Salaric

Last year my little girl came home with this ‘letter to Santa’ they gave them all magazines and catalogues to cut the things out they wanted for Christmas and then they glued them to the card. This is brilliant as at three they really are too little to write stuff themselves.

The down side however was that Jean announced she was getting a puppy for Christmas – she didn’t get one of course – well I think there was little toy one in her stocking but not a real eating the furniture puppy!

I made this set of six napkin rings as a wedding pesant for my cousin to go with a dinner service set, place matts and table cloth and napkins.

I used pink, blue and white irredescent glitter craft wire that I bought from the Works in Stroud – unfortunatly this chain of shops has been closing down so I got the last two packets they had so decided that I would make the napkin rings in three colours. Each packet had three coils in of wire in it – one of each colour.

The only other equipment I used was Artistic Wire’s Wire Worker – which has several sharft of didfferent diameter and cross sectional shape – ie long sticks of either plastic or metal that are either round rods or triangular prisms or square cross section. These fit into a handle that allows you to twist and wrap the wire around the shafts very easily. It also has holes in the handle so you can poke the wire through and twist it round the handle so it doesn’t slip when you initially start work.

And wire cutters.

Unfortunatly the wire that I had was thicker than the bead making wire you normal use with this as I wanted the napkin rings to be sturdy. The wire would not poke through the wholes with out skimming off the glittery outer – which was actually Fabric!

So I had to hold the wire in place and wrap the wire around the square shaft slowely – I find you can’t really just twist the wire quickly around anything thats not round as you have to press the wire onto each flat side of the square (or triangular shaft) inorder to get the square shape. Also you have to be careful to make each twist of the wire sit net to the last on the shaft.

Once all the wire from the coil was on the shaft I eased it off – the result was a sqaure twist spring or coil.

I gently eased the coil into a slightly looser spring until it was the right length to wrap round into the napkin ring. I pushed the two ends of the spring together so that the coils over lapped. Making sure it was sucurely fixed I cut the ends of the wore off and bent them into the inside of the spring so there were no sharp ends sticking out.

I then did this with the other five coils of wire I had – I discovered that the first one I had made was a looser spring than the subsequent ones but apart from that it was easy to make them all about the same size.

This post is a shameless plug for sponsorship for the Race For Life, a friend of mine is taking part in this event to raise money to ‘beat’ cancer.

You can sponsor her here.

And I am placing this here on Salaric Craft as she is saying she’ll crochet cute little thankyou presants for those who sponsor her – and she is an ace crochetter!

In sponsoring her you will be helping raise money towards research into the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of cancer.

Thanks 🙂

I mixed the green fimo clovers from the first picture with the paper die cast punched green clovers from the second as table confetti for St Patrick’s Day.

For the the paper clover I just used a paper punch but for the fimo I used green glittery fimo soft – this is a polymer clay.

I kneaded it until it was soft, though the red and green glitter fimos tend to actually be too soft! Then I rolled it into a flat sheet about 1.5mm thick. I used a wooden rolling pin – again the strongly coloured fimos tend to stain and nothing used with them should be used for food again afterwards. A glass can improvise as a rolling pin too. Fimo tends to slowly melt plastic so plastic rolling pins are useless.

I then used the two clover shaped aspec cutters I have, to cut as many little glittery clovers out as I could. Each shape was then carefully lifted and placed upon a baking tray which I put in a pre-heated oven for 30 minutes. The oven is pre-heated to 180 degrees C.

Once baked I waited for them to cool and, using a thin plastic sculpture tool, prized any clover leaves off that were stuck to the baking tray.

I know none of these clovers have four leaves and therefore are not the lucky clover that the leprechuans have, but it makes the table nice and green.

The red hearts are fimo too – red glitter and rolled and cut with an aspec cutter in the same way. The aspec cutters I got from Almond Art.

My three year old came home from pre-school with a cuddle token – this was a simple heart shape cut out of paper with a promise written on it in felt tip pens. She promises to cuddle her mummy 🙂

She also made us a Valentine’s card out of orange card folded with a large white heart she had ‘coloured in’ stuck on the front. (It is behind the meal my husband cooked, which is written up over on Salaric-Cooking).

Then we made the heart decorations which I’ve already posted about here.

I got this big box of Christmas Craft from The Works discount bookshop in Stroud. It cost me £3.99, which was reduced from about £7. It was full of coloured pom poms of various sizes, pipe cleaners in lots of colours including metallic ones, foam shapes, glitter pens, green and red lolly sticks, and ‘fashion cord’, PVA glue, plus some goggly eyes (these had red and green irises which was a bit weird).

