April Showers

Today it is wet and miserable here, not so much April showers as April down pours. Bleurgh. It did remind of a lovely little decoration I'd been inspired to make after seeing a similar one.  A simple cloud, which I felt simply needed the addition of raindrops.  So I immediately got to work.  I used:

• some thick beading wire
• my heart punch 
• some white paper
• some insulation tape
• some thin white cotton
• some normal sticky tape

I shaped the beading wire into the cloud shape I was after and then wrapped it with the blue insulation tape to make it stand out a bit. Next I punched out several hearts and used those to create the rain drops (cut in half and slightly shaped).  I tied the cotton onto the cloud shape and added my half heart rain drops to the cotton and that was it.  I was finished.  Tah Dah.  A nice easy peasy craft that still looks super effective now.

I think you could possibly make this work as a coat hanger too, a flat bottom to the cloud, without the raindrops, and then add a hook to the top.  That would make it into something useful, as opposed to just looking pretty.

More Monsters

As well as the crocheted monsters we made photo props of monster mouths.  We saw the idea here, but decided to make our own.  It was surprisingly easy.  We just drew out our shapes and coloured them in bright felt tips, cut them out, laminated them and stuck them to straws.  We all made some, but I think the kids ones were my favourites as they were more "out there".  Each guest had their photo taken with a monster mouth and then we used those pictures on their thank you notes.

I loved the idea of the playdough monster pots, but budget didn't really allow us to provide that at their parties, so we made a playdough pack for each guest as part of their party bag.  We made home made playdough and used a variety of colours for each batch we made.

We split the home made playdough into a small pot that we had bough in packs of eight from Poundland, and added a few bits and bobs to design their monster - cut up pipe cleaners, googly eyes, pom poms, foam hands and feet, feathers etc.  

We then packaged all that up in a clear card bag like these with a little note suggesting that their new owner created them and then stored them under their bed/in their wardrobe, 'cos obviously that is where all monster live. 

I'm sure the parents appreciated soggy playdough being put under their children's beds!!

The playdough recipe I used is one my Mum always used when I was little.  The only change I made was to use food colouring pastes to make the colours brighter.  I've also added various essences (vanilla/strawberry flavouring/peppermint etc) to make the playdough smell.  I did try adding glitter to the mixture once.  It looked pretty, but it went everywhere.... you've been warned!  This recipe makes a slightly squishier playdough than the bought stuff, the longer you cook it the less squishy it gets, but cook it too long and you get dry flaky bits.  It lasts a while in an airtight container, but not forever, you'll be able to tell as it goes sort of slimy.  urrggh.

Playdough Recipe:

2 cups (you can use a mug instead of a cooking "cup") of plain(all purpose) flour

2 cups of water

1 cup of salt

2 tablespoons for oil

2 teaspoons of cream of tartar

Few drops of food colouring

Cook the mixture in a pan over a medium heat

Stirring all the time to prevent sticking

Remove from thee heat when the mixture comes away from the sides of the pan

Knead well and store in an airtight container

Very Quick Felt Lamb Craft

I've been decorating an Easter Tree this week.  We always used to have an Easter Tree when I was little, but this is our first year with one.  I'm hoping to share some pictures of it soon.  I felt that it didn't have enough lamb related decorations on it, so I created a quick felt sheep/lamb.

I drew round a flower shaped cookie cutter, and then felted some black roving wool in three sections. One larger oval for the face and two smaller ones for the ears.  I then felted the yarn onto the back of the lamb's body so it could hang on the Easter Tree.  I added a couple of french knots with some embroidery thread.  The Husband is calling this craft the return of the zombie sheep.  Maybe that is a good thing, I can double up the decorations for use at Easter and Halloween?!  So I did another without the zombie looking eyes.

I'm not convinced.  I think I prefer eyes, zombie or otherwise.  Obviously I just need to work on something that looks more normal!

Felting onto Clothes

There are times that I see something and straight away I want to have a go myself.   This time I saw this, and immediately ran out (well ok, I didn't actually run!) to the charity shops to find a suitable jumper.  50p later, I returned with an orange jumper one size too big.  Ahh well, it doesn't really matter does it?  At this point I should have taken a before photo, but I didn't.  I just wanted to get straight to the crafting I'm afraid, you'll have to imagine this as the plain orange jumper it was before I decorated it.

I didn't really know what I wanted to do, so I just played around a bit.  I didn't have much time before the school run, so I only got the top layer done (again, photos should have been taken, but weren't).  I showed my daughter the jumper as soon as we got in.  She was pretty impressed, and had some helpful ideas about what we should do next.  So I have to admit, that the colour scheme and the shapes made were really just what she said I should do.

After the last time we felted and it ended in injuries for all of us she wasn't too keen on getting involved, that was until I found one of her old tops which had got ruined with oil.  She set about decorating and designing her new top straight away too.  Luckily there were no injuries this time.

I've no idea how this will wash, I'm going to assume that it will need a low/hand washing setting and keep my fingers crossed.  In the meantime I'm really pleased with the result and I think I'll be trying it again with some other tops now I know it works.

Paper Bunnies

Getting ready for Easter I was thinking about what crafts we could do and what we have done in the past.  We have made some lovely bunny paper punch art a couple of years ago.  For this one I used 2 different sized circle punches and then cut out a couple of ear shapes and used some cotton wool for the tail and drew on the whiskers.  It is an easy Easter card to recreate.

Another bunny paper punch art, but this time no bottoms!  We used an egg/oval shaped hole punch and then added a couple of cut out ear shapes and a little paper punched heart.  Googly eyes and some whiskers and you're done!

Whilst looking for rabbit related crafts, I came across this on the Crafty Crow blog. Sadly when I followed the link, this particular cut out was no longer available.  So I have created my own and thought I would share.

I designed it to fit on a piece of A5 paper.  Print it out landscape onto A4, cut off the large blank expanse, fold in half and then cut out the shaded bits to create the rabbit in the frame.  I hope you like it. :o)

Rabbit Template PDF

Skulduggery Pleasant

We have been through many phases in our house, there has been Thomas the Tank Engine, Octonauts, Deadly 360, Hello Kitty, Super Heroes, Harry Potter, Moshi Monsters to name just a few.  The current obsessions are Minecraft (which I already wrote about here) and Skulduggery Pleasant.

Some friends started reading this Derek Landy series, and I thought there was no way that my daughter would like to read them, but I showed her one of the books in the library and she was quite keen.  Over the Christmas holidays we managed to acquire books 1 to 7, and I am so pleased we did.

The blurb on the back of the first book is:

"Meet Skulduggery Pleasant; detective, magician, warrior.  Oh yes, and dead."

How cool does that sound.

My daughter started reading it, and my son was interested so I started reading it out loud to him.  Currently my son and I have just started book 2, my daughter is coming to the end of book 6 and the Husband is just about to start book 3.  We are really, really  enjoying the series.

Now, normally, when the kids discover some new craze I go find some games/word searches/crafty ideas on Pinterest/the internet and we work through them.  This time it has been different, I really couldn't find that much out there.  Although, there is some very cool artwork here, and the official website here also has some things to do on it.  Oh and I also found this, which gives you step by step instructions on how to draw Skulduggery Pleasant.

So this time we've had to come up with our own crafts and printables.  My daughter owns a fashion designer book and she created her own Stephanie using the stencils in the book.  I created a word search inspired by Skulduggery Pleasant.  Here it is.  I hope you have fun with it.  I have an answers sheet, please leave a comment if you need it, and I'll try to put that up too.