Salaric

I made this pressed flower card for my friend who was having lots of stomach problems. The previous spring I had collected a few petals and leaves from various plants in our garden and pressed them in the book that had inspired the whole project – a pressed flower book I had picked up in a Red Cross book shop. I pressed the flowers by putting them between sheets of tissue paper and kitchen towel, as I like the texture this gives the finished petals. I don’t think this would work for whole flowers rather than individual petals.

Blotting paper is the best thing to use for pressing flowers, but this was one of the first projects I had tried since being a child. I used copydex glue, a fineliner and a card blank with an oval cut-out in it. I got the card blanks from The Works in Cheltenham.

I looked at the petals I had and thought that some of them would make a nice picture of a woman on a hill with long flowing hair. I was thinking wild innocence dancing on the stormy hillside in a sodden pink dress.

I started off by folding out the card so that I could get to the panel behind the oval cut-out. I stuck on the hill, which had been a large white petal, then I stuck on the hair, which had been the petal of an orange-coloured poppy.

I then stuck on the arms and upper torso of the woman – this had been a small white heart-shaped rose petal. I then stuck a pink foxglove petal over the bottom half/pointy bit that’s joined to the flower. This made the formal dress of the dancing woman and was exactly the right shade of pink.

I then stuck on a small ’rounded corners’ triangle for the woman’s face, this had been a small burnt orange fading to red colour before pressing, and now is a lovely deep red.

Once the glue was dry I folded the card back up so that the picture of the woman was trapped in the oval frame and around it at the top and bottom I wrote, “MAY THE LADY DANCE YOU BETTER…” with the fineliner.

I made this card for a friend’s birthday; as her birthday is in spring and our garden was abundant with ox-eye daisies, ordinary daisies and various flowers that I don’t know the name of (but might well have been purple and lavender daisies), I wanted to make a spring flower card.

I used a sheet of blue card with pink blurry lines running around it; I think they look like little clouds scudding across the card. I then selected a blue, lavender and white iridescent glitter pen and a 3D yellow pen.

I started off by folding the sheet of card into four to make an appropriate greeting card; I then squeezed out eight little yellow dots in roughly three columns down the card. These were to be the centres of the flowers.

I then took the glitter pen and carefully added petals to one of the yellow dots. It then became apparent that I could not fit petals on all of the dots so I initially did three flowers.

I then discovered that I had to be careful not to get the petals either too near each other or the dots, as the paint sort of fused together.

I then added another three flowers, making two columns. I felt that the two spare dots looked a bit odd so I added lots of other dots which I felt looked right.

My husband’s aunt made this fish glass panel at a day course run by a man called Rod Friend who now lives in Spain running residential courses that I would quite like to go on at some point as I have quite a few stained glass projects up my sleeve!

First off, Barbara drew the picture she wanted with colouring pencils and then made the picture up out of random bits of glass that were cut in assorted sizes, though mostly square or rectangular in shape.

These were all arranged and stuck down, and then some ‘black stuff’ was put over it to hold it all together.

The panel itself is quite nice and depicts fish in the trout pond behind our house, I think. This has helped me to think that it is possible to make my own windows, which I have been wanting to do for a while now. It means you get very personal designs that actually mean something to you.

This vase was partially designed from leftovers and partially based on mineral textures you find in rocks. It was made using a Sainsbury’s Basic’s glass; orange, egg yoke yellow, mint green and forest green fimo soft. I also used another glass with straight sides as a rolling pin, a chopping board, a plastic sculpting tool with an angled flat blade, and a penknife – plus our oven and baking tray.

To make the green swirls I actually used the off-cuts from around a Christmas tree cookie cutter. I was using the tree shapes primarily, and then when I saw the off-cuts I thought they would look perfect as the sort of ‘veining’ you get in mineral formations – though I must say here I was thinking more about how rocks look in thin slices under the microscope with various filters on them. I was also working with meteorites specifically at the time and so had unusual patterns lodged in my head that begged to be used artistically.

To get the texture I simply cut up the dark green fimo and then squidged it all back together to get it in a nice manageable consistency; I then did the same with the light green. I rolled the colours into two different sausages which I then put next to each other and rolled together. Then I folded the two tone sausage in half and half again. I rolled it into a smooth shape, pinching the ends where I had folded it off, in order to make beads and shells. I then cut the sausage into discs about 1.5mm thick which I arranged into a sort of wonky square. Obviously there were gaps between each of the discs but I used my fingers to try and squidge the discs a bit without distorting the colours too much. This sort of fuses the edges of the discs together.

Once this was done I took a high-sided glass and used it as a rolling pin, making sure that I moved the now sheet of patterned fimo around, otherwise it sticks to the glass rolling pin or the surface that you are working on. The rolling action helps fuse the discs into a sheet nicely – some people use a pasta machine to roll sheets of fimo but I have never tried this personally, so have no idea how well it works.

As I said earlier I then cut out Christmas trees from this and used the off-cuts for this vase. I had lots of bumpy stripes which I wrapped around a glass as a series of rings – I wanted it to be quite natural-looking so the rings were quite irregular. A bit of gentle pressure with a finger pad meant I could blend the fimo into nice continous rings rather than having an abrupt and obvious join, but you have to be careful not to blur the colours in doing this.

Once I had done this I made an orange and yellow fimo sausage which I again cut into discs, but this time I put the discs straight onto the glass and squidged them, smoothing over the bits where they touched each other and the green rings. I covered the entire glass at the rim, overlapping the edge of the glass so that the fimo disc went inside. Once it was entirely covered I took the sculpture tool and ran it around the inside of the glass to get rid of the excess fimo – this left a nice neat rim around the top with a clean interior. I then signed the bottom of the vase and using another high-sided straight glass, I rolled around the vase to help remove fingerprints. Then I placed the finished vase onto the baking tray.

I then baked it for 30 minutes at 130 degrees C.

I made this card for my friends who had just moved into their shiny new (old) house. I used a sheet of orange card, yellow card, pink card, one maroon and one gold metallic gel pen from a large pen set from WH Smiths, pritt stick and a pair of scissors.

I decided to go for highly stylised houses so cut out three vastly different sized ‘wonky’ rectangles out of the yellow card. I then cut out appropriately-sized triangles for the houses’ roofs out of the pink card.

I then arranged the houses on the orange card, which I had folded in half and then in half again to get a good card size. I actually decided to rotate the rectangles by 90 degrees as I thought it looked better – fortunately all but one roof still looked fine. I then stuck them in place.

I then used the gold metallic gel pen to draw the doors and windows on the three houses – making sure that they were scaled appropriately as I had one tiny house, one medium-sized house and one large house. I found I needed to weigh the corner of the card down whilst I did the drawing and postioning of houses on the card – the scissors worked nicely for this.

Using the maroon metallic gel pen I then added the words “NEW HOME” at two different angles above the houses to sort of represent the slope on house roofs.

In the same pen I then added “WELCOME” underneath the houses. Of course the pens produced too thin a line for what I wanted to do, so I had to carefully trace round each letter several times to get the thickness required. The colour and effect of the pens has not come out well in the photos unfortunately 🙁 .