It’s funny how an idea can sprout wings and take-off (dreadful pun entirely intended), such as it has been with these bonnie birds. It’s rather refreshing to have something I can make out of papier mache that doesn’t take forever and a day and that isn’t a bowl! Aside from this pair I’m hatching three more and they should be fully fledged in the next few days (and yes, that was a couple more of dreadful puns that were entirely intended).
This pair seem to be diametrically opposed in terms of form, one’s short and fat and the other a bit leggy with a great fan of a tail, the tail’s something I can see me repeating and refining on future versions.
Of course, like all birds that flock, it doesn’t take long for them to catch-up with more of their own kind …
… I imagine this flock will be growing as they, ahem, get to know each other better … well, it is almost Spring!!
I’ve been busy making layered button pendants today from some of my vintage button collection. These buttons have been collected from various elderly relatives over the years and there are some amazing buttons within that collection, some of which make great pendants within themselves.
I’ve not even scratched the surface of the buttons I have, which makes it really time consuming to come up with combinations. There must be millions of possibilities. Here are a few that I’ve made this morning that are now dry. There are others just waiting for the glue to dry.
All but the last one are available in our Coriandr shop. I’m not at all happy with the quality of the last one…you can see the glue under the heart button.
This tartan chap was created as a commission this weekend. In keeping with our attempts to reduce waste, he’s made from a piece of tartan that would have otherwise been binned and some ecospun felt. Stuffed, as usual, with reclaimed polyester stuffing.
He’s got a bit of a problem though. Whilst out for his morning walk, he came across a very strange object. It looked like a grassy mound but he couldn’t be sure.
At first he stood next to the mound, he thought it enhanced his green wings and the green stripes in his tartan, but after a while he became suspicious that the object wasn’t a grassy mound at all but an owl eating alien so he made a hasty retreat to his new home.
It’s always a bit of struggle for me to get back into the swing of the craft thing following the festive frivolities, of course it hasn’t helped that we were on emergency fuel rations until our delivery arrived Wednesday and I had to spend the next three days shifting it up the hill to the house … that’s another story though!
Currently I’m working on this piece of wall art that I last picked up during late November or December and following the break I’ve lacked any kind of motivation to pick it up again. Losing momentum can be a real struggle at times and until you can gather yourself to move on projects can idle and die, this can be a real issue with materials like papier mache which require long drying periods in between adding layers or building up texture or depth.
The concept isn’t exactly a new one but it’s one I’ve been keen to experiment with and following my fourth sub-standard painting on this canvas I decided it was time to use it for something other than painting … I suppose you might suggest that the previous efforts have been consumed by the character emerging from the canvas now. He certainly looks like he might have a touch of indigestion!
Well, it was bound to happen sooner or later … that’s right the spirit of Christmas has finally caught up with me, almost. Anyway, in preparation for it’s imminent arrival I felt compelled to make some decorations, contrary to my usual ‘bah humbug!’ approach to Christmas!!
Actually, it wasn’t just me, Jolene started it with these rather pretty little crocheted stars …
… it’s while she was making these that she tossed a bag of felt offcuts in my general direction and told me to stop being ‘lazy’ and to ‘get on with something’ …
… I was …
… I was drinking tea …
… it’s important!
I spent a few minutes rummaging, looking at the various shapes available, before coming across some bendy triangles. It wasn’t a huge leap to come up with the trees above.
I’m hoping to get some pine cones done up in time for Christmas, maybe as a table decoration or maybe as a few more hangers for the tree, whatever I do I’ll be sure to share them here.
Regular readers may well recall these bowls in their original form, you can see them here. As then they were blue, and they are finished with varnish. What is different is the depth of the ’sub-coat’ I apply to these pieces, the method in which the paint was applied and finally the varnish used is a much tougher and much higher gloss variety.
In all honesty I was never satisfied with the bowls, despite the compliments (thanks!), and when I brought them out at one of our recent craft fayres I was compelled to immediately re-wrap them and return them to the crate from whence they came!
With everything that’s been going on of late I struggled to get them finished, but the final coat of varnish is dry and we even managed a wee drop of winter sunshine to get some piccies taken … sunshine makes me happy! Anyway, here are the bowls:
This is the second set of bowls I’ve made along the mushroom lines, of course mushrooms don’t traditionally come in shades of blue, but then traditionally bowls don’t come in the form of mushrooms. I have been keen to experiment with colour and whilst I was initially sceptical about making these blue they are beginning to grow on me … not that I have some sort of fungal infection you understand, it’s just that I’m coming to like the bowls!
