Christmas Penguin

This is a cute decoration for your tree of just to have around your house, the Christmas penguin.
What you need is- black, white and yellow felt, not a lot, a single sheet will do. Black embroidery thread and white thread.

 Cut out two almost bowling pin shapes from the black felt, then from the white felt a smaller, similar bowling pin shape. Then with the yellow cut out a little beak. You really can decide on what size you want for the I chose a small one because its for my tree however a  larger size works just as well with the cute factor, if your going to make a larger one use buttons for the eyes. So basically what you do is position the white belly on one of the pieces of black felt and so on, keeping it tidy in the front, with just a simple run stitch.  Then position the beak in the middle of the head and so on as well in a simple run stitch.

Next your going to want to add the eyes, using the black embroidery thread sew over and over again in one spot to make small black eyes. Put the two black felt body cut outs front to front and sew around till almost done, turn them the right way out, stuff them and finish them off and there you have an adorable penguin. Add a couple cute accessories and its lots of fun.

flowery face paint

 

My older sister and I get bored sometimes, so this weekend we decided to paint my younger sisters face with a twist. To make it standout more for a flower fairy birthday party we painted it with a white base, then coloured flowers and then using tissue paper cut out flowers and stuck them on her face as well. Fortunately the tissue paper is sufficiently light that using just the face paint you could get it to stick down no need to glue. For the tissue paper flowers you fold a sheet in half and then cut a small circle, with this circle you fold it into four then cute out little corners to make a small flower. The end affect really made her stand out and looked quite beautiful.

 

Sea glass Pendants

Today I made some sea glass jewellery, last Christmas I made a bunch of earrings and pendants out of it and everyone loved them so here is how you do it, they make great gifts and are so cheap to make. I just found sea glass off my local beach but they tend to sell it at craft stores. For earrings you are going to want to find two smaller similar pieces of sea glass, but for a pendant it doesn’t matter what size so long as the wire supports it. All you need is pliers (once specific to jewellery are better), wire – I use a really thin wire I like like 1/2mm but I can’t remember and a piece of sea glass, also scissors, just to cut the wire.

 Cut about 6 inches of wire, at one end make a loop around the pliers to thread your chain through

 

Take the sea glass and wrap the wire around it in a crisscross manner, holding the loop at the top till it is stable within the wire then wrap the leftover parts around the base of the top loop, to secure. If you have lots of wire left you can just chop it.

 

If you want you can be finished at that but what I like to do is bend the wire into almost lightening like patterns to make the wire tighter and add a pretty and ethereal affect to the jewellery. Then you just thread it one a chain and have a gorgeous, unique pendant to keep or give to a friend.

More clay food

As a continuation from my post on Barbie pizza, this was a just the food I could make with the colours and time that I had, for the bacon, I got two colors of clay and rolled them out very thinly next to each other and then cut them into small slithers giving them a slight twist to make them more 3D. For the peas you just get tiny balls of green clay, the smallest you can manage, roll them once and then put them in your bowl. The French fries didn’t work out to well and neither did the burgers, which I have been told look more like stuffed chocolate chip cookies. With the turkey/ chicken I just made an oblong shape and too drumsticks, then stuck little orange carrots round the sides, to add some colour. Enjoy!

 

Barbie food

 

I have two younger sisters who really love Barbie’s and also anything small so when I started using clay again I got bombarded with requests of me making them food for their Barbie’s. I kept it pretty simplistic looking as I only had about an hour to do it all and there pretty young so they don’t really care about detail. Unfortunately the first time I cooked them (I use Sculpey clay which you bake at 275 for 15 minutes)  they all burned so there was a second even more rushed attempt but I like the way they ultimately turned out.

For the Pizza I got a tan ball of clay and pressed it out into a little round, I then got a ball of red and rolled it out into a thin strip which I ran around the edge of the pizza to make the tomato sauce.  For the cheese I had a bit of I dilemma because I hadn’t bought yellow, instead what I decided to do was roll white and orange until just slightly mixed to get an almost marble like colouring and then I thought I needed texture to make it more realistically look like cheese. What I ended up doing was using the corner of a ruler to press in little bumps making it look akin to shredded cheese but you could use anything to texturize it, a fork? Just whatever you have lying round. For the mushrooms I just rolled little tiny balls and stuck ends on them and then pepperoni the same idea, little balls minus the sticks. Slice it into for, then bake it and you have a perfect Barbie pizza. I'll follow with a post about my other food at a later date, feel free to comment with any questions!

The Figurines

“The figurines”

For my uncle Nick’s wedding his fiancée (my aunt Jenn) asked me to make figurines for the top of their cake as a surprise but out of clay so they could keep them. I have never made figurines bigger then and inch out of clay, but I gave it ago. It was a lot of fun but I realised I really need to practise, not quite as skilled as I had been when I used to make figurines every weekend. Basically I made a tinfoil inner structure of the figurines in order to make them lighter for the top of the cake as well as ensure they had good structure so the head wouldn’t fall off and things like that.  Once I finished the inner structure I got nude, black, white and red clay. The bride was wearing black ( her favourite colour) which actually made things a lot easier because with white you have to be so careful your fingertips are clean and you don’t get smudges otherwise it looks dull and messy. I rolled out the balls of clay making them really soft and then placed them over the foil in the correct places. For the hair I rolled thin spaghetti strips of black and draped them on the girls head and for the guy (yes his hairline is meant to be receding) I just rolled out a small ball and placed it around his head. As a finishing touch I made a rose, for those who cake decorate it would be much the same as making a fondant rose, you roll a piece in the middle to look like a cone then flatten out petals and place them around the cone, loosely to give the effect of a delicate rose.  For the figurines I went with a more cutsy look then actually trying to make replicas of the bride and groom, for the faces just little balls of white clay then even smaller balls of black on top and gentle press them on to the face to have bubble eyed people, I have always hated mouths but I eventually got them, I think it’s pretty self-explanatory as what you see from the picture of how you do them. I hope you enjoy.