Craft Blog

This afternoon during the boys’ nap time I sat myself down with my new carving set and a pack of rubbers to carve my first ever stamps following Two Cheese Please’s stamp tutorial… a heart, it came out so so, a mushroom, pretty good if I do say so myself, so I was feeling bold enough to try and do my name… and that’s when it all went downhill!

I’ve had my fair share of crafting brainfarts, switching between metric and imperial and wondering why my quilt came out wrong, forgetting about polymer clay and pulling it out of the oven an hour later to find my beautiful beads are now brown blobs, and don’t even get me started on the amount of frogging I’ve had to do on various crochet projects!

I’m sure I’m not alone in this! What’s the biggest crafting mishap you’ve had so far? Was the rescue attempt successful or did it end up where my name stamp is heading, straight in the bin?

I just sat down to get started on taking the pictures on today’s “Tuesday Tutorial” and then realised that pattern pieces and designs are currently sitting in my husband’s laptop bag, that is currently sitting in an office in North Sydney. Oops. I guess that’s what I get for scribbling down my ideas the moment inspiration strikes… and writing them on the back of his meeting notes! In my defence, I promise they did just look like scraps of paper.

So just a quickie today, and hopefully I should be able to get a more substantial tutorial up either tomorrow or Thursday, “Tutorial Thursday” sounds just as good, right?

My toddler loves to finger paint and get messy, but he’s still at that stage where as far as he’s concerned everything is edible, nothing is safe from going into his mouth, and so I’m somewhat hesitant in buying poster paints from stores without knowing exactly what’s in them and what he’s ingesting, and so this is my fix, non-toxic toddler safe paint where I know exactly what’s in it.

Fern’s Fabulous Recipe For Toddler Safe Paint

Throw two cups of any kind of flour you have laying around the house into a bowl, add COLD water until it forms a fairly smooth paste free of any big lumps, then slowly add freshly boiled (kettle is fine) HOT water, stirring constantly until it forms the right consistency - if you’re finger painting you’ll want it to be a little thicker, so add less water obviously.

Split the mix into however many colours you’d like, add a few drops of food dye to each pot and you have non-toxic completely toddler safe “paint”, they can eat as much as that like, and although it won’t taste fabulous (Declan gave up after one mouthful) you will know exactly what they’re putting in their mouth. Considering the amount of paint a toddler can go through as well, this is a far cheaper alternative to buying bottle after bottle of poster paint.

Only make up as much as you’ll need for each paint session as it doesn’t keep for more than 24 hours without going crunchy and hard. You can see some of my son’s finished artwork using the flour paint here, these were several months ago and they still look just as good now, you can’t tell that they weren’t made using “real” paint.

I really like batik and the effect it gives, but don’t have the spare change to buy a proper set up to do batik traditionally, which is why as soon as I saw this tutorial I had to try it out straight away!

Tutorial: Flour Paste Batik
Level: Easy
Time taken: Probably only an hour worth of actual work, but there’s a lot of waiting time as well, this isn’t an instant gratification project! Give yourself a full weekend to allow for drying times.
License: N/A
Materials Used: Fabric dyes, spray bottles, frame, flour, water, cotton fabric (I used cheap