I made some examples of this that you could make out of the pack and then handed over about one and a half big craft boxes minus the glitter pens to my Scout troop to play with. The glitter pens do not dry quickly enough to be used in a Scout troop. They also had the leftovers of the Big Spooky Craft Box from Halloween.

Here are what they produced! Apologies for the poor quality of the photos, I forgot the camera so had to rely on my phone to take the pictures with.

Christmas mobile:

He bent a star out of a silver metallic pipe cleaner, twisted a fluffy red and a fluffy white pipe cleaner together and bent it into a candy cane. For the other two were a foam cut-out Christmas tree and a yellow and gold pom pom. He tied each of these shapes to the lolly stick cross using some of the fashion cord, which was transparent plastic with sliver specks in it. I made the lolly stick cross for him out of two lolly sticks and pipe cleaners. I twisted the pipe cleaners around the middle of the two lolly sticks where I had overlapped them.

Three tiered snowman:

One of them just stuck three pom poms together in a row, starting with a large red pom pom for the base of the snowman, then a medium white pom pom and for the head a small white pom pom. He wrapped pipe cleaners around the joins to make it look neater and stuck on some goggly eyes. He then decided he wanted to make a halo for it which he did by bending one of the metallic gold pipe cleaners into a loop. The excess pipe cleaner he used to make it ‘hover’ about the snowman’s head.

Christmas tree in crisis:

Being impatient for the PVA glue to dry and seeing that I had ‘tied’ my green pom poms onto the lolly stick with pipe cleaner tinsel, one of the Scouts decided to do the same. He liked the effect so much though that he decided that the tree should just be a decoration made out of interlocking pipe cleaners giving it a surreal 70’s sci-fi egg look.

Candy canes:

One of the girls twisted red and white fluffy pipe cleaners together to get the candy cane effect and then cut the resulting twist into four. She then shaped them into little hooks. She really enjoyed doing this and so decided she would make some out of other colours as well. We had some left over stripy pipe cleaners from Halloween and she chose these to twist together.

Pipe cleaner Christmas tree:

One of the girls twisted a pipe cleaner into a Christmas tree shape and then decorated it with more pipe cleaners – generally the metallic type – as tinsel.

Surreal mobile:

One of the boys made this surreal mobile by twisting a red and a green fluffy pipe cleaner together to produce a twist effect; he then looped this to make a circle. Then he made a lolly stick cross in the way I had shown them to and weaved the circle onto this. This gave a fantastically strong frame to work with and was very neatly done. He then made bizarre but cute little creatures from the pom poms, foam shapes and goggly eyes. He then used more pipe cleaners to attach the little creatures to the mobile. It wasn’t very Christmassy but it was really effective.

Red Christmas tree monster:

This started off as a red Christmas tree because he couldn’t find three green pom poms but soon mutated into a monster. Like the Christmas trees he stuck three pom poms onto each other, large at the bottom, then medium and then a small sparkly red pom pom on the top. He used the lolly stick as a base for the moster, stuck on the yellow foam holly leaves as wings and then stuck on two goggly eyes, one green and one red, and just to make it more monster-esque, one eye is below the other rather than them being next to each other. He also used a pipe cleaner as a sort of belt for the monster.

Spiral pet:

This was again incredibly simple but very cute, if not very festive. One of the girls twisted a fluffy red and green striped pipe cleaner into a flat spiral (so that it was two dimensional and didn’t go up into a cone shape. She then just simply stuck two goggly eyes into it – again one red and one green to match the stripes I assume.

Red spider/octopus:

One of the girls made this by just sticking two red pom poms together, one slightly larger than the other, and then twisting a red fluffy pipe cleaner and a green fluffy pipe cleaner around its body (the slightly larger pom pom) as legs. She then stuck the googly eyes onto it, again one red and one green.

Pipe cleaner reindeer:

This is a little pipe cleaner reindeer. I unfortunately thought it was a dog which she fortunately took in good grace! She twisted the body shape out of a gold pipe cleaner. She actually cut it into three pieces to get the body and ears which were little folded loops and the the two sets of legs which were just bent into two sides of a triangle. She then stuck on a small sparkly red pom pom for the face and a tiny white pom pom for the tail. She then added on the goggly eyes.

Spiral decoration:

One of the boys made a set of these spiral decorations. He twisted two pipe cleaners of contrasting colour together, this was a much looser twist than those used for the candy canes. He then bent the result into a loose spiralling curl with a loop at the top for attaching string so that it can be hung up.

