Recently we’ve been giving a lot of thought to our packaging.  It’s not something that comes naturally I’m afraid.  Occasionally, it works out just fine like with my button pendants; however that’s a very rare occasion indeed.

Last week I had a crazy notion to make some Christmas gift tags for sale.  Having deliberated for some time about the best way to present these, I settled on a good old baggie with fold over label and spent Saturday morning bagging them up.  I hope you’ll agree they could compete with any mass produced packaging.

There are four designs in each packet, the reindeer shown above with it’s bright red nose, the Christmas tree, the mistletoe and the Christmas roundel.

As with the dolls, birds and copper ornaments, these will be on sale at our upcoming Christmas Craft Fairs.  We’d love to see you there and we’ve just added another date for Penicuik High School on November 27th.  Time permitting there should be more sock monkeys and felt owls for sale too.  Keep an eagle eye on this space for an update.

Paper fabric is fabric made with layers of paper and other bits and pieces, in this case glitter and threads, covered with a whole layer of tissue paper.  I used an old sewing pattern instead of plain tissue paper.  All of this is glued in sequence on top of a piece of muslin with watered down PVA glue.  The effects are interesting and the resulting ‘fabric’ is very easy to sew.

When I first started to make my piece of paper fabric I worried that it was too haphazard and it would look too messy but as you can see, once sewn into a finch the effect is quite striking.

The legs are made from some of the recycled copper electrical wire from the rewiring of our house and the whole bird has since been varnished with clear lacquer for a very shiny finish.

I’m now in the process of making a blue one to keep this one company.  Colour is added simply with acrylic paint sprayed with water.

Available in the shop

Preparations are well under way for our first craft fair of 2010, which will take place in Hillhead Library in Glasgow’s West End this coming Saturday.

In the true spirit of leaving everything until the last minute, we have a list as long as both our arms of work to complete before Saturday morning and, in the true spirit of procrastination (something that we are very good at) Alasdair is currently rewiring the house and replacing the plasterboard, while I am busy redesigning and packaging my button pendants.

Going off on a tangent for a moment, these boards to hold my necklaces were made partially from the paper I made a couple of weeks ago.  I mounted the paper onto mount board and stamped ‘madestuff’ along the bottom, cut a couple of notches in the top to hold the cord and (in a later version) threaded a piece of wire through to hold the cord in place.  I’m so pleased with the way they worked out.

So, the list of things to do is still as long as our arms; however it’ll be alright on the day and if you would like to come along and meet us in person, and see some of the many other wonderful crafts on sale from numerous other makers, we’d love to see you there.

The details are on our events page.

Back in April I entered a competition on the Craft Scotland website to win a copy of Papermaking and Bookbinding: Coastal Inspirations by Joanne B Kaar and was delighted to learn a few weeks ago that I was one of the lucky winners.  I was even more delighted when I received my book last week to find that making paper isn’t the painful experience I remember it to be from my childhood attempts, where the paper ends up all pulpy and useless.  The book also contains all sorts of suggestions for jazzing up your handmade papers and what to do with all that paper you’ve made.  I particularly like the embossing from driftwood idea.

This Instructable describes the very method I used.

On a complete whim today (so wholly unprepared with any sort of shop bought materials) I made my first batch of paper, which is now handing merrily in the bathroom drying slowly – as directed in the book.

Tomorrow I get the iron out to flatten them out and decide what their fate might be.  I can’t decide between labels for my handmade photo notebooks or whether I should print onto them and frame them as works of art.  I kind of like that idea though…such ugly, unnecessary junk turned into art.

Just in case you think we’re really clatty, that grout is in fact pink and not dirty!  We inherited a baby blue and pink bathroom (complete with pink grout and, for some very odd reason, an orange shower tray) when we bought our current house and it’s not up there on the list of priorities to change, in spite of it’s very scary appearance.

It seems that the higher the temperatures get with the incredible – if not late – onset of spring and summer the lower my enthusiasm for doing crafts becomes.  Given the choice of doing ‘work’ in the garden or sitting doing crafts it seems that the garden chores win out every-time … not that there isn’t plenty to be getting on with out there!

I’ve not been completely idle though on the craft front with a couple of developmental pieces underway.  This one was just done for fun when I was messing about with some left over mache.

The spider in the foreground here was my first, half-hearted attempt at a spider, partially inspired by some fabric spiders I caught a glimpse of on Ann Wood’s blog that Jolene follows, clearly it bears no real resemblance to that spider – it really just provided the kernel of a notion that later developed (and is developing) into an idea.

