Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

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.

 

Rainbow PomPom Swag

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To celebrate the birth of our little boy, we made a gorgeous rainbow pompom swag to hand in our front window. It’s been a really popular feature on our blog so I thought I would add it here as our pom pom rainbow craft. It was either that or make an entire rainbow from them and frankly, I do not have the energy to even attempt that!

We used our pom pom makers for this craft and cheap and cheerful acrylic yarn from our local cheapy shop. Makes for a perfect craft that everyone joined in with. We all took a size of pom pom and went from very large to medium sized ones, doing half and half colours on each maker. The middle two are the largest size and half red/half orange and then the range slowly out in the same pattern through the colours, with blues and whites for sky and clouds at each end. It ended up hanging in the window for months, cheering up the room in the face of some extremely miserable British ‘Summer’ weather.

This would work beautifully as a group project in a classroom or as part of a greater weather project. I seriously considered windows full of silver threaded raindrops, snowballs, a huge fluffy sun and clouds hanging from the ceiling!

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Rainbow Baby Blanket

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This one is not really a craft I would normally put on this website but it deserves more attention than it gets on my ordinary blog. I’m not going to attempt to describe how I knitted my more complicated rainbow blanket, as I wasn’t that pleased with it anyway but the simple stripey one was a pleasure to do and definitely counts as a simple craft 😉 You can read more about it here, if you would like to where it was first posted.

It’s double seed stitch and in various shades of Lang Superwash Merino 120 (which is nearly impossible to find online). The rows are 120 stitches long and the white stripes are 6 rows and the coloured stripes are 8 rows, except for the two end reds which are 6 rows (knew I would run out of wool!) The edges are finished in double crochet. As knitting a blanket goes, it’s a lovely frothy light stitch which has proved to be really warm and snuggly and soft enough to bend and snuggle comfortably round a baby, but light enough in the summer too. Perfect really. It was easy to knit it while pregnant, which was good as I was short on brain power and the ends wove into it fairly easily too afterwards. It’s stood up to washing well, thankfully. I highly recommend Lang yarn but if you know of another bright and soft wool, use that as Lang is tricky to find.

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Rainbow Hama Bead Pattern

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Rainbow Hama Bead PatternThe delicious bright colours of Hama Beads really lend themselves to rainbow crafting. I’ve had loads of ideas for doing rainbows over the years, from pictures to coasters, to threaded ones on yarn and earphones and decorations for a tree in the garden that lends itself to rainbow is our family history. Sometimes though, simple is good. So to get us started, this pattern is an easy picture which was first featured on BeadMerrily. It is part of a series of designs based on the weather and the seasons and is a good first pattern for children who want to work on bigger Hama Bead designs as it is largely symmetrical and easy to see if you go wrong. The colours can be varied slightly to suit what you have; you could even go for a very surreal rainbow on a greyer day if you wanted. It would make a lovely window design, hung from a thread, if you made it in translucent colours too.

Since rainbows lend themselves well to St Patrick’s Day, here is another pattern with a pot of gold that we did for that time of year. It’s lovely, I think. Although admittedly I am biased 😉

Required: Large Hama Bead Hexagon pegboard, hama beads, iron, ironing paper. Large round for the second one.

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