sunday craft-in on the cheap.

I must say, there is nothing better than a cold autumn sunday spent crafting and cooking a roast... and what better to accompany a whole afternoon of work than watching Gone With The Wind is all its amazing nearly-four-hour glory!

Ahh.... a perfect sunday in.

Now, make it even a little better because you are crafting and eating on the cheap!

The Meal: Roast Pork Neck Fillet (cheap from the butchers, and made from a Jamie magazine recipe)
The Craft: turn a few rolls of clearance sticky back plastic into a total flat make over.

Ta Da!



Here's how to do it...

Draw a rough design of what you want for your wall (I obviously have a fixation with trees and bird silhouettes and shadows, so naturally this craft lends itself to my own design interests....)... but you can do virtually anything. Basically if it has a recognizable shape and/or casts a shadow, you can craft it.

If you don't feel confident with your own drawing skills... cheat a bit with google images or... log on to fontface a site with tons of free fonts - many of which are not letters at all, but interesting shapes and silhouettes!

Then measure out your drawing, measure your wall, work out a rough scale, cut out the shapes and mount them on the wall.

Ok, so I glossed over those steps for ease - but really, it can be as easy or complicated as you want it to be. If you aren't very confident start with something simple.

For this craft I free-cut the trees as I mounted them piece by piece, measuring each end to make sure the pieces lined up - and then I randomly cut the holes and knots to give a birch tree effect.

The birds are a combination of images of birds I found online, and a bird font I found online as well... I then enlarged them to the right proportions.

Once you have gently laid all the pieces in the right place and you are happy with it, run your library card/credit card over the whole thing to make sure there are no air bubbles and everything is well stuck on.



Note: This is a temporary decor idea, which will stay up as long as you want it to (as long as you don't leave any huge air bubbles)... if you use the right products, they will peel off without pulling the paint... when you are ready to take them down, just use a hair dryer to warm up the plastic (as instructed on the packaging) and it will be far less likely to ruin any paint job.

all this for only £6.48? not a bad sunday afternoon in my books!


And if you are watching films and making nice food, why not share it with some friends who can lend a hand and advise on turning your ideas into a mock-mural.

beatlemania...

These days everywhere you turn around the Beatles are back... for a group that broke up many many years ago, they seem to be doing a lot of business in 2009!

I've been playing with my layered portraits a bit more, and decided to try layering paper on canvas... who better to be a test project than the fab four themselves?


This little gift idea was inspired by catching site of the Beatles Rock Band game in the window of a shop the other day... I figured it would be a fun challenge to see if I could preserve such inconic faces in paper craft!

Beatles portraits and other famous faces are for sale in my Dawanda shop!

don't forget furry friends!

Furry friends are worth of crafting too!

here is a portait based on a snapshot of what is definitely my most favourite dog in the world.


I did this portrait in heavy card, to give a stronger/bolder look than the lighter/feathery papers I usually use... seems like the possibilities are endless!

smoke rings remain...

Since leaving life in the big smoke, it seems that London seems to be constantly on my mind... not necessarily in the sense that I miss it, but I think the city became such a big part of my life, that every new experience I have in Manchester is seen through a comparative 'London Lens'.

Of course, living in London is not just a part of life - Living in London becomes your life... its an amazing beast of a city that sweeps you off your feet and carries you away with its fast pace and pulsating life... so its only natural that now that I have left it, I still notice the imprint its left on my mind.

Leaving London didn't just mean leaving the city behind, it also marked leaving an amazing friend and flatmate - and a turning point in both our lives. I moved north to begin my new studies, and she took that giant leap into property ownership... so what better way to celebrate her new digs, and commemorate the end of our London life than to make her a housewarming gift.

As I become increasingly obsessed with paper and textiles, I was inpsired by some art I saw at the Great Northern Contemporary Craft Fair where one of the artists took a long sheet of what looked like postal wrapping paper, and painted and stiched designs of a skyline into it... I took that idea in a different direction and created a little piece inspired by the view from our former Battersea abode.



Ah yes, I spent many a day knee deep in craft supplies looking out over the inconic Battersea Power station recovering the energy I spent in London while expelling the creativity that the city inspired within me.

The craft is made of a combination of papers and threads, all handstiched together and layered to represent a number of inconic pieces of the London Skyline - can you recognize them?