Following the creation of this rather cartoon-like spider I went on to work on something a bit more life-like with reference to a variety of spider photo’s and biology models that I found around and about on the internet.  The end result was this spider pictured below.

I’m still not entirely satisfied with the spider – although I do like the mandible’s – I think the Abdomen (back bit) is too small in relation to the Cephalothorax (front bit).  I may work up another version of this, weather permitting, that’s a bit more anatomically correct – although I don’t think I’ve ever made anything that’s not largely abstract … it might be an interesting challenge.

I’ve nearly finished working on a winged version of my bonnie birds, another development piece, and I’ll share that when it’s finished too.

Dan Reeder is a relatively well known papier mache artist and I just thought I’d share this amusing video with you of his presentation at the ignite night in Seattle.

One key point though, papier mache is seriously under-rated, also … I’ve never made a pig :)

Following Jolene’s last post I couldn’t resist the post title, nor – I’m afraid – could I resist including a little musical flashback to my youth … I’ll leave that till the end though!

As Jolene said in her post I have been making more bonnie birds and taking her through the process at the same time, I could be wrong, but I think it falls into the harder than it looks category.   Certainly I think it’s taken a bit of practice and development to get them to the stage they’re at now, I only wish I had saved the original prototypes to share with you by way of a comparison with the ones I’m making now … the difference is quite startling!

I’m working on something else now and have saved the prototype of that one so you can see that these things don’t simply materialise without any thought … although that’s often the way these things begin, with a random convergence of whimsical and divergent partial thoughts!  Anyway these will be my last Bonnie Birds for a while so that I can concentrate on other things.

Click for full size!

These and others available from the shop.

And finally, as promised, some classic rock!

Actually that was released in 1980 … a little before my time :)

Alasdair has been guiding me through the process of making one of his Bonnie Birds…it’s not a process I will be repeating in the near future!

First you have to make the armature, which is quick and easy enough.  Then comes the mache, which refuses to stick to the armature.  Alasdair’s most helpful advice was to keep squeezing it together until it looked body like…yeah, ok…the more I squeezed, the more determined the stuff was to stick to me and not the armature!  Then, and I am not the most patient of people, you have to wait overnight for the body to dry…

…next night you can make the tail in the same way…mache stuck everywhere but where it was supposed to be, and once again we had to leave them overnight to dry.  The next night was a repeat performance for the head…I nearly threw it on the fire that night!  My beak was huge, then too thin, then it all fell off…argh!

Alasdair assured me that it would all be ok in the end and to just try and get a sort of shape that sort of resembled a bird.  I trust him, because he’s my husband, so I persevered, tried my best and created something resembling a bird.

This is Alasdair’s bird after sanding.  Mine was too ugly to contemplate at this stage.

The next stage was to sand it all down…I needed to wait for the weekend for this…I won’t bore you with the whys and wherefores.  Alasdair insists that sanding is key and other than advising me ‘not to be shy about it’ his other top tip was to mind my fingers!?  That exercise went a whole lot better than I imagined it would and I ended up with the shape you see in the finished article.  Alasdair was right…all of the mistakes I made earlier were wiped out at this point.

The final stage of painting and varnishing were nerve-racking for me.  I’d spent all week making this bird and was about to ruin it all with one wrong brushstroke.  Fortunately the Bonnie Bird is a forgiving creature and I was able to rescue it from an overzealous paint job by imagining target practice where the wings should be.

This is me fixing the bits that I missed the first time I varnished it…oops!

As I said, it took me two weeks to make mine from start to finish…Alasdair made five in that same time.  See them all in the background laughing at my bird’s short legs and lumpy backside…still I think it’s pretty good for a first (and only) attempt.

I’m not sure if this is an abstraction of the commoner garden blackbird or what happens when bonnie birds start listening to goth music!?  Whatever it is I’m rather pleased with the colour combo, I may even go so far as to describe it as being a bit chic … but, to be honest, I’m not entirely sure what that means!

Anyway, the sun’s been out the last few days and so it would have been churlish to not get out there are get a couple of photo’s outside, just for a wee change from my usual white background.

As ever this is available in our shop, there are also some additional images there too :)

Having made a few batches of previous bonnie birds and developed a decorative pattern that I think works for them – see previous posts here – I’ve been keen to develop alternative patterns, something as it turns out is easier said than done.

Here are a few examples of what I’ve come up with thus far, the first is my favourite of the the three and the last (zig-zag) is based on a design suggested by our wee lad:

As ever, these items are available for sale in our shop.