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.

This is not one of my greatest cards ever but I thought I’d share it with you anyway – I made it for my parents 30th Wedding Anniversary. The theme was Ruby so I picked out reds or as close as I could. The card blank came from a kit I picked up in the Pound Shop.

I used:

One white, square card blank
Metallic paint pens
A small square of red card
3D white fabric heart
Purple crystal/gem stickers (I didn’t have any red)

I started off by sticking the red square in the upper right hand corner of the card, leaving a nice boarder of white.

I then stuck on the heart, in the corner of the red square.

I then added the writing in with the paint pen which unfortunatly was a bit glooper than I was expecting. I then constructed letters out of the gems for the last part.

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.