Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

Chinese New Year Pom Pom Dragon

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Maddy’s latest make is this gorgeous pom pom dragon. Here are her words on how to make him 🙂

Maddy's pom pom Chinese dragon @minimoobear

 

You need red, yellow and blue acrylic yarn and some different coloured pipe cleaners plus something to make eyes; paper, felt or googly eyes will work.

First make 4 medium pom poms, roughly the size of the palm of an adult hand. These pom poms are work out as mostly red, with 1/6 of it wound in yellow. This makes the stripe down his back.

Next make 2 or 3 similarly coloured smaller ones to make the tail, getting smaller as they go along. You can decide how long to make his tail depending on how patient you are. Make another red/yellow medium one to be the nose and a really big one in the same colours to be the head (so, 5 medium, 1 large and 2-3 smaller ones).

Next a thinner pom pom (not too thickly wound) in blue to be the ruffle round his neck.

Now thread yarn through the centre of each pom pom (best to use a thick needle) in this order (medium, large, ruffle,, medium, medium, medium, smalls) and make a really big knot or thread a bead on each end and knot it to make the ends secure.

To make feet, fold a pipe cleaner over the central yarn  and twist it round to secure it as two legs, then make feet at each end. You could decorate the feet with felt or foam. Do one set near the head and one set near the tail.

Do similar ones with more pipe cleaners as horns and spikes wherever you fancy. Some between the nose and head look good as whiskers. Finish off with eyes.

dragon2

We tied some string lengths to places along the central yarn to hold it up. If you attach that to a stick, you get a pom pom puppet!

Chinese New Year Hama Beads

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This week my kids and I are going to spend some time revisiting Chinese New Year  and seeing what we can remember from previous times we’ve explored it. The Hama Bead patterns are old ones and have previously featured on our family blog but I thought I would pop them over here too. The dragon, which is done on the ordinary Hama dragon board, gets plenty of admiring comments  as he perambulates around the internet 🙂

hama chinese dragon

Maddy has a great craft lined up for tomorrow but I’m hoping I might persuade her to do another dramatic and brand new hama pattern too.

The same year we also had a go at making Hama Bead tangrams…

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These sort of worked – we had another go and made each individual piece too but the bumpy edges meant they weren’t good enough to play with. Did inspire the kids to actually print off some paper ones though.

One of the younger children made Chinese people. Clearly the whole red and gold thing had hit home, even if nothing else did!5416676904_81d415f431

I’m a little out of the blogging habit just now, what with one thing and another (and a lovely blanket to crochet!) but hopefully putting up a recycled craft here will inspire us all to be more creative tomorrow!

Embossed Fimo Snowflake Decorations

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It's nearly time to put away the winter crafts and Christmas is long behind us but here is one craft we loved doing this year and will definitely do again. Ill write it up now and put links in shortly or it will never get done!

First we cut out a snowflake from white fimo. It gets covered in powder so it doesn't matter if the white isn't perfect.

This is the back of the snowflake, which I left white but used texture plates to enhance a little. You can colour both sides but it makes it a little trickier. You could paint it with acrylics after it is all baked though; metallic colours would look great.

Flip the snowflake over and put heaps of mica powder (these are ejr powders) on the front. Smooth it in well and then rub the powder in with baking paper or your finger so it is well stuck down.

Once done, press a texture plate on to the front. Spot the deliberate mistake with my green one (as opposed to the blue one at the top… I didn't think about the angle of the snowflake so the writing is slanted!)

I use a roller on top of my texture plates to get an even pressure when I press a design in. Then heap a different colour of powder on to the snowflake, on top of the base (the green in my case) and distribute it across the snowflake. It will move easily but light pressure with a finger tip will press it on enough to stay in the depressions.

Bake your first snowflake, otherwise when it is added to the back one, it will have droopy 'petals'.

Now, cut a second, larger snowflake from more white fimo. Repeat the texturing of back and front and add a colour of powder to one or both sides. Make a hole for a hanging thread in the tip of one point.

Add a blob of liquid fimo to the larger snowflake, press the baked smaller snowflake on to it and rebake the two together.

Ejr powders can be varnished but seem to stay pretty well glued on even without 🙂

 

 

Pom Pom Snowball Fight.

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I saw this idea a year or so ago on Pinterest and will have to find the right place to credit it when I'm near a proper computer but this idea for making a Pom Pom snowball fight tickled Maddy very much when I told her about it and so she made it happen.

It turned out to be the perfect playtime craft for a Christmas Eve, nice and easy so no parental involvement required (if you use the lovely pom pom makers we have) and then ideal for burning off over excited per bed time energy when the stocking are out but sleep won't come!