Eyes in the back of my head:

I unfortunately didn’t get a picture of this one but wished I had. One of the boys got a black pipe cleaner and then pom poms of varying sizes in white and red and cut holes through them so that he could thread them like beads onto the pipe cleaner. He managed all but the very smallest pom pom with the safety children’s scissors, the last one had to be done very carefully with the small scissors on my pen knife. He then positioned them along the pipe cleaner, the ends of which he bent so that they would loop over his ears like glasses. He then stuck a goggly eye on each pom pom and put it on so that the ‘eyeballs’ were staring out of the back of his head. It was so clever! I couldn’t stop laughing – again not very festive but a good laugh.

I made these shells with polymer clay, I specifically used fimo soft. I had a pack that had lots of colours in and was actually making other things. I was trying to mix a specific type of brown. I always start by taking the two colours, putting them next to each other and rolling them into a sausage. This time I then folded it over a couple of times, rolling it into a smooth sausage with each fold. The result is a stripy sausage. I then rolled part of it thinner and thinner until a piece breaks off – giving me a tapered conical shape.

I then gently rolled the cone to make it thinner and longer until I was happy with it. Then I twisted it slightly and gently pulled it round into a series of concentric loops that sat on top of each other coming out from the side, this gives the impression of a shell. These ones are more snail type shells but the technique can be altered slightly to get beautiful spiral shells.

I made this card as a batch to experiment with some new stamps and inks I had been given. I think others from the batch have already appeared on this blog! I started by folding a sheet of yellow mounting card from Costco in half and in half again. I decided I wanted the card’s orientation to be portrait and then selected the stamps I was going to use.

I started with the three leafed holly stamp and pressed it into the light green ink pad and printed the two corner hollies. I then took the candy cane stamp and put that into the pinker red ink (I had two reds and two greens) and printed candy canes in the two corners. To a certain extent I think the candy canes look a bit clumsy on this design but never mind.

I then took the sledge stamp and here I ran into a problem. The stamps are foam shapes on a piece of plastic sheeting and came from the Pound Shop in Cheltenham. The inks came from The Works which is in the same set of shops. The inks were in blocks of three colours all next to each other and each ink pad wasn’t actually that big. The stamp I wanted to use was bigger than the ink pad.

Fortunately the fact that they were cheap stamps helped as they are flexable and I could sort of bend half of it into the black ink and then the other half. I then printed it in the middle at the top of the bottom third of the card.

The card then looked unbalanced so I got some glitter paint and put it underneath the sled in a sort of semi-circle to ‘shadow’ the sleigh.

I made this card for my friend’s wedding. I had some white card blanks so took one of them, then I had some cards with Just For You in gold writing on a golden shimmery background – these came for a kit I got in the Pound Shop.

I used copydex and glued the writing onto a golden/yellow brown square I had cut to be a nice border. I then glued that to the white card blank which I thought was simple but effective.

Recently I went to the Belgiun city of Bruges. There I was instantly blown away by the medieval architecture. Unfortunately my camera was broken so I had to resort to camera phones and friends’ photos. The buildings are covered in lots of ornamentation which I long to draw; everything also appeared to have a double meaning and to be caught up in symbolism. Arts and crafts seem to have a natural home in the city and the carvings of the stone for the buildings seemed to reflect this.

Out of all the touristy things there, there was one thing I was desperate to do and that was to go and see the Hieronymus Bosch triptych . The piece is called the garden of earthly delights. I have a sort of love hate relationship with this particular artist as his pictures quite frankly scare me but the they are akin to some of the things I was once drawing and I find that the intricacy and detail of the pictures just draw me back again and agian. Now I do not actually have an artistic background education-wise but I have slowly been collecting little bits of knowledge.

In the art gallery/museum I patiently worked my way through the rooms until I fell upon the work naturally and even waited, examining other works whilst others gawped at the triptych. From the pictures I had seen of it I was expecting something massive, surely to fit just so much into it, it needed to be the size of a wall but no! It is not! It is more akin to the size of say, a cupboard door in a standard kitchin, and sits there in a display cabinet.

I was examining it in detail and was lost to the detail of the middle panel which represents earth, noting as many of the strange creatures as I could, then I moved on to examine the hell panel when I got a tap on the shoulder. The curator was standing there and pointed to the queue of people waiting patiently behind me! I uttered a suprised “Oh! Sorry!” and scuttled off. She seemed amused more than angry.

But the picture was haunting me – I longed to go back and examine it but felt that I had used my allowance up and was sad as I wandered the rest of the galleries absorbing information on Flemish Artists. I have to say I feel that whatever was going on in history at the time of these paintings must have been pretty dire. Just the symbolism and graphicness of the drawings and the fact it’s everywhere, even in the fabric of the buildings itself, made me want to investigate more and oddly enough it gave me a story idea involving conspiracy theories and vampires.

We went to the beer houses afterwards – it gave me strange dreams!

I only had a weekend there but I think a week would have been better as there was just so much I wanted to take in arts and crafts-wise.