Another Year Older

How to Train Your Dragon continues to fire Jessica's imagination. At some stage, she requested a "Night-light" cake, at which point I stopped listening to all the other requests that came because I quite fancied the challenge of modelling one of the offsprings of Toothless and the Lightfury. She was thrilled with the result; I thoroughly enjoyed making the dragon and having a go at marbling fondant icing. If you fancy giving it a go, this is the tutorial I used for the marbling: Wilton Tutorial

 

Miniature Modelling

There are times when Jessica takes advantage of my keeness to craft and I start to question my sanity. Last weekend I found myself modelling all sorts of things from polymer clay and hot glue for her Sylvanian families. It was therapeutic and Jessica was delighted but surely there were better things I could have been doing with my time!

It all began with making bowls of cream for the cats...

These were moulded around small marbles, baked and then filled with hot glue "cream". Jessica then decided that they needed remote controls for their television and a ladder to reach their top bunk in the caravan. Naturally, they also needed a new set of tiaras as well. 

 

Perhaps this weekend Christmas will arrive in the Sylvanian town and I'll find myself making tiny rrees, lights and tinsel!!! I will not be giving these ideas to Jessica; we're going to be far too busy finishing Christmas gifts.

 

Pine Cone Rudolph Decoration

This little fellow is a make from a few years ago that I seem never to have shared although I love him. This under five minute make has felt ears, googly eyes, a ruby red pom-pom nose, twig antlers and the ability to make you smile year after year when he comes out of storage!

 

The Christmas Craft Cupboard is Open!

That's right - we're beyond October half term, so it must be time to crack on with some Christmas crafting, surely!! As a result of returning to teaching and struggling to adjust to a new work-life balance we didn't do much for Christmas 2019 but I have built up a huge supply of blanks and bits in the sales over the past two years so we've certainly got enough to get us through this lockdown comfortably! 

Today we kicked off with polymer clay modelling. Jessica wanted to do a Christmas tree and snowman (again) but I think we might be ready to try something like a penguin next time! 

These lovely little creations are destined to hang on our tree in fillable baubles looking like little snow globes. We've got a few different options for the shapes and sizes of baubles and for the accompanying filling matter currently in my stores from places like Hobbycraft and Poundland and haven't decided exactly what form they will take yet but here's the general idea...

With the remaining warmed up clay, Jessica decided to also make some little marbled pendants in unusual shapes. I love how simple rolling and folding creates such beautiful effects.

We use Fimo Soft, which is smooth and easy to blend. The colour does bleed onto hands and surfaces so you have to be slightly careful and be prepared to clean your workspace between colours if you need to keep crisp colours and brilliant white. It's a lovely activity for everyone and I'm always surprised how far a little block will go.

Unicorn Baubles

I've turned my attention to my sister's tree now; her style is somewhat different from mine! I have to admit though, these have been my favourite baubles to create this year and I'm really pleased with how they've come out...

These are made from fillable baubles, which means that the glitter is all enclosed! Jessica and I painted the inside of the baubles with clear PVA glue and poured in the glitter. She also helped me make the horns from Fimo Soft. I then painted the eyes with acrylic paint and made the ears from card before using my cool glue gun to put it all together with a few ribbon roses and crystal flower to finish them off. We've made four large and two small unicorns and I can't promise that Sarah will get all six because I think Jessica is going to love them!

Harry Potter Wands

Let's have a break from all this Christmas talk for a moment and have a look at a selection of Harry Potter style wands I have been creating shall we?!

These have been so much fun to make and are going to be sold to raise funds for the Friends of Braiswick Primary next week. They are made from chopsticks, air-drying clay, melting glue (I preferred using my cool melt glue gun but hot glue would be fine) and a selection of acrylic paints. Cheap as chips and utterly fabulous results. This won't be the last time I make these!

Snow Globe Baubles

So, this is what we did with our Christmas tree and snowman figures from yesterday. We glued them to the base of fillable baubles and added a scoop of artificial snow and glitter to create fabulous little snow globe baubles.

We also used a miniature gold bottle-brush tree to do the same thing, which will look stunning on our tree but has far less charm and character than our entirely homemade ones above!

Introducing Fimo

My word, Jessica enjoyed crafting with Fimo this afternoon. I had picked up a Fimo Soft Christmas Kit when it was on offer a few weeks ago so we had some good colours to play with and a moulding tray to try out but we quickly went rogue and decided to try making candy-canes. Jessica was so good at making them; I was so impressed! The ones pictured above are all her own work and I love them all! The bigger ones, at least, are definitely destined for my Christmas tree.

It is such a long time since I last dabbled with polymer clay (we're talking a couple of decades here!) and I'd forgotten just how good it is. It's wonderfully simple and very satisfying. As well as the candy-canes and a few little things from the moulding tray we made this snowman and Christmas tree together. I have a feeling we'll be making more before the festive season is through! Just wait until you see what we did with these figures later in the day...

