Salaric

I painted this picture on black paper/card, A2 size. I painted it during my GCSE’s at age 14; basically I was given a white block of paint, water soluble, and a round paint brush, and I just started painting straight onto the paper. Apologies for the bad photograph.

I started with the pattern on the sleeve of the jumper and progressed from there. I painted over mistakes with black paint, which, if you look carefully at the picture, may become apparent, as the black paint had a slightly more matt texture than the paper and therefore looks like a more solid black.

I was going to give this to my granddad but he unfortunatly died before it was released from the school so I have donated it to the village cricket club as that seemed like the ideal home for it. The photograph is of it hanging in the club in its nice new frame.

Our village was having a paper boat race as a joint event to raise funds for the village feast and the Scout group’s chosen charity Akanyo Voko, so I’ve been having the scouts making and experimenting with lots of different types of paper boats. We experimented with two types of origami boats, including the catamaran, and each will have its own write-up later on. But the style of boats that the kids liked best were ones where you draw circles at various points.

Here are a selection of what they produced with this:

The number of circles was entirely up to the child and they had lots of fun experimenting!

Equipment needed:

Paper

Scissors (we use safety scissors)

Compass or selection of cups etc… for drawing around

Pencils

I also put 4 copies of my dragon template onto one A4 sheet and printed these off onto coloured card for them to decorate the finished boats with.

The simplest type of boat you can make with this concept is one that has two circles of the same size joined by lines, so it sort of makes a 2D sausage shape. Then you cut around the shape, and to make it into a boat you draw a line to the centre of each circle from the ends. You then cut down this line and slide the bits of paper either side of the slit over each other, and fix them in place either with sellotape or as we found best – a paper clip – that way we could alter the shape slightly if we weren’t happy.

The length of the boat was up to the child, as was the size of the circles, you can also use one large and one small circle to get some interesting effects.

You can also do three circles in a triangle; the two circles at the ‘fat’ end of the triangle can be far apart or closely overlapping.

Four circles we found made a flatter, more stable craft, though you have to cut the circles at an angle of 45 degrees from where the corner would be if it was a square or rectangle. The size of the circles determined the depth of boat.

One of the boys was very innovative and overlapped the slight circles at the front of his boat so much that it ended up with a ‘cone’ for a nose! This actually did float very well when we tested them.

Another pattern was one that had overlapped circles all the way round, in a sort of rectangle. I wasn’t sure this one was going to work but it did! However they sort of curled over to give the boat a protective rim, and other versions of it that he made just had a nice scalloped edge effect if he just left the circles uncut.

One of them made a lovely little boat by drawing the circles overlapping in an eight-petalled flower – this made a round boat that was very sturdy in the water and we felt it was only right should be decorated as a dragon!

The kids decorated the boats in various ways, using colouring pencils and pens, the dragon templates, and gems and glitter.

This is one of my geo-vases that were inspired by my undergraduate petrology classes (looking at rock forming minerals under a microscope).

I made this vase by covering a hi-ball glass in fimo (polymer clay) and then baking it so the fimo went hard.

I created the swirly texture by squidging my selected colours of fimo to make them soft. The colours I used were:

*Red *Orange *Glittery gold/yellow *Green *Blue *White

I then rolled each colour into a sausage, except for the white, which I rolled into a number of sausages as it was to be mixed with all the other colours!

I then took the blue sausage and mixed it with a white sausage, the half and half sausage was then folded in half and in half again, and rolled back into a thin sausage. I then sliced the sausage up into mm thick discs. I did the same for the other colours, mixing each with white to give some sort of continuity to the vase.

I then started at the top of the glass and squidged two layers of the blue and white discs around the glass. I made sure that the fimo was squidged over the rim. I then did two layers of green and white, followed by two layers of gold and white. Then the orange and white – again orange and white. With the red and white, however, I just covered the rest of the glass in it, as it was mostly the base of the glass.

I made sure the fimo on the base was slightly thicker than the rest of the vase as this is where I sign them by slashing my signature into the fimo with a sculpting tool. I then rolled another glass around the vase to smooth the fimo as there are always lots of fingerprints present in the surface.

I then scraped around the rim of the vase to remove the excess fimo whilst leaving the rim covered neatly.

I then baked it in the oven for half an hour (30 minutes) at 130 degrees C.

I made this when I was about fourteen at Guides.

We were given stockings or the legs chopped off old laddered tights and we put a handful of grass seed into where the toes would go. Then we poured in sawdust on top of the seeds.

When we thought we had enough to make a decent head we pulled out a piece of the stocking, making sure it contained some sawdust, and pinched it so it became a little bud, we then twisted it so that the ‘neck’ of stocking material was closed, and tied it with cotton so it would keep its shape – this was the nose!

We then made sure there was enough sawdust in the head and that the nose would end up in the right sort of position. We tied a knot in the leg of the stocking, trying to make sure there was no excess space or the head would be all floppy!

We then sat them in mugs with the knot at the bottom and drew faces on them with felt tip pens!

The idea is that you stand them in water, which soaks up through the sawdust, and the grass grows into hair. I felt that the felt pen would run if I did this so never got around to growing the hair – but I will probably give that a go when my daughter’s a bit older.

This was a fun project and I am thinking it would be a nice one to try with my Scouts in the winter.