Time out for crafting

Took some time out for myself over the last couple of weeks to start an art journal inspire me during my new weight loss journey with my sister.  I also wanted to alter a box I found in a charity shop as a gift for a dear friend...

Ahhh... I feel much better now!

Art Journalling

I have been teaching the children some different techniques to make backgrounds for their art journals as they always seem to get stuck on this.  These ones we made by spraying different coloured inks onto a page and then spraying over them with water to help them blend.  We then used stencils to make the 'watermark' kind of patters; you just lay down the stencil and then spray over with water.  You then 'dab' off the water with kitchen role and there you have it.  This just amazed the kids and they loved the effects they came up with.  The kids use cheap scrapbooks from the £1 shop for their journalling so we have to gesso the page first so that the the ink [or whatever medium you use] isn't absorbed into the paper.  Actually, whatever paper we use we gesso it first.

We used ready made inks for our backgrounds but you can make your own using the little bit of ink that is always left in your printer cartridges when you change them [how annoying is that?].  Just mix a little bit with water and put it in a pump spray; you can add mica [the shiney stuff] from make up or the craft shop if you want it to have glimmer.  You can mix different amounts of all the colours to make any colour at all... we learned all this from a fantastic crafting lady on You Tube and you can check out her video here.  It will be worth it as these sprays cost a fortune.  I think though if you want the 'glimmer' to stick to the page you need to add a tiny amount of glue but I think that this lady said it may 'go off' after a while.

Sorry these pics are not great because of the reflections bouncing off the glimmer in the ink sprays but I think you will get the idea of the effect inshaAllah.

Crush put a compass and fleur de lis in this background as he wants to use it for his cub scout stuff.

Daisy also chose the fleur de lis but wanted to make her page about the family - obviously a work in progress!

This is Sprites 2nd page - this time he spread gesso through the stencil to give a raised, textured effect.  He wants this page to be about time inshaAllah.

This is Sprites finished page.  He's not too happy with it but I think it looks great.

This is another page in Daisy's journal.  I think I have showed this before but she insisted it go on again and I do hate to disappoint her lol!

Modelling Fest

We have been really indulging our artsy side this Ramadhan [and beyond] and the kids have been modelling. I mean really modelling. With a passion. They have been modelling with plastic kits; modelling with foam, modelling with card, modelling with wood and tissue. Basically, anything they can get their hands on. They made: masks, knights, planes, tanks, landscapes, terrain for gaming, houses, huts, anything and everything. Here is a small sample of the stuff they have been doing...

A lot of the card models were downloaded free from either Currell Models, Raven's Blight or SS4's Paper Models.

Gardening firsts

This is our first harvest of the year, albeit a bit late because of the odd  weather & the floods it brought; I thought the plants would never recover but they did by the Grace of Allah. The kids were just thrilled to see the results of their efforts & our deformed (or are they normal?) carrots amused them for hours... Daisy even put on a 'puppet' show with them lol.

My first commission, yay!

I was commissioned to make this for a friends mum... I love doing these but the supplies are expensive here in the UK so it means that financially I just break even when I sell one but at least I get the enjoyment of making them... wishing I had relatives in the US at the moment; Joanns has a 40% off sale and they don't deliver to the UK LOL... Loved the colours in these papers, some of them were so nice I couldn't do much to them at all!