Air Drying Clay Bowl

The second gift for Vicky's birthday was entirely handmade. We wrapped cling film around a bowl and then layered thin circles of air drying clay on top to form a flower shaped bowl. We had used this type of clay once before at a group we used to attend at Fingringhoe Wick but never to make something functional. Once dry, Jess painted it with acrylic paints. We only painted the inside so that the clay can continue to breath and dry in case it wasn't completely dry. I didn't like the idea of trapping moisture in the clay, which would eventually go moldy. With hindsight I think we should have used thicker circles of clay because I think it's probably very fragile and brittle but that's not my problem now that we've given it away!!! ;-)

What Came First?

What came first, the chicken or the egg? Well, we weren't aiming for a chicken but nevertheless, in our case the egg definitely came before the bird, and it was polystyrene egg! Jessica made this little bird from the polystyrene egg, which she painted before giving it wings, a tail, eyes and a beak. I was left to create the feet from thick, purple wire. You could attach a hook to the top of these if you wanted to hang them up or paint extra details like a red breast but we opted for super simple...

Junk Modelling Cat

My collection of "junk" is extensive. I just can't bring myself to put coffee tins, toilet rolls, plastic lids, yogurt pots or egg cartons out for recycling. It just sits in the conservatory waiting for inspiration to hit. Today the lightning bolt hit Jessica and she decided to make a... wait for it... oh yes, no surprises here, a cat! She chose four toilet rolls and two egg cartons from my collection. We cut out the central pieces from one egg carton to make the ears. After raiding my craft cupboards for tape,  glue, acrylic paint, googly eyes, pipe cleaners, a pompom and a feather we set to work and created this...

Here's a side-view to showcase the feathery tail...

As you might imagine, Jessica is very proud of this model of Nala, the cat from down the road!

First Birthday Cake

Jessica turned 1 last week – where did that time go?! Setting myself up for a challenge every year, here is the first birthday cake that I made her.

  

She adores cats and is a monster with a ball of wool so the design decision was an easy one!

Needle Felted Penguin

To save the reindeer from the previous post being lonely on Sarah’s mantelpiece I have made him a friend in the form of a penguin. It’s inspired by a kit that Hobbycraft had out for Christmas (but quickly sold out of). I couldn’t get hold of the kit, which included everything you needed to make a family of three penguins, including the needles, for just £3 so I just bought their styrofoam eggs and used my own equipment. My dark wool is probably a bit coarse for this really but fluffy penguins are cute, right?! Anyway, I chopped the bottom off the egg to give a nice flat surface and then pricked away doing the belly then the black and finally the eyes and nose. I was impressed with how easily the wool fused to the styrofoam and will definitely be using the technique again.

Here he is, what do you reckon?!

Upcycled Coca-Cola Can

Inspired by an article I saw on WonderHowTo (click here for more details) I set about making a Coca-Cola can rose this evening. What a marvellous way to upcycle a humble drink can. I even managed to do it without cutting myself, which was no mean feat. This one is not recommended for children! I lost one petal in the process and spent ages attempting to shape it. The post that I linked to above has got a you-tube tutorial showing you how to make them. It’s very easy to follow. If you do take a look you’ll see just how much more practice I need. His rose is much more accomplished and fuller than mine!

More Seed Bead Creations

It’s just possible that I am already hooked on weaving delicate creations from seed beads and wire. The snow put an end to any ideas of getting back to Mum, Sarah and the kids this weekend so, on Friday night, when I would ordinarily be doing battle with the M1, M6, M54 and A5, I tried out another couple of the patterns from my new book.

As any regular blog reader will know, my husband loves a crafted mouse so I first beaded this little creature to go with his knitted and felted mice…

  

Then I decided to brave a butterfly that the book claims to be a difficulty rating of “intermediate”. It wasn’t too hard to do but it was a challenge to gauge how much wire to allow for the weaving of the wings, which is why a couple of them are sitting slightly too far from the butterflies body. I don’t think I’ll be progressing to “hard” just yet but I’ve definitely got the taste for this little craft.

Origami Colibri Hummingbird

As we all know, first anniversaries are traditionally meant to be gifted with paper. So, back in 2010 for our first anniversary I spent hours and hours perfecting the skill of folding a Colibri Hummingbird from paper for David. Three years on, here’s the little fella standing proudly on my clothes horse!

Although it’s Ruby-throated rather than Colibri, here is one of my own video clips of a hummingbird feeding in Texas from our holiday in 2011…

Book Review - Project Origami, Thomas Hull

Although there is a second edition of this book out at the end of this month (click here for details) I only just got this one for Christmas. It’s brilliant. Mind you, it is very definitely another one of those books that will appeal to the few of us who really are passionate about both Mathematics and crafting.

