Salaric

The making of Visual Poetry (VisPo) or Concrete Poetry as it is also know is a contentious subject but it is a fun activity and I like making cards out of it to send to people.

Here is a picture of my friend cutting up magizines in a coffee shop to stick onto card and things to construct his poem. I took along, card, card blanks, pritt stick, foam letters, letter stickers, magazines and scissors.

This also works well as a childrens’ workshop. You can cut out images and words or just letters to make up the words etc… It has endless scope.

My little girl got this Bindeez kit for christmas, they are similar to hama beads except that they are little coloured balls that sit in depressions on the formers instead of beads sitting on pegs and they dissolve in water so no hot iron is needed. This made them much more accessable to younger children like my daughter as she could build the picture up (using the little gun/pencil thing so dexterity was low priority – meaning little toddles could do it with out sending the beads everywhere!). She then used the water spray to spray them and we waited for them to set!

She went on to make a range of things with them, including a coaster for Daddy to put his drinks on at his desk!

After Christmas and birthdays and the like my husbands family expect Thankyou Cards – this was a new one on me as in my family you just say thanks to each other. None the less I struck on a good way of making thankyou notes and occupying a small child at the same time.

First off I got some sugar paper/mounting card and some poster paints and just got Jean to paint on one side of the card – I went for red and green card as these where Christmas thankyous. This worked best as a hand squishing and swerling paint excersise so was extrememly messy.

Once dry I cut out the thankyous we’d written on plain white paper – they could have been printed but I like hand writing notes. I then cut them out and using little loops of cellotape stuck them to the card on the none decorated side. I then used a paper gliotine to cut out the card as a boarder to the letters. This was suprisingly effective – especially as I made sure they would all fit into the various sizes of envalopes we have!

I think this would have worked better with double sided tape and perhapse the more uniform sizing of printing the letters.

This snowman bag was made by my little girl when she was I think one and it was done at her nursery – its one long bit of thickish paper, with a very fiberous feel too it in pink. They then with Jean’s help stenciled a snow man in white – Jean obviously added a purple streak!

Then the sheet was folded in half and the sides taped to make a bag. Metalic pink parcel ribbon was then stapled on for handles – this contianed all the presants she had made Mummy and Daddy.

It’s a lovely simple idea and perfect for younger children!

My little girl made this hanging flower at her preschool for Father’s Day – it is very simple and quiet effective.

It is a yellow card disc 12 cm or 4 3/4 inches across (diameter) on one side – the back there is a smaller circle with the message I Love my Daddy becuase he takes me to the park. The other side has tissue paper discs stuck on like petals in blue, purple and yellow. They are 7 1/2 cm across or 3 inches, with a blue card disc or circle in the middle saying Number One Daddy. There is a whole punch whole at the top through which a fluffy white pipe cleaner has been pushed through and twisted to itself to make a hanging loop!

She also made him this card – it is simply a piece of orange card folded into a greeting card with a picture Jean has drawn cut out and stuck on. The picture is Daddy in Green Felt Tip 😉

We also made him a Rocket cake which will appear on Salaric Cooking shortly! And in its defence all I can say is that icing isn’t like painting and polymer clay!

Last year my little girl came home with this car card for her Daddy on Fathers Day. It is literially the shape of a car cut out of folded red card with the roof acting as a ‘hinge’ so the card opens. She then painted it (with red paint!) and the nursery school drew on the windows and wheels. Very easy and effective – Jean enjoyed making it and it is still up in pride of place this year!

For our Cub pack we made up a large Shark Infested Puzzle Solving Game but of corse that means we needed some sharks so we set about making some!

Need:

corrigated cardboard – an old cardboard box will do nicely!

Sturdy scissors or a stanly knife

Tape

Black Sack, paint or paper – if using paper you will need glue as well

Cut out the fin shape – this is two curves making up a sort of curvy tapering triangle shape – think rose thorn. Then bend the bottom inch or around 2.5 cm of the fins base up to create a ridge for sticking it too the base. If you are having trouble folding the cardboard then use a metal ruler and a knife to score but not cut all the way through, this will make the cardboard easier to fold.

Cut a rectangle to fit the fin – this will be the base and as such you can scale the shark fins to what ever size you want though bigger fins will need thicker card and smaller fins thiner card.

Tape the fin to the base.

Cut a black bin liner up into panels you can wrap around and tap to the fin.

We used clear cellotape for this and thick green packing tape for the structure of the fin.

And you have a shark fin ready to play! If you paint and vanish it or use a glue to attack the bag then the fin becomes waterproof too! (well to a certain level!)

Here it is at the village hall awaiting the fin fun!

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!

I bought this bunny soft toy in the Pound Shop in Cheltenham – it came with some pens and was white with brown lines on it to mark where you should colour.

This was a nice easy project to do with my little girl – we did it together making sure we covered as much of the rabbit as possible! She chose the colour scheme.

The pens really did appear just to be felt tips and obviously you need to be careful of colour bleed – ie the ink keeps spreading out after you finish colouring an area – the resulting rabbit has a slightly fuzzy look around the edges becuase of this. The colours are also not water fast and it runs when wet – but it was a good project for a three year old 🙂

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.