Printed Father's Day Cards

How to make a Father's Day card in 10 mins!

We used polystyrene pizza bases (I have a stack under the sink for such occasions) and 'E' used a pencil to draw a picture, Daddy in this case.

I went over the picture a bit harder to make the lines deeper.

Then we painted some block printing colour over our tray, but you can use any paint, I have used poster paint before.

Place your paper or card over the top and smooth it down with a flat hand and peel back to reveal your print.

How To Needle Felt a Flower Brooch

Here it is a little needle felting flower project for you.

Where am I going to get the materials from? you might be asking.

Well, I have listed a few links for companies I have used at the end of this post and you can also get supplies from various Etsy and Ebay shops.


I also thought that I would have a little competition. If you fancy having a go at the wonderful craft of needle felting, post 'I would love to have a go at this' with your comment below and I will pull a couple of names out of a hat and send you a little kit to get you started.
You can't say farer than that, can you?

**Competition closes Saturday 25th April 2008 at 1200BST**

Ok, so what you will need to needle felt a flower brooch are the following supplies;

• A felting needle
• merino fleece
• a dense foam sponge
• a cookie cutter of the shape you want
• sewing supplies
  
• a safety pin or brooch back
• and a button, oh and a cup of tea (very important)

• 

This is what a felting needle looks like, you might just be able to see from the photo that there are little nicks in the needle end. These are called 'barbs' and they are what makes the fleece felt together. They come in different gauges for different types of work. The larger the gauge the quicker it felts, but it leaves visible holes and you then need to work with a finer needle but it then depends on the fleece you are using.......... I could go into more detail but I'll leave that for another post.

For this project I used a finer needle.

Start by pulling your fleece (plucking) into small tufts and piling it into a cookie cutter, filling it up right to the top.



Poke (stab) your needle into the fleece, you want to gently push the needle through the fleece and into the sponge but not to far or hard.


Once the fleece has flattened a bit, take the cutter off.....


...........and carefully pull the shape off the sponge. Little tufts of fleece will have been poked into the sponge.

Now, your shape will look a bit of a mess, but don't worry, you still have some work to do.


Put the cookie cutter back onto the sponge, turn your shape over and put it back in the cutter.
Repeat the stabbing and turning over few more times, you will see the fleece 'felt' together, firm up and form a more solid shape.

(sorry about the rubbish photo!)

In-between taking the flower off of the sponge and turning it over you can poke the fleece round the edges.
WARNING: this is when I stab myself, so be careful!!
This will make your flower shrink a bit more and firm up the petals.


The great thing about needle felting is that you can sculpt it. If it is a bit wonky and lopsided you can felt it a bit more on that side. You can shape the petals by poking the needle in-between them.


When your flower is smooth and you feel it is firm enough to sew the pin onto firmly, it's done.


Choose a button for the centre and sew on and sew a pin onto back.



Supplies
All the materials are fairly cheap with needles around 80p-£1.00 each and the fleece is about £1.50 for 10g and the sponges range from 80p to £2.00. But you can used any dense foam, car washing or bath sponges.
You can also by kits with a variety of coloured merino fleece, needles and a sponge for around £9.50-£15.

I have brought supplies on the internet from Christy Bears and getknitted and from Art Van Go and Crafty Notions at show events.

Recently, I have been looking at ebay suppliers and there are a couple of interesting ones in the uk- KRAFT MANIA and Needdleworks Pleasures. They both have a really nice selection of colours.

FeltFinland blog has a list of suppliers, one of which is fantastic looking Wingham Wool Works, serious fleece!

These Christmas decorations were made the same way.

Hope this has given you enough info to inspire you to have a go, any questions just ask:-)

Make a Sunflower.

Why not make a sunflower, you will need...............

Paper plates or card cut into a circle, white glue, yellow and orange tissue paper and lentils or split peas (optional)

Cut the tissue into triangles and glue round the edge of your plate.

For the centre you can either glue on more tissue or..................

put lot's of glue in the centre of your plate and pour on the lentils and pour off the excess lentils that haven't stuck.

One Week Wine

What do you do with all these brambles? we asked ourselves. Then it came to me, One Week Wine!

I had seen a 'how to' in CRAFT:03 so we decided to give it a go.


What you need is.................

a container, sieve, yeast, 2 litres of bramble type berries and (though we didn't think so at the time) muslin.

We started by pushing the brambles through the sieve..........

but we soon realised that squeezing them through muslin would get more juice out.

Decant the juice into a screw top container.

Add about a level tea spoon of yeast and leave for 7-10 days.

Do not keep the lid on really tight, this could cause a build up of gas and it will explode! Keep the container slightly unscrewed so as to let some of the gas out. Do not open the container and look in, if you do the air will react with the wine and could cause it to bubble out.

After 7-10 days your wine will be ready to decant........

let it stand untouched for 6 hours so the sediment will settle and then pass through some muslin.

And there you go, one week wine.

It might look quite inviting but it tastes bloody awful!

It was used today as part of a barbecue sauce recipe and I did toy with the idea of making it into Sangria!

It might not taste to good but it was fun to make and we are now planning our next adventure in home brewing and eyeing up our neighbours apples!!!

Make your own envelopes.

I love handmade envelopes but it's taken me a while to have a go at making my own but I have to say I now love making them and got carried away and made loads!

Want to make some? here is how:

Find an envelope the same size as one you want to make and carefully pull it open. This will be your template.

Select some paper for your envelope. You can use anything including magazine pages, wall paper or scrap paper.

Draw round your envelope....

and cut it out.

Now this is the bit I just discovered and it makes your finished envelope really neat.

Place your envelope template on top of your cut out envelope. Fold the envelopes together using the template envelope as a guide for the folds.

Fold all the sides in, remove the template envelope.......

and glue the side flaps closed.

There you go, handmade envelopes, you can even make your own glue that can be licked to seal closed.