These bowls are made on the same moulds as the previous set, and despite this you can readily see that the bowls themselves are rather different from one another not only in colour but also in shape and weight. The bowls shown here have a much lighter or finer finish to them than their predecessors, although each is as robust as the other, I was mildly concerned that the blue bowls would be rather flimsy so I was pleased to discover that the finish I use gives a rigidity to the edges that you might not otherwise expect.
please click on images to see a larger image
I have one final set of these in the pipeline, in fact, I’ve already removed them from their moulds and the moulds are no more.
It’s been quite some time since I did any paper pottery and it was something i was pleased to get back to a two or three weeks ago when I decided I needed a rest from the ‘plant pokes’ I’d been working on. The piece shown here is the first of nine pieces I’ve been working on, this one is the most individual of the set and I’ll presenting a couple of simple ’spring bowls’ in a few days time as well and two sets of three ‘mushroom bowls’ … those however are for later.
I’m relatively pleased with the way this has turned out, especially since it is the first I’ve done in some time, the simple colour scheme is probably borne of an abstract ‘ladybird bowl’ that sits in our window sill and was one of the first pieces I made a few years ago. I suspect though that a more immediate influence has been the scenes of autumn that have been surrounding us for the last month or so, lots of reds, oranges, yellows and browns this year. Very nice.
… and a couple of fun photo’s …
… obviously when i say, ‘fun’, I mean it in the, ‘I need to get out more’ sense!
In terms of uses for such a bowl, well it is largely decorative, although we use bowls like this for keeping nick-nacks and keys in and so on
It seems that pocket pillows are becoming a favourite of mine. So called because they are pocket sized rather than them having a pocket, although occasionally they have a pocket too. They’re just the right size for little hands and are perfect even for pin cushions for those with grown up sized hands.
The two I’ve been working on this weekend are a boy in green and blue (I can’t remember where I got this pattern from) and the love bear from Andrea Zuill.
These are so easy to make. All you have to do is embroider your design of choice onto your fabric of choice – my favourite is brushed cotton for softness. Put your embroidery and backing fabric wrong sides together and draw a line round the embroidery (about 1/2″ from the sewing). Sew round the line (I use back-stitch) leaving an opening for turning and stuffing. Turn and stuff quite tightly, and sew up the opening with whip stitch. I use invisible thread for this but that’s my personal choice.
For the red bear (shown below) I upcycled a dress that had a rather fetching pocket for whatever trinkets little girls like to carry around.
These are so simple to make and a really nice way to display embroidery – go on have a go, you know you want to.
I’ve decided to start swapping again. The first of the swaps I tackled this week was to create two Vintage Fashion ATCs. Here’s my interpretation and a bit of a how to.
I love this effect and it’s really quick and easy to acheive.
First find an old dressmaking pattern that you are done with or don’t mind never using again. For my purposes I have a huge box of vintage patterns for size 10 clothing…even with the best will in the world I’ll never fit into these so they’re perfect for other crafts. The background I used actually has two patterns stuck to it as the one I had with words on it didn’t look old enough for the effect I was trying to acheive.
Using a glue stick, stick the pattern pieces to a plain postcard. Wait for these to dry before the next part, otherwise they will tear and the whole thing will be a mess.
The figures were applied using the packing tape transfer method shown in the video below. Pay particular attention to removing all of the white bits, unlike me who did this in a poorly lit room and missed bits!
I photocopied the pattern packaging and coloured in the figures with crayon and coloured pencil before sticking it to my “packing tape”. The green one is crayon and the red one is coloured pencil. Crayon gives a more vibrant finish, although I prefer the washed out appearance from the coloured pencil. I guess anything would work as long as it’s waterproof.
The cool thing about this method of transfer is that ech time I’ve done it, the packing tape (or sticky backed plastic in my case) stays sticky even though it’s been wet, which is perfect for finishing the ATCs. I just smoothed it on and rubbed my scissor handles over it to get a really good contact between the transfer and the patterned postcard.
The back is finished with another plain postcard for neatness.
9 March, 2010 9:00 am | 