 

This book consists of 22 activities to inspire mathematical discovery in the classroom through origami. They range from “folding equilateral triangles in a square” to “rigid folds – Gaussian curvature and spherical trigonometry”. The worksheets and solutions are carefully produced and, at least at first glance, appear to be very useable while the pedagogy and extension sections are really interesting.

 

Although the material is primarily aimed at higher education Mathematics courses such as topology, number theory, calculus and graph theory, many of the activities can be adapted to suit high school Mathematics too. It will just take a bit of creativity, flexibility and plenty of enthusiasm to see them through.

 

Once they have constructed the net of a truncated icosahedron (football), I have often challenged my key stage 4 classes to colour the net so that no two faces of the same colour touch before cutting and folding the net into the 3-dimensional shape. This book has given me some further ideas on this topic and next week I’m going to attempt to introduce my Year 10s to the concept of planar graphs allowing them to demonstrate that four colours are sufficient to colour the ball without like-coloured faces touching.

 

Imagine putting a football (which is made up of 20 hexagons and 17 pentagons) onto the table, stretching the bottom face out and pushing the rest of the ball down flat onto the table so that none of the edges cross. This creates the following planar graph of a truncated icosahedron:

Note that this representation only shows 31 faces as the 32nd shape (the final pentagon) is stretched out underneath all of the others. This new 2-dimensional representation of a football clearly shows which faces touch each other, making the colouring problem significantly easier to tackle. It is easy enough to show that three colours are not sufficient so all they need to do is to colour the diagram with four colours so that no two adjacent shapes are the same colour and the outer hexagons are coloured using only three colours (so that the hidden pentagon can be coloured in the fourth colour). This is a simple exercise that they will have no problems with. It can then be extended to a 3-edge-colouring problem, which is even more interesting!

 

That’s why I keep asking for these kinds of books. They give me so much inspiration and help me to steer clear of hum drum textbook learning once in a while. I know it’s a niche market but while they keep publishing this kind of material I will keep buying it. Sorry David, my quirky library is ever expanding.

Late but definitely worth the wait

Okay, so I ran out of green paper but you have to admit that this Sierpinski tetrahedral structure made out of 256 individual tetrahedrons is pretty impressive. Each edge of the structure is 64cm long so I have had to be careful carrying it around school – it just about fits through the doors!

Two of my students also constructed a beautiful topper for our Christmas tree. Again it was done properly using a pair of compasses and consists of equilateral triangles. There are three of the snowflakes taped together to create a sort of pyramid that sits on top of tetrahedral structure.

The topper is another example of a fractal and is called a Von Koch Snowflake. You start with an equilateral triangle and draw three more equilaterals, which have sides a third of the original, in the centre of the three sides. Now do the same on the twelve new sides and repeat as many times as you like as shown in the diagram below.

Our Van Koch Snowflake began with an equilateral triangle of sides 9cm. The next iteration used 3cm equilaterals and we stopped once we’d done the 1cm triangles as this was fiddly enough using a pair of compasses.

Mathematics really is beautiful.

Bamboo Hyperbolic Paraboloid

On Thursday night I needed something to occupy my mind and keep myself awake while I waited for David to come home so I decided to make this…

It’s a hyperbolic paraboloid, which is a surface shaped like a saddle made from perfectly straight bamboo skewers. This is known as a doubly ruled surface since it is created from two families of rulings (straight edges).

Mathematically it is given by the Cartesian equation 

Structurally it is created by forming a tetrahedral frame and gluing bamboo skewers from one side to another in one direction and then again in the opposite direction. Finally (and preferably once completely dry and solid) you remove the two unused skewers to leave you with the saddle or giant pringle! It looks amazing if you hang it and allow it to spin on an axis.

Unfortunately, this story has a sad end. I took my work into school on Friday to share my creation with fellow appreciators of geometry but Yavuz dropped it. This knocked some of the skewers off and compromised the structural integrity of the surface. It is now back in the form of 24 individual sticks and is waiting to be reconstructed using a stronger glue before it can take its place in my classroom.

Jubilee fever & clay mermaids

It was a jubilee special in the Cbeebies Art magazine this edition so Katryn and I have been busy this half term. Actually, I’ve avoided doing too much and have let her get on with it.

She made four of these royal portraits out of various stickers and foam pads…

The jubilee bunting required a lot of cutting and sticking and the odd bit of colouring…

I also finally let her break into one of her Christmas presents from me. She made and painted six plaster mermaids and attached magnets to the back of them. She did really well painting them because the brush was quite thick and the mermaids were quite intricate. We do love a bit of arts and crafts!