Maddy made 16 medium sized white pom poms and filled to mini ikea steel buckets with them. Then all hell let loose as they pelted each other with them! The baby particularly liked it and no one got cold or hurt or needed drying out afterwards! Perfect!

It looked pretty too 🙂

 

Paper Snowflakes

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The inspiration for our felt snowflakes was the paper ones we make each year for our windows. This is such a perfect craft for kids; little ones can manage simple versions but older, more creative children can really enjoy working out what cuts will manipulate the paper into more exotic shapes.

As you can see, Maddy got pretty carried away with her versions – I’m not entirely sure they are snowflakes as nature intended, but who cares!

Here are some sites that will show you ways of cutting to make different effects.

High Hopes

Instructables

Inspiration for Home

If you really want to get carried away, what better than this pin to get your juices flowing!

Source: joybx.com via Merrily on Pinterest

We tend to laminate our snowflakes so they last for a year or two and have an extra sparkle. This year we seem to have quite a blizzard! Maddy is going to do some more of her own cutting ideas here at some point but we also love this idea; if white paper is too thick to cut easily, try using coffee filters!

Simple Sewn Snowflakes

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Since illness and panto-ing children mean we've not really started christmas here yet, we thought we would fest up a bit by celebrating winter instead. So we've jazzed up our murky foggy day with lots of snowflakes these last few days.

Recently my youngest girl made a gorgeous beaded bunting strip for a friend and, following a day making paper snowflakes, she thought the idea might be nicely applied to some felt versions.

Since having my error pointed out to me by a friend once, after we made (just WRONG!) 8 point snowflakes, we always make sure ours are folded into 6 triangles. This proved a little harder with our fairly substantial felt and I found we had to make decent sized flakes and occasionally unfold them a little to make the cuts as best we could. The rounded edged ones seemed to work the best as the slightly cuddly shape just seemed to work well in felt.

The girls stuck to very simple seed bead embellishments but I've got a bit of an urge to try some slightly more intricate ones with some embroidery. I really must learn to embroider properly.

These are going to be glue gunned to some pretty white ribbon and hung up in our French windows as dangling banners. We don't want real snow, thank you but some fake snow will do nicely!

 

Simple Paper Christmas Wreath

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Maddy created this really quick wreath a few days ago while I was running around taking our little boy to hospital. She takes her craft blogging very seriously 🙂 It’s very easy but it looks rather nice I think.

The wreath starts with a cereal box cardboard ring on the back, then squares of green craft paper cut out and bent slightly. Pinking shears are perfect for a prickly look 😉 I think Maddy cut red circles out for the berries but sticky dots would be perfect too. Once it was all stuck down and bent to satisfaction, she punched a hole in the top of the ring and hung it with a pipe cleaner. I think possibly a ribbon would have worked better, but still!

 

Fimo Snowman Snow Globes.

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A batch of cute little jars in the house and a frosty morning inspired a fresh go at snow globe asking this week. Baby food jars are not idea for this, as the lids don't refit well, but some cheap mini jam jars are great.

Maddy was in charge of this craft and she made a gorgeous little snowman out of fimo. (Tutorial to follow). The tricks we learned here were to build up a platform inside the jar lid that reaches above the thread of the jar, so as not to distort what you can see of the model with the thicker glass.

Make sure you leave a gap between the fimo and the lid edge that is large enough for the jar to screw closed (bitter experience!) and test it before adding the model and baking.

Once you've added your model and baked the lid and the fimo (make sure it's a metal lid, not plastic!), varnish it to add some glisten to it. It will look better. Then put white glitter into the bottom of the jar, fill with water and put the lid on. Make sure you do this over a sink to catch any displaced water!

If you want it to last and be water tight, paint around the lid with thick PVA afterwards. A better solution will be to hot glue gun in sealed after completion.

White glitter seems to take a while to settle and floats like a cloud to start with. Be patient though and your model will live long ins winter wonderland 🙂

 

Challenge: beat our gods eye snowflakes!

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While admiring something done by Red Ted Art the other week, I had the idea for some yarned snowflakes. So I took the kids out on a walk, collected sticks and when they got back they had a go.

To be honest, I think really we made spiderwebs, though if we spray them with glue and glitter, they'll make nice frosted ones 😉 I've been trying to come up with a way of improving them since and making them a little more crystal like, but I've not come up with anything pleasing yet. So I'm throwing it out there as a challenge; can you take the gods eye idea and improve it? I'd love to see your blog post or photo if you do!