Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

Crafty Bottle Cat

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This gorgeous creature was made by Maddy after she was inspired by the shape of a beer bottle left on the side one morning. He reminds me of Carwash from Willow the Wisp, but Maddy didn’t know the character so I think it is co-incidence.

This cat would make a great Halloween cat, though you might want to make him black in that case, and was lovely and easy to do.

First Maddy balanced a polystyrene ball on top of the beer bottle and glued it down on the neck. Once that was dry, she used PVA glue to stick pieces of red tissue to cover the bottle and the ball until all of it was covered. Then it was left to dry for a day or two, with a covering of PVA glue painted on top of all the paper bits to give it a glossy finish.

Maddy made some body parts from polymer clay; a nose, tail, paws, front legs and ears. Once the main body was dry, these were glued on to him with tacky glue and his features added with permanent black marker.

I think he’s purrrrrrrr….fect! 😉

 

Autumnal Fimo Candle Votive

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Sometimes when I’m trying out a new idea in Fimo, what I like to do is have a go at a very simple version first and then see what I like and don’t like about it before I go on to try a more complex version. Family life does tend to mean that I never get to the complicated version, or I don’t ever blog what I do make because I’m not happy with the finished product! In fact this blog is partly for exactly those projects; things I know someone else will probably do a better job of than I will but might not have had the particular idea in the first place 😉 This particular project started off as a quick try out of an idea though and when I test ran it, I liked it far more than I thought. So I give you a simple Fimo Autumn themed votive, which looks LOVELY when lit and pretty good when it isn’t too!

The original plan for these autumn jars was for them to be complex, similar to the flower jars we made on recycled jars early on in the summer. I wasn’t feeling terribly creative on the day though and just made some simple oak leaf shapes using an icing sugar cutter and some branches that looped around the jar so it would all hold together. Then I decorated it with some very simple acorn halves and baked it, feeling rather disgruntled with my efforts.

These were the things I wanted to do better.

1) Texture the branches.

2) Use texture plates to make more realistic leaves and make them thinner and less chunky.

3) Look more closely at acorns and learn how to make them in polymer clay.

4) Build up the base with more detail  to hide the tealight.

I’ve created several Pinterest boards to develop the theme a little more including a Hedgerow theme and Autumn Crafts and Nature Crafts and I think I’ll be back to working on this, because autumn colours and shapes really please me. However, in the end, the way it looked in the dark pleased me enough to think it deserved a little outing even in its first incarnation.

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Rainbow Storage Jars.

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Following on from the success of the flower Fimo jars last week, I had an urge to try out rainbows on jars too. I had an idea in my head of a candle votive decorated in coloured spirals and thoughts it would be fun to experiment with a few designs on some small jars. I quickly found that Fimo Classic or Sculpey Premo was the best type of polymer clay for this; while Soft clings well to the jars, it is too hard to get a neat rope from it. I’ve not done a lot with Premo in the past but I suspect I’ll be coming back to it as I really enjoyed working with the purple colour I used.

Fimo is ideally suited to quick rainbow making as it comes in the perfect colours, so no mixing required. The only blending I did was to make the slightly more muted leaf colour on one of the jars, otherwise these are straight out of the packet.

My first attempt was the one second from the left, which is fine but I rushed and wasn’t too pleased with. After that I remembered seeing Starless Clay on Etsy once, so I had a look at her for inspiration. I adore her work and am hopelessly jealous of her talents but I used her for inspiration (I hope she will be flattered not annoyed!) I didn’t attempt any of her fancy filigree or marking of the spirals but did cut chunks out of my spirals with a circular cutter and fitted them together that way. It was surprisingly easy to do that, I can’t work out if I’m naturally talented with circles ( ;)), lucky or there is some circular mathematical magic going on I don’t understand.

After that I used some other small sized cutters to make a random jar covered in geometric shapes to see how far you can stretch the requirement for the Fimo to loop around the jar to hold it all in place. It did work but one of my girls broke it before I varnished it to make it stronger. Fun though and a design I will probably come back to.

Last up was the flowered one; I just loved the rainbow palette of colours for this, it really seemed to work in a perfect, natural balance. The flowers and leaves could easily be made by hand but I stuck to cutters for speed and a uniform look to it all. It’s given me an urge to try some crewel style designs in polymer clay.

Lastly, Maddy stuck much more firmly to the rainbow brief in her version, which is a change jar decoded with a rainbow (and blue bird) and a photo of her when she was little. She’s going to do a step by step blog post on how to do this soon.

 

Fimo Flower Jars

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Recycling glass might have got much easier than it used to be around here, now that we can put it all straight in our ordinary recycling bin, but I do often feel I ought to be able to make more of jam jars and the like; they feel like a free resource that should be crafted especially as we currently have lots of baby food jars too (I know, I know…)

So this week I had to provide a craft for children in a group we go to so I took jars along with us. I also took the flower cutters I have (made for icing) but I’ve blogged before about hand making fimo flowers, which is just as interesting? As it happened, the kids made as many of their own flowers as they cut them out and were very creative.

Amazingly, they spent all day poring over their creations and as a craft it worked brilliant, especially for using up scrap polymer clay. The results were stunning.

The premise is really simple. Polymer clay will hold to glass around a shape so long as there is a continuous loop. The clay bakes and contracts and so a loop will grip on to the jar. You can varnish for extra stickiness and gloss and strength to the pieces but it isn’t necessary. The kids built up designs of looping stems, leaves and flowers to make vases, candle holders, pen pots… You name it. The front left one, while clay intensive, has holes pushed to the glass in every flower to let candle light out afterwards.

The kids all interpreted their designs in their own way and as you can see, my Maddy did her very own thing again! I can see us coming back to this idea again and I’ve been collecting some inspiration of my Fimo Pinterest board.

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Simple Fimo Tree Picture

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This was a lovely easy craft to introduce Fimo Polymer Clay to children. It can be adapted to different seasons and will be enjoyed by children of all abilities.

simple fimo tree

Full instructions are available where this craft was first published at Fimo-Ideas. Fimo can be purchased at CraftMerrily. Step by step instructions for future crafts will appear on this site and will be unique. This post is just to provide early content.

Required: Scrap Fimo/Sculpey, pressure plates, baking tray

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