Salaric

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!

I made this border by folding a piece of slightly bigger than A4 card in four to make the greetings card.

I then took a foam holly stamp foam stamp from a set I found in the pound shop and pressed it into an ink pad of the more yellowy green I have.

Because of the red of the card I needed to make sure the stamp was well covered in ink and then only stamp on holly leaf at a time - this was to get a more solid green and not dingy looking leaf.

I created the border pattern on quiet a few cards as it then allowed me to personalise the cards with glitter pens and the like for each person who was going to receive one!

Glittery Christmas Tree Vase

For this vase I used one glass tumbler (Tesco’s value glasses survive baking. I always do a test run to check, before I spend ages decorating a glass), a pen knife, rolling board (marble or glass is best but I use an old chopping board with greaseproof paper over it), a hi-ball glass (this is instead of a glass rolling pin as polymer clays, of which fimo is one, melt certain plastics and get stuck in the grain of wooden rolling pins), one metal Christmas tree cookie cutter (I have specific cutters for the polymer clay work as it is not advisable to re-use for food), one baking tray and one oven.

The fimo colours I used were all fimo soft:

Dark green, light green, green glitter, yellow glitter and red glitter.

I started off with the Christmas tree for which I used the dark and light green. I started by cutting the dark green into small chunks and then squishing them back together again to get a nice malleable ball of fimo. I did the same for the light green. I then rolled them into sausages so that I had one light green sausage and one dark green.

I then placed the two sausages next to each other and rolled them into one big sausage, one half light green and one half dark green. I then folded it in half and rolled it again. I folded the sausage in half once more and rolled it between my hands until it was a smooth sausage, about 7mm in diameter.

I then cut slices off the sausage, 2-3mm thick, which I arranged next to each other on the chopping board. With my fingers I then pushed the edges of the discs together to ‘fuse’ the gaps. I then used the hi-ball glass (a tall smooth-sided glass) as a rolling pin. You have to turn the fimo sheet over after every few rolls or it sticks and ruins the pattern. I rolled from different directions to try and get an even thickness of fimo sheet. This also helps stop distortion of the pattern, giving a nice mosaic look. Once the sheet was between 1-0.5mm thick, I cut the Christmas tree out using the cookie cutter. I then gently lifted the shape and softly pressed it onto the glass tumbler. You have to be careful not to stretch the shape or squish it out of shape at this point. I rolled over the shape with the hi-ball glass to try and get rid of fingerprints.

I then baked the glass at 130 degrees C for half an hour (30 minutes) and left it to cool. This is so that I didn’t distort the Christmas tree shape whilst adding the background.

For the background I rolled together balls of red glitter, green glitter and yellow glitter. Once it was one big smooth ball I rolled it into a sausage and then folded it once and rolled it into a smooth sausage, about 1.5cm in diameter. I then cut this into discs about 2mm thick. Then I took each disc and squidged it onto the glass; this merged some of the colours and gave a very different effect to the way I did the tree.

For the top of the vase I pushed the fimo right over the rim and into the interior of the vase. Once I had completely covered the vase I again ran over it with the hi-ball glass into order to smooth it and eliminate the fingerprints (you can actually sand polymer clays once they’ve been baked but I have never tried this myself yet). I then scraped around the inside of the vase with a knife blade in order to remove the excess fimo. I sign my vases and things on the bottom, using a knife or sculpting tool. Once that was done I baked it for a second time at 130 degrees C for half and hour and let it cool.

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 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!

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.

Me and my little girl made these easter eggs for two purposes - her ones have been writen on the back of and sent out as invites to the easter egg hunt and my ones have been stuck up around the house as decorations. They could also be used to stick on the front of cards to make festive easter cards.

First of all I drew an egg shape - this can be done by drawing two circles next to each other - one has to be smaller than the other - I then joined the two circles with two straight lines. I then cut out around the egg shape and gave it two my dad.

Dad then used it as a template, drew round it on different coloured card and cut them out for us.

I then gave them to Jean one at a time, poured some PVA white craft glue into a pot and gave it too her with a paint brush. I then gave her shapes I had punched out of card and scrap paper - mostly rabbits and ducks, a hug tub of glitter confetti and some glitter 3D paint pens.

