Simple Crafts

A craft for everything & everything in a craft.

Foam & Felt Mother’s Day Card

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I’m not always very good at mixing my crafting media; I tend to make something out of all felt, or all Fimo etc But I happened to find myself playing with a Spring craft pack the other day that had been created in our shop for a set of bloggers and it pulled together a variety of different early years materials that I wouldn’t normally be playing with. The result was a very happy afternoon making some very gorgeous items with my girls which thoroughly pleased us 🙂 We made various cards from the items in the kit and Josie did a great job of making something really pretty out of an assortment of different materials.

I’m going to give pride of place to my favourite one though which is nothing more complicated than layering a set of items together but really worked for me; it has sat on the shelf for a week or two now but I’m liking it so much it may end up staying!

Easy Mothers Day Card

I’ve taken a liking to craft foam recently, having never really played with it before. These self adhesive shapes are great and I like the way you can swap them about to give a multicoloured look to the tulips. I stuck them on to felt and then used glue squares from last months Bostik challenge to to stick that to the felt rectangle I glued on to the card with a bit of a 3D effect. It’s all terribly simple and the materials are deceptively basic, but the effect is quite stunning.

Josie made more cards too.

simple mothers day crafts

Apparently I put the one on the left sideways. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy.

Disclosure: on our other blog, we are part of the Bostik challenge and receive some free items from them which we used this month for these cards. The kits come from our own shop, CraftMerrily.

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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Felted Flower Picture.

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A few weeks ago a visit to a re-enactment day and the girls loved the idea of wet felting. We’ve needle felted before but not wet felted so we pulled out our trusty supplies, looked up how to do it and had a go. In the few relatively nice days we had this summer, the girls sat on the patio with soap and water and blended fibres and got wet and messy but clean at the same time!

Being a little slapdash and short on attention, their desire to create intricate pieces was fairly short lived. They did enjoy the process and the fun of making up blends of colours but were short on patience at making really flat felt. This left us with lots of pieces of felted wool in a variety of fun mixes and nothing to quite do with them so we hit upon the idea of a collage style picture.

We cut leaf and petal shapes from all the different pieces of felt and then needle felted (it was raining!) some blue and green blends together. Then we stuck some linen on to the board at the back of a large 30″ picture and stuck the sky and grass backing on to the linen.

Once they were no, we arranged petals and central circles on to the scene and stuck them down with tacky glue. The felted stems were twists of fibre needle felted into shape and stuck down. Once completed we put a dark wood frame on it and got it ready for the wall. You’d have a picture of it there if I hadn’t smashed the frame carrying it out to take this picture!

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