Origami with Kat Thomas

Origami make and taking with Kat Thomas, the Paper Florist came to teach the kids how to make origami flowers, peace cranes and butterflies. Joseph decided to make a gun to combat all the peace from the peace cranes! Anyway it was a fabulous afternoon of making. The kids really got into it. And they were excited to know that they could make these wonderful origami objects out of just about anything! Thanks to Kat for a great lesson!

Chinese New Year - Printing the Year of the Dragon!

Chinese New Year brought a flurry of printing. The kids learnt how to print using embossed wallpaper, different coloured paints and a printing press. There finished pieces were awesome!

Junk Animals

Hannah and I pitched up to make and take club this week, armed with all sorts of random cardboard and plastic junk saved from the grip of the recycle bin. The aim was to show the kids what wonderful things can be made from junk, with a little bit of imagination and hard work. They ended up showing us! All I can say is that we are blessed to have such a creative bunch. They made everything from Pigs, Badgers and Tortoises to a Aquarium filled with fishes and a medieval catapult.

2012 and Knitty madness

Tom and his abstract finger knit

Olivia already a dab hand at knitting

Joseph concentrating sooo hard, he did brilliantly

Violet WOW you did great!

Intense concentration by Ella

Well, this week we taught the kids to knit with needles, only to find that some of them already new how to knit! The room was deathly quiet as the kids just got on with it and concentrated really hard to get the stitches right. Some, frustrated with the slowness of knitting just stopped and went back to good old finger knitting. A thoroughly enjoyable hour of knitting was had and whatever knitting the kids chose to do, it was perfect.

MERRY CHRISTMAS !

Have a really lovely Christmas to all our lovely children who have worked hard on their crafts for the last 6 weeks. Cant wait to see most of you back again for our next term Make and Take in 2012. We have lots of fantastic making planned for 2012. Until then,

Merry Christmas
and a Happy New Year

lots of love Hannah and Pip xx

Sewing Christmas Cards

The children's finished masterpieces

Ella completing her card with Christmas Wishes

Olivia's patchwork creation, lovely stuff

Team work around the old Singer sewing machine

India's Miffy the rabbit in her christmas dress

Joe's Christmas Shark (do... do, do... do, duh.duh...duh.duh)
Violet's rockin' robin
Eleanor's gingerbread man

Sharky sewing fun

Han and Pip's 'here's one a made earlier's

This week we taught the kids to sew christmas scenes then machine stitch them onto card using an old singer sewing machine. The children didnt have to be neat just as long as the bits were attached to each other and they had a go!

It was lovely, Hannah and I had done our 'here's one I made earlier' to give the kids a template of what could be done. We worried that they would just try and copy what we had done. We need'nt have worried.......

Violet made a lovely fabric robin, with little apple buttons lining the bottom of her work

Joseph made a Christmas Shark (of course), with a button eye.

Lots of the children chose to do Christmas trees, all totally different from the next.

Daniel (helped by mum) did a Snowman and Eleanor a gingerbread man. They are such a creative bunch, we were sew impressed! (groan)

The next thing was to sew these masterpieces onto card, to make the Christmas Card. I brought along my old handle turn singer sewing machine and we got to work machine sewing. The kids worked as a team, with one person turning the handle and the other making sure the the piece fed in to the machine in a (semi) straight line. It was really great fun.

Thanks to all your hard work Children. Han and I hope you're looking forward to next week's pom-pom snowballs, pom-pom take a long time to do, but are well worth it.

See you next week, love from the Craft Hub Make and Take gang

Wet Felting - Week 4

The Gallery of Ta-Da's

Felty fun, what a soapy, wet and splashing time the kids had. We decided to teach them to make Christmas decorations for the tree by wet felting into cookie cutters.

This is a really simple technique with great results.

First you take a towel and a cookie cutter, preferably a christmassy one.

You need wool tops which we purchased from the rather lovely companyhttp://www.torbaytextiles.co.uk/ who have a wide selection of lovely colours

Take the wool tops and pull them into wisps. Seperating is really important, tops will not felt if they are bunched in thick clumps. So wispy bits are what you need.

Take the wooly wisps and start to layer them into the cookie cutter, best to layer them firstly vertical then horizontal and then build up the layers alternating one way and then the other. This helps the felting process. You can layer with all sorts of colours you dont need to restrict it to one colour. We also used some angelina (a lovely synthetic sparkly textile, you only need add this in small amounts but if you are adding it, it is really important to place some wisps of wool over the top as this will seal and felt over it. If you dont do this then the angelina will just fall off as it felts.

Its surprising how dense you need to layer the wool tops into the cookie cutter. The higher the layering the thicker the finished piece.

Once this has been done, then squeeze a small amount of Ecover washing up liquid onto the wool tops and gently poke for about 3 seconds. Once this is done, then pour warm water into the cookie cutter, completely saturating the wool tops, then begine the process of felting. You can use your finger (good for kids as they have such little ones) or you can use the eraser end of a pencil or a smooth end of a knitting needle. Anything really. The process basically involves poking the wool tops to felt them. This is quite a long process, around 20 mins needed. As the fibres start to felt, it will feel less boggy to the touch and harder. Once it starts to feel harder then you can poke the felt more vigorously.

Keep going, the more you do this the better your result. Keep poking, keep poking. Eventually once alot harder, the shape can be gently removed from the cookie cutter, placed between two pieces of bubble wrap, bubble side down and rubbed vigorously. To keep the edges in shape then rub the edges with a little friction moulding them into shape.

You know you are finished when you try to pinch the fibres and they remain on the shape, if you can pinch the fibres up then your piece is not yet felted and needs more rubbing and agitation.

Once finished, press your shape in a towel to remove excess water and leave to dry. When its dry, ask an adult to poke a hole in the top of the shape and pop a ribbon through, hey presto! a lovely tree decoration!

Have fun, lots of love The Craft Hub Make and Taker