How to impress with your watercolour skills, even if you have none…

May 14, 2013 By Kate in Making, Paper Paper! Tags: art, artist, craft, diy, family, Kids, stencils, watercolour painting 27 Comments

You can bet your bottom dollar that the likes of Turner and Kandinsky refined their watercolour skills over decades, diligently painting day after day as they mastered the art of pigment on paper, water and brush.

Not us, oh no. This is, after all, the home of slapdash crafting where most projects take less than an hour and benefit from the accompaniment of a glass of wine. And I’ve discovered, somewhat by accident, that using basic stencils can create impressively accomplished results with very little skill. It’s a great thing to try when you have a few minutes to spare, and the results are likely to be as good if you’re 8 as if you’re 80 (and there’s not much we can say that about).

A few basic materials are all you’ll need; simple stencils, watercolour paints and something to mix them in (I used an inexpensive plastic palette), heavyweight paper and brushes. The choice of paper is the most important thing; using 300gsm paper will help the paint flood within the stencil but then be quickly absorbed, reducing the risk of it running.

Once you’ve chosen your stencil and assembled your paints and paper, simply hold it in place lightly with your fingers and brush your chosen colours into the stencil. Work quickly, so that the colours can mix before they dry. Warm colours work beautifully together (pinks, oranges, reds and golden yellows), as do cool ones (blues, greens, lemon yellow), but there are no rules.

If you have a steady hand, you can whip your stencil off straight away; otherwise, wait for the paint to dry completely. I’ve found the best technique varies from one stencil to the next (I guess it’s to do with the shape); for my hummingbird I was able to lift the stencil off instantly and the still-wet paint retained a perfect silhouette. For the pigeon at the bottom of this post, it took 20 minutes patient waiting and a cup of coffee before it could be successfully revealed.

Once I’d done a few stencils, I began experimenting with rubber stamping, into both wet and dry paint. Make sure you do this with the stencil in place to get a clean finish within your chosen shape.

I used these bird stencils, but letter / monogram stencils would also look wonderful . If you don’t have any stencils to hand but do have craft punches, simply punch out a shape in a sheet of thin plastic or cardboard, and use it as a stencil. Use the finished paintings for cards, gift-tags or collage, or even frame them as paintings in their own right.

So; a morning’s artistic activity where you should be able to refine and develop your prowess in the space of an hour. Much better than a lifetime spent starving away in some bohemian artist’s garret and waiting for the muse to strike…

Come tell me a story…

May 9, 2013 By Kate in Making, Paper Paper! Tags: diy, family, family games, fun, Kids, papercraft, spelling, story-telling 17 Comments

Storytelling is big in our house. From tales of the little people who live behind the skirting boards, to the owl family up our chimney; from the lego men who come to life after bedtime and party hard in the playroom all night, to Mummy’s magic shoes which dance when anyone steps in them; we weave stories into the fabric of our days almost without thinking, and Harry loves it. Experts may say that we are storing up untold problems and creating a fantasist; I like to think that we’re just unleashing Harry’s imagination throughout the wonder years before the real world starts to hem it in.

And indeed, Harry loves telling stories too. ’My turn, my turn!’ He’ll exclaim as we sit around the table, or bundle into bed together. And Harry’s stories are a delight, though they tend towards repetition and rely heavily on goodies and baddies, robbers and jail, and cars. Oh, and usually someone falls into a giant vat of mud at the end.

This week we introduced The StoryBox, and it’s transformed our tales. Filled with random but enticing words – like custard, mud, helicopter, sword and pirate – each person has to pick out a word and use it to begin their story. Whenever you run out of narrative steam, you choose another word and have to incorporate it. At three-and-a-half, Harry grasped the idea immediately and loves the unpredictability of what might come next. It gives him triggers to keep his own story going, and it also allows him to direct – or perhaps sabotage? – our stories too, by pulling out words and insisting that we now need to add in a huge pile of elephant poo – or grandma on a motorbike, or a slimy monster, or whatever is written on the card.

To make this I used a sturdy giftbox and filled it with chips of foamboard to which I glued interesting words. I chose the names of family members, comic concepts and ideas involving mud, poo, custard and slime, and current obsessions like Lego men, the emergency services and all forms of transport. And I added in a few completely new words, so that we could explain them and continue to expand his world. It’s helping with Harry’s word recognition too (though you have to shut your eyes when actually choosing, to add to the drama and unpredictability…).

