Salaric

    

January 26, 2014

Purple Ruffle Scarf

Filed under: Knitting and Crochet — sarah @ 9:48 am

A boa of ruffled purple

For Christmas I was given purple ribbon wool which opened up into a kind of edged netting. The scarf took three balls of the stuff! Using a crotchet hook I made a chain or dutch lace. When I was coming to the end of one ball I simply over lapped it with the beginning of the next.

elegant ruffled scarf

Tying off the end I then went back to the beginning and hooking through the loops my chain stitch had provided and did a second lot of chain stitch making it a bigger puffier ruffle!

Jean running off with mummy's newly made scarf

I made this one very long as a kind of bower type thing or you can fold it in half to make an elegant ruffly scarf. Now my only issue is stopping my 8 yr old from running off with it!

January 19, 2014

Geeky Tissue Box

Filed under: Paper Craft,Papier Mache,Upcycling — sarah @ 10:03 am

Circuit board tissue box

For this tissue box I used PVA glue watered down – 5 parts water for one of the glue, graphs and circuit diagrams cut out of an old technical manual (pages have to be thin and not glossed for this to work well), and a tissue box that I picked up in a cheap shop in Cheltenham. It would be relatively easy to make the box yourself if you have a jigsaw etc…

supplies to make the geek tissue box

I cut out the pictures I wanted to use – large graphs for the main background, circuit diagrams and pictures of transformers for the images. I used a paint brush to paint the watered down PVA glue onto the box, then I painted a picture at a time with it and laid the ‘painted’ side down on the box. Using the paint brush and my fingers I smoothed any wrinkles in the paper out.

To make it extra neat and prevent flacking edges, I wrapped the paper up underneath the bottom edge of the box and made sure it was smoothed off on the in side, I tried to avoid edges of pictures occuring at corners and edges.

corners

For the hole where the tissues will come out I cut little slits into the pictures along one edge before pasting them on. For the more curved bits I the lines into the picture radiating for the some point on the edge of the picture. Both these ways of cutting the edge of the picture gave me flaps I could glue into place though the hole in the inside of the box.

For the corners I cut the pictures in half up until the middle of the image so I ended up with a piece of paper with two ‘legs’. I then pasted it onto the box with the legs sticking up from the sides I folded them over one at a time so that one leg sat over the other.

I then left it to dry raised up on some plastic cups. For a longer life I am going to attempt to vanish it.

Geekery tissue box craft