Mainly Jean painted her eggs with glue.

Sprinkeled the glitter onto them.

Shock excess glitter off onto another sheet of paper so that it could be re-used.

And then left them to dry. She also added the glitter glues and 3D paints but squidged them all with her finger and then added more glitter from the shaker.

A few rabbits and ducks were stuck on but not many.

I personally experimented with drawing shapes with the PVA and then sprinckling them with the glitter - I did a heart, thick horizontal strips, think horizontal strips, a flower, a cross, spots that look like a paw print, a zig zag shell crack and then used the glitter pens to draw an orange glitter concentric spiral, a flower, and a blue irridescant wiggle.

This is a very simple project, Jean enjoyed it and I think the results are quiet nice.

Dad’s been moping about his Welsh ancestory lately so I thought I’d better cheer him up. I decided we would celebrate St David’s day on the 1st of March as he is the patron Saint of Wales. The symbols of Wales are daffodils and leeks due to some historical battle and I’d picked up a foam kit in the Pound Shop in Gloucestershire. This kit makes daffodils in a vase.

I started by constructing the blue vase; this came as six foam shapes but was actually very tricky to push together as some of the shapes where just slightly misaligned. Eventually I got there and it is a simple and pleasing shape.

The kit comes with foam heart sitckers in two sizes which I then stuck onto the sides of the vase in a horizontal line.

Then came the making of the flowers; this was actually incredibly easy.

First off all I found there were three different foam shapes that made up the flowers, plus a leaf shape. The outer petals, a middle piece that was like a serrated disc, and a long rectangle that had a hole in one end and a rounded off corner at the other.

I pushed the outer petals onto the green fluffy pipe cleaner.

I then slipped on the middle foam ‘disk’ and pushed the pipe cleaner through the hole in one of the long rectangles of foam. I pushed enough pipe cleaner through so that I could bend it over and twist the pipe cleaner to itself underneath the foam shape.

I then rolled the foam rectangle around the twisted pipe cleaner centre forming the ‘trumpet’ part of the daffodil.

I then moved the foam disk up the pipe cleaner and slid it over the bottom of the rolled up tube of foam - this holds the ‘trumpet’ of the daffodil in place.

I then moved the outer petals up so that they came up over where the pipe cleaner twists onto itself and so that it was flat against the back of the other two parts of the flower. The double thickness of pipe cleaner helps it all to stay in place.

I then threaded on the foam leaves. These had two holes in them to help the leaves sit nicely on the pipe cleaner, however during the first attempt I made at this I put the leaf on upside down :/

To finish the flowers I bent the pipe cleaner so that the head of the flower part was at a right angle to the stem.

I made all of the flowers with different colour combinations as there was orange, white and yellow foam flower shapes. I then placed the whole lot in the vase and presented it to my dad This was easy to do and I’m going to get my scouts to make daffodils in a similar way.

I tend to make, paint and sew seascapes for me, my husband and my little girl. The history of this is to do with my undergraduate degree, a paleobiology module and me explaining colonial organisms to my husband. The particular organism I was taken with is called Bryozoa but I got it a bit mixed up with corals. Anyway my husband and I decided we were a ‘colony’ and I started producing pictures of the colony within an ocean bottom environment.

This is the latest and it was my Valentine’s card to him this year.

I got the card blank from a set of eight card blanks and card toppers from the Pound Shop and the rest, ie the picture, is all cut out of magizines and catalogues. They are stuck on using glue sticks.

I cut the shapes out including:

• Seaweed

• A rock

• Colonial organism like a coral coming out of its tube

• Fish

• Heart

I tend to sit down and chop up a page at a time of magazines into the shapes the colours and layout that the page suggests to me. So for the shapes I eventually chose for this card I just selected from things I’d already cut out.

I wanted a very clean and stylised look.

I started gluing the shapes on, first off the seaweed and the fish hidden in them. I made sure that some of the seaweed overlapped the fish and some did not. This involved peeling up bits that had already been stuck and was essential for the balance of the picture. The rock in the middle was then stuck on.

I then placed the coral onto the rock, making sure that the bottom of the coral overlapped the rock. I then placed on the fish in the background and the blue heart - the heart was purely to show it was a card for Valentine’s day.