Some very cool stories have emerged. Like the one where Granny had to rescue Daddy who slipped on a banana whilst escaping from the naughty pirates, who she then chased on her scooter before making them jump into a big bowl of custard that they had to eat all up before going to jail.

You can make this at home in just a few minutes, and it can be as simple or as finessed as you have the energy for. For the five-minute version, scribble a host of words onto scraps of paper and place them in a hat, shoebox or bowl for family members to pull out. For the lux version, you can print them out and glue to something more substantial as I did, and decorate a special box to keep them in.

If you want to use my graphic (below) for the cover of your box, you can find a printable version to download at the bottom, albeit one without Harry casually strolling through the pages..

I will keep adding words to our game as Harry’s vocabulary expands and his interests change, to keep it fresh and ensure that the StoryBox retains a firm place in family life. And now I must go; apparently there’s a cross-eyed camel running loose in the garden, and we need to find a saucepan full of sausages to tempt it over with. No rest for the wicked…

Storybox Main Graphic

Weekend Notes

May 6, 2013 By Kate in Green Fingers, Making Tags: cards, craft, diy, gardening, geraniums, printables, recipes, summer, sunshine 11 Comments

Did you have a lovely weekend? We had a divine long weekend of sunshine, friends and downtime, with very few places to be and nothing which required more sartorial effort than t-shirts and deck shoes. Perfect. it gave me a chance to plant up the windowboxes which line our sills and always make me think of those beautiful hidden squares in the heart of French villages..

We managed to eat al fresco every single day, with picnics in the park and long, lazy lunches in the garden at home. The magnolia trees continue to explode in bloom so I snipped a handful of buds to float in a bowl in the centre of the table;

We feasted on some tried-and-tested family favourites like this tomato salad with grilled halloumi cheese, torn basil and balsamic glaze;

…and experimented with some new decadent dessert recipes which I’ll share with you properly in due course. The cocktail glasses were all scraped clean with happy sighs so I’m considering that a resounding success!

There was one small shadow cast over the weekend, and a grave reminder that pride surely comes before a fall. My sunflower, which shot off the proverbial starting blocks just a week ago, has now developed a worrying lean. Like a teenager in the midst of an ungainly growth spurt, it has somehow overshot itself. We’ve called in the fire brigade to assist but I’m not confident. The other two are standing strong, but I may make an early and untimely exit from the family race..

And finally… one of the loveliest things about the gradual arrival of summer is the long balmy nights. I spent one evening this weekend with the garden door propped open, glass of chilled white wine to hand, making these cards (top and below) using a photograph I took of my Valentines typewriter. I’ve included a printable version at the bottom if you want to use this yourself; just trim around the main image, then carefully slice around the top three sides of the typewriter-paper which is inserted into it. Roll the flap lightly around a pencil to create a curve (see below), then glue the main image to card stock, being careful to avoid glueing your flap down. Ta-da; a 3d typewriter correspondence card. I added simple white shirt buttons to the keys as further embellishment..

Before I sign off, a huge thank you for the lovely comments recently, and welcome to those who are new here; it’s wonderful to hear from you and to have you along for the ride.

Have a good week, and may the sunshine be with you!

Vintage Typewriter Printable

Lost Arts: Paper Boats

May 2, 2013 By Kate in Making, Paper Paper! Tags: diy, dolphins, family, holidays, knots, paper boats, paper craft, seaside 23 Comments

Do you remember making paper boats as a child? Or perhaps paper hats? I was thinking last week about how easy it would be for these oh-so-simple and yet so magical crafts to vanish in the modern world. I grew up knowing how to make boats and hats, how to write secret letters in home-made invisible ink , how to tie a myriad of different knots – albeit mostly with the aim of binding my brother to a tree – and how to build bivouacs and signal in morse code using my torch, illicitly, late at night.

It helped that my mother was a Girl Guide leader, and that most Friday nights saw the garden filled with girls flamboyantly lighting campfires (health and safety be damned..) and practicing outdoor skills. It was a gung-ho upbringing and I just assumed that all parents knew this stuff and could whip up a sailing boat, a double-half-hitch-crossover-hench-twist* or a series of intelligible smoke signals at the drop of a proverbial hat.

