Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

Pumpkin Glow Pot

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Here is a quick and fun way to use up the strips of crochet you accumulate when a child is learning that craft.My 10 year old actually taught me to crochet, but is still happiest turning out long chains. I got her to do a long piece in bright orange acrylic wool for me, so we could make a pumpkin pot using some glass baby food jars we have stashed.

As you can see, he turned out really well. It’s so simple; one long chain of yarn, crocheted in orange. Then paint a jar in tacky glue and wind the crochet around the jar. We did felt shapes for eyes and nose and mouth in yellow, but I think for a quirky effect, we might replace them with black tomorrow. The felt got glued on too.

For a bit of fun, Amelie covered the lid of the jar in green fimo to give him a top. She decided it turns him into a French pumpkin! If you use an electric tea light for the glow effect, you’ll be able to leave this lid on while he’s ‘alight’ – obviously with a flame tea light, the lid will make him go out though!

For the record, we put a flame tea light in. The yarn is synthetic and can’t burn easily. I lit it once the candle was inside (grown up job!) but you could flame proof the yarn if you wished. Be careful – and don’t do anything silly with it. We aren’t responsible for anything daft you do while making or lighting this 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.

 

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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