Cheltenham Hackpace is having an Easter Crafts day on Good Friday Apr 14th 2017 from 10 am, there are lots of activities and we are taking our upcycled basket making 🙂
Hackspaces are a community workshop, skill share and create space and is a grass roots movement that is spreading globally.
Colour, fold, cut and stick a range of little paper friends complete with story boxes and mini theatre with changeable backgrounds using a combination of origami, puppet design and paper craft construction. Create shows and character play to take home with you – suitable for all ages and skill levels.
Repurpose fabric, egg boxes, broken jewellery and more to create fantastical headwear and other accessories such as unicorns, dragons, fairies, lions, festival fashions or anything else your imagination can think of! Part of the Upcycling and Junk Art workshop series. Suitable for all ages and skill levels
7 fluffy pipe cleaners in autumn colours – brown, yellow, orange, red, green
I bent five pipe cleaners into leaf shapes and then assembled them – this was super easy and something I think kids would love doing 🙂 You can even collect real leaves to model the shapes off of or find templated to guide you from the internet or craft books.
One manga style colouring in sheet of Ada Lovelace as free download this coming week 🙂
To celebrate Ada Lovelace Day 🙂 A celebration of women in Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths.
This bat was made by my pre schooler at nursery and it is a quick easy craft – there is a cardboard roll like those inside of loo rolls and kitchen towel which has been covered in black card, a circle of card with eyes added for the face and flappy wings cut out of the same card, string added so that it can be hung up 🙂
Just before we moved to the new house about a year ago, I came up with the idea of Lojbani Chicken, a character who would help my little girls or anybody else understand and learn Lojban (a constructed language) but I wanted it to be more than that. I wanted some sort of all languages web-comic thing which is obviously very complex and so it never happened – there were some biro sketches in the back of a note book and that was that.
Then last week I saw it was Lojban’s 25th birthday and so I sat down and revisited the idea of my chicken. The result was more biro sketches and Mother Lang and her two daughters Coni and Nat, they live on a farm where Lojbani chicken is one of the animals.
A full first story will hopefully be appearing on my Wiggly Pets blog soon 🙂
Once the image above is digitally edited (this is just what I russeled up using my new birthday pens and colouring pencils.) there will be speech bubbles saying such things as fi’i – meaning welcome.
Other existing characters include Esperanto Cat and Toki Pona kitten. I haven’t decided yet what creatures should represent any of the natural languages – mainly due to worrying about offending people :/ I might do something like have made up creatures for natural languages and real animals for the constructed languages – suggestions welcome 🙂
I wanted Mary to be able to make something for Halloween and she loves monsters so I had already cut up an old jumper for Jean to make a trick or treat bag with so I just used one of the sleeves to make a little cuddly monster for Mary.
I sewed across the bit where I had chopped it off the jumper. The almost all the way across the bit just below the cuff. I then turned it inside out and stuff it, arranging the cuff for a tufty hair look.
I then sewed up the remaining gap so the stuffing wouldn’t come back out and fixed the cuff in place (this was quiet a tricky thing todo so not sure I would repeat it).
I then got my little girl to stick self adhesive monster eyes made of felt on it. Obviously these can be a choking hazard so I sewed them on securely after wards but she enjoyed being able to take part.
October is coming and that means my little one is already excited about Halloween, I informed her we were not buying a replacement trick or treat bag but that she would be making one – she was really enthusiastic which I hadn’t quiet expected her being 7 now and getting to the point of rolling eyes and saying ‘oh mummy!’
We found rummaged through our black sack of cloths that are stained and wholey and she found my old furry purple jumper so we cut a rectangular chunk out of it (well almost rectangular – she did the cutting!). We folded it in half and she stitched it together up the two sides. I let her do it free form and she found the problem of the fabric shifting around so we lernt about tacking and then she did grate big stitches and learnt that this wasn’t a good idea and then we did some back stitch too which she prefered the results of but took too long for her concentration span. Once the sewing was finished we turned it inside out so the stitching was on the inside and not to be seen!
We then cut strips of jumper and plated them together to make a handle which we sewed on. Jean Later added some felt eyes to the bag.
All the sewing was done with a large bodkin needle and yarn/acrylic wool making it easier for her to handle and for me to see what she’d done wrong and there for to untangle her!
Spiral snakes are very easy to make and can be hung up around the place as jungle or halloween decorations. When I was little my Welsh grandmother used to make a variant of these for Christmas (less snaky 😉 ).
Draw a circle and cut it out – pre cut circles save a lot of hassle when doing this project with small children.
Draw a spiral and then add snake makings and face to it – this can be done with pens and pencils or with stickers or ink/paint stamps or even embossing for a more subtle patterning.
Then cut around the spiral. There are many templates that you can by or find for free download on the internet but I find free hand ones work just as well 🙂
To add string either punch a whole and tie the ribbon or thread onto it or use tape. They will dance and move in thermals air currents.