*Don’t try to look this one up; accuracy is not my strong point.

Of course, I have forgotten nearly all of it, so in an attempt to ensure I can create the same delight and awe in Harry, I gave myself a refresher crash course in elementary boat building. If your skills are similarly rusty, arm yourself with a sheet of letter paper and follow this. Pause it when you get lost and start-over. Don’t do this after a glass of wine.

I made my boats from map paper and poked twigs and wooden skewers through each to form a mast. Washi paper tape and scraps of fabric complete the sail, and I used a rubber stamp kit to print random numbers and letters on them. I christened my boats with suitably nautical names – Tradewinds, Siren Song, Night Trawler et al – and prepared to set sail.

Tiny silver bells and paper dolphins accompany the boats as they take to the high seas; these are beautiful if you’re making boats to tuck into bookshelves and on mantels, but obviously won’t survive a voyage across the bathtub.

If you find you’re having balance problems, try adding an anchor; I used a handful of beads from an old necklace which look a little like ancient maritime fishing bouys.

And finally if you want to produce an armada to be sailed across lakes, rivers or ponds, try using an old book. The pages are perfectly thin and work brilliantly for folding. I found an old book of letters in my local junk shop for 50p and now have a handful of tiny boats that we can practice bombing, sinking and blowing off course…

Staying with our nautical theme, we managed a long weekend at the seaside, having a very British kind of minibreak; each day we acquired a smattering of freckles, a dash of windburn and the kind of bracing exfoliation that only frequent, brief hail-storms can provide. Every time we turned to face each other our hair had been coiffed into evermore improbable positions by the briny crosswinds, and we practised our sprint-starts by racing each other to shelter under the pier when the heavens opened.

And yet, and yet …it was beautiful.

In three brief, heady days we had a ball; crabbing in the harbour with leftover bacon from breakfast; building mermaids and forts in the sand; watching astonishing sunsets with a glass in hand, and gradually amounting a huge collection of dubiously scented seaweed, driftwood and flotsam, which has left a lingering & evocative presence in the car ever since that no amount of ventilation can quite dispel.

We came home, unpacked the car, collapsed in a heap together on the sofa, and then remembered our sunflowers. A feverish scramble to the windowsill revealed…

..that we have life!! A magnificent 4 inches of life no less; we are very proud.

Have a wonderful weekend when it arrives, wherever you are and whatever you’re doing. It’s a holiday weekend here in England, and for once the skies are blue and cloudless. I feel a barbeque coming on…

Food for friends: Sunshine Apple Crisp

April 25, 2013 By Kate in Baking, Making Tags: apples, Baking, puff pastry, recipes, simple baking, summer food 20 Comments

It’s a glorious morning; the sun is shining, I’m surrounded by hungry boys (some borrowed, some home-grown), and we’re feeling in need of a treat. Something quick, decadent and portable, that can be eaten on the lawn with fingers and requires little washing up. Those of you who come here often will know that I don’t feature heaps of baking, but when I do it’s always simple food that requires almost no skill or experience; I know my limits.

A lightening quick post this week, therefore, with a lightening quick dish for Sunshine Apple Crisp. It takes just a handful of minutes but will look as though you have slaved away for much longer – do not disabuse anyone of this notion.

We found puff pastry in the freezer and apples in the fruit bowl; everything else you’ll probably have to hand. You can use different kinds of sugar or different kinds of jam; you can even substitute apples for peaches or pear and it’s equally delicious. Finer chefs than I might peel the fruit, or use a mandolin for finer slices, but I am a slapdash, carefree cook with scant concentration so you won’t see such guidance here.

Eat in the garden where sticky fingers don’t matter and where spilled sugar and pastry crumbs can fall without consequence.

Enjoy, enjoy! … and I’ll see you after the weekend.

Kate

Weekend notes

April 21, 2013 By Kate in Making, Uncategorized Tags: aprons, art, baguettes, diy, fabric, family, gardening, Kids, picasso, sewing, spring, sunflowers, weekends 22 Comments

You just know it’s going to be good weekend when you go to the supermarket and find all the Spring bouquets discounted to £1. Even then, buying flowers for yourself is somehow deliciously decadent. Add baguettes, fresh figs, french cheese and drizzling honey and you have a sunshine feast in the making; never mind that I forgot the far more crucial household staples (domesticity will never come easily to me; lack of effort, I suspect…).

