Salaric

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 🙂

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!

Last year I decided to write a poetry book with my little girl – it was halloween themed and unfortunatly did not survive the half term holiday! She gave me poem ideas and I wrote the poems and then drew pictures on folded card which we stapled together.

I drew the pictures with felt tip and went for a child like style.

You can see the poems here I am hoping to produce it as an actual book to buy etc… for news on that go to Orange Monster which is my illustration and childrens books blog. This year I did something else for her using the same book concept 🙂

Via twitter we found a great local site to us called GlosWhatsOn – they are basically a directory for stuff that is going on in our county and they have been so useful to us with Arts and Crafts (and keeping small children entertained during the holidays!).  They cover many other things too, like sports and business and if you are in the Gloucestershire area (UK) or the Cotswolds I would suggest you give it a look.

I’ve found so many new craft activities, especially childrens’, since discovering the site.  But more than that I found out about the Wychwood Festival and from there managed to get on the team for festival crafts!  This has opened a whole new area of possibilities to me – I hadn’t really considered the craft workshop angle before (other than running kids crafts at the village feast, school and of course Scout camps etc…).

I’m just really happy I’ve found them and that not only can I find out about events on there but I can get my events on there so people can see them and come along.  It is also free which is always good 🙂

Anyway I just basically wanted to say thankyou to them 🙂

p.s. They are also on twitter.

I have been working for years now on a series of children’s books that explain the elements – the Periodical Periodicals and these are some of the character designs I have been coming up with 🙂

If you want to see a bigger version of the image just click on it.

This picture does need some sorting out but I think it is a good basis to start from. I love drawing, painting/making seascapes and ones with mermaids in are exactly what my little girl wants 🙂

If you want to sea a bigger version just click on it.

Percy the Pebble is a character I made up before my little girl was even thought about 🙂

This is me brain storming for one of the stories I have written about him and his adventures – in this one he befriends a baby pebble who turns out to be seed!

Anyway if you want to see a bigger version just click on the image.

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 🙂