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I’ve never really been into Pokemon.  It kinda passed me by as a child.  But Pokemon Go has me totally addicted.  And, being who I am, when I become addicted to something I start to craft.

I just had to make some team badges…

The big ones are 45mm and cost £1.  The little ones are 25mm and cost 50p.  They’re available to buy on my store here.

You can also pop along and buy them at the inaugural Pokemon Go Party hosted by the Pokemon Go Basingstoke page on Facebook. The event will be this Saturday, July 30th 2016, at Eastrop Park from 2pm-7pm.  Meet lots of other trainers in a beautiful park that just so happens to have lots of Pokestops.  There’ll probably be a few Lures floating around too 🙂

I will be there selling the team badges, as well as some Pokeball badges and even some Pokemon badges.  You’ll be able to “catch” Pikachu, Charmander, Bulbasaur and Squirtle.

Hope to see you there 🙂

After I made that adorable book hedgehog, I took to the internet to find more book folding ideas.  In terms of shapes like the hedgehog the most common things I found were fairy houses like these…

.and candles like these…

But there is a whole other side to book folding.  You can retain the book shape and create an image in the edge of the pages.  Like these…

And there are a couple of different methods to do this.  Measure and Fold requires measuring down the side of the page at two points per page, and folding the corners to those marks.

Cut and Fold requires marking the page at various points, cutting into the page a little and then folding back.

Then there’s the Combi method, which folds the top and bottom corners and has the cutting method along the edge of the page.

I’ve attempted the Measure and Fold method so far.  I started with a heart pattern I found attached to a YouTube tutorial…

After that I went hunting for more patterns and found a website called Folded Book Art which has a LOT of lovely free patterns.  And I went a little nerdy.

Generally these type of book folds are done with hardback books.  I’m told you can add card to the covers of a paperback book, but I’ve yet to try that.  I’ve recently been culling my books, so before I sent them off to the charity shop, I rescued a whole bunch of hardback books.  One was in beautiful condition, but very thin (usually you need several hundred pages), so I used it to test doing a letter.

Next to try is a Cut and Fold pattern.  I’ll let you know how that goes.

I’ve been wanting to make polymer clay things for ages.  There are so many beautiful examples online.  Watching YouTube tutorials is a little addictive, and there are a hundred different ideas for things you can make and sell with the stuff.

For those who don’t know, polymer clay comes in a range of colours and you can sculpt whatever you desire.  Charms, figurines, or beads.  Then you bake it in the oven to harden it.  Popular brands are Fimo, Sculpey and Premo.

When I was very young, my grandparents had Fimo at their house and I remember playing with it.  I can’t recall anything that I made though.  It’s been on my list of things to try for a long time, and finally a YouTube tutorial sucked me in.  This one…

I figured it was simple enough to get started and I only needed to buy two colours to begin with.  I passed on the white because I am an extremely mucky person, and ordered black and a lovely grey from eBay.  Once they arrived, I set to playing.

For some reason I didn’t take any progress pictures, which is annoying now that I come to write about it.  But it turns out that sculpting is something I’m not very good at.  There are a few crafts that I enjoy, but that I’m not at all talented at.  Much much more practice is needed.

The cat in the video proved completely beyond me.  I ended up making a very simple rabbit, and then a flat cat image I found online.

The next step was to bake them.  The YouTube videos all say to follow the directions on the packet but these are a little complicated.  It gives a temperature and time per a certain thickness, which took me some time to figure out.  Apparently I got it wrong.  Wrong temperature, wrong time.

The paper is supposed to remain untouched.  And as for the pieces.  Remember I told you I bought a nice grey colour?  It’s this lovely blue-grey here…

(The colour is called Tranquility if you’re interested).

I show you this because my completed pieces bear absolutely no resemblance to that.

I’ve done plenty of research since, and have found out what I did wrong.  I think.  My temperature was way too high and I have bought, as suggested by a few people, an internal oven thermometer.  The surface I baked it on wasn’t ideal so I’ve bought a ceramic tile and some foil trays.

I will be having another go at making polymer clay pieces soon.  Hopefully I’ll do a bit of a better job at the baking.  As for the actual sculpting, well that can only improve with practice.  I hope.

I’m sure you’ve all seen images of melted crayon art on the internet.  Like these…

This one from Instructables.com

And the several million you can find by searching “melted crayon art” on Pinterest.  And it’s not just the crayons either.  You can add a little drawing and turn it into something even more spectacular.

CrayonGogh on Etsy makes incredibly beautiful pieces, like this one featuring Elsa.

Trying this has been on my list of things to try for a while, and I finally got around to it.  I got myself crayons, some canvas, a glue gun and a heat gun and got started.  I wanted to do something simple to start off with, so just used the seven crayons.

Well, it melted…

I just don’t think it looks all that great.

I did end up with quite a few cuttings of crayons, because I experimented with different size pieces of crayon, and I tried putting them on small canvases and aiming a heat gun at them.

They also melted…

I’m not entirely impressed with the results.  But I guess it takes a bit of practice.  I’ll have to have another go at some point.  Maybe try a different palette.  The majority of the pictures online use rainbows.  I’m not entirely sure why I didn’t go with rainbow to start with.

Have any of you tried melted crayon art?  How did yours turn out?

One of the most prolific crafts that I have is Hama beading.  You’ll find LOTS of items in the store, and I have a whole bunch more to add too.  I’m sure you’ll recognise the craft.

You lay the coloured beads in a pattern on a pegboard and then iron them to fuse them together.  In America the prevailing brand is called Perler, so that’s what the craft is known as there.

As much as I love when people buy my Hama pieces, it gives me a little thrill when a little kid comes up to my table at a fair, points to the Hama pieces and says something along the lines of “Mummy, I have these!”  I feel like I’m renewing their interest, and I like to think they go home and get those beads out and get crafting.  I’m all for spreading the craft love.

Recently I’ve been trying to work through all the things on my bucket list, and one of those things was to create a timelapse video of a Hama bead piece.  And I found the perfect time to do that on March 10th – also known as Mar 10 – also known as Mar10 day!

What do you think?  I used an app called Lapse It, and I need to jiggle around with the settings a little, but for a first attempt it wasn’t bad.  The end result looks pretty good too….

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