The same trip took me past a haberdashery store which was selling roll-ends of fabric; I bought some majestic raspberry velvet which will easily see Harry through a childhood of Harry Potter cloaks, wise man nativity outfits and Santa hats, plus a length of this cheery tea-party cotton for which I have a myriad of ideas; it will hang over my desk till inspiration settles.

And on the theme of lovely-but-unnecessary purchases, the postman delivered me a long-awaited and utterly impractical lukrecja cotton apron from Polish company COOKie. Whilst serious cooks would doubtless throw up their hands at the skittishness of my apron, I am giddy with adoration for it. In its defence, it is made of heavyweight industrial cotton and designed for the kind of heavy-duty labour a kitchen skivvy needs.

Undermining this defence completely is the publicity shot for the apron (below), with the tagline ’it is easy for Lukrecja to leave the kitchen to buy vegetables whilst absent-mindedly forgetting to wear clothes under her apron’. Hmmm. Completely mad, and all the better for it. I have been waltzing round the kitchen in my jeans and apron, twirling and admiring myself in the oven door and every other reflective surface. Dinner has been late.

In other despatches from the weekend, we’ve been channeling our inner Picasso, making a homemade picture for Harry’s grown-up brother who has recently moved house. Harry adores Chris, so going to Chris’s first grown-up house is a very big deal. In real life, Chris and his girlfriend Emma look as if they have stepped from the pages of an Abercrombie catalogue. Harry, in the manner of Lucian Freud, has chosen to render them looking rather simian and obese, with no hint of flattery. He stood back to examine them, then waved his hand dismissively; ‘they are done, mummy’. A 3yr old artiste.

Harry draws BIG, so I took his two pictures and scanned them in, adding the names and date, then mounted the print and placed it in a simple silver frame; he is immensely proud of his efforts, which manage to look stylish and understated in C&E’s hip neutral living room.

The sun has shone this weekend, almost throughout, causing Britons up and down the country to hurl off their clothes and lie on every available patch of grass. It’s a cultural kind of carpe diem; sunlight is so rare and cherished that we tend to overreact completely to the melting of frost and make the most of every ray of warmth. In a rather more domesticated reaction, we hung washing on the line for the first time this year, and Harry tackled the spring-cleaning of his playhouse (for about 5 minutes; he gets that staying-power from me).

We’ve planted our sunflowers, turned over a couple of flower beds and then there’s just been time, as the spring sunshine fades today and the air cools again, to lie on the still-damp grass and look up through our magnificent magnolia tree, which has suddenly burst into bud and bloom.

Heaven.

I hope you had a lovely weekend too…especially those who planted sunflowers with us; let the race begin!!

Kate

The Great Sunflower Race 2013!

April 18, 2013 By Kate in Green Fingers, Making Tags: diy, family, Flowers, gardening, Kids, outdoors, sunflower, sunflower competition 28 Comments

This time last year, we launched our inaugural Great Sunflower Race, pitting our horticultural skills against family, friends, neighbours – and you. We painted our pots, googled top tips, and Harry and I then watched in glee as our seeds germinated seemingly overnight, sending out perky shoots and promising great things. We tut-tutted over my husband’s barren soil - his seedling eventually grew about a foot before peaking and retiring – whilst watching our stems shoot heavenward.

…They were eaten as an appetiser by a passing deer the following week.

But there’s something about the British spirit of perseverance against all odds; a relentless optimism combined with a constitutional patience that causes us to quietly join queues and wait in line even if we have no idea what we are waiting for. Some argue that it is this spirit which has won wars; it’s certainly the same dogged optimism that compels us to try again this year – and with such passion and fervour!

Once more Harry and I have had a fun time packaging up seeds into tiny envelopes to give away to old friends and new, so that the race can begin in earnest;

And once again we’d love you to join us, if you have a patch of soil or even just a doorstep – the beauty of sunflowers is that they need very little space. Choose your seeds, fill a pot and throw your virtual hat into the ring via the comments below, and we’ll have regular progress checks on sunflower growth spurts around the world. Let the great sunflower race begin!

Kate's Creative Space

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