sure I had the glass so that the strips would be the exact opposite of each other on the glass, and be nicely positioned either side of the glass, I laid the discs on the glass and pushed them down so they stayed on.

It was only once I had done this and looked at the effect I decided that it looked completely wrong. I took my penknife and cut down the side where the blue and gold pattern had fused with the grey granite and yellow. I then scraped all the unwanted fimo off and later made beads and things with it.

For the remainder of the vase I used alternate layers of grey granite and the yellow granite mix. I continued the strips underneath the base of the glass and also made sure there was an overlap of fimo along the rim of the glass.

Once the vase was completely covered, I signed the bottom by slashing marks into it lightly so that they didn’t go all the way through. Then using a long, flexible angled plastic blade from my sculpture tools, I removed the excess fimo from the inside of the vase by running it along the rim.

Then just to smooth the fingerprints out, I rolled the hi-ball glass around the outside to smooth it. I then put it on a baking tray and baked it in the oven for 30 minutes at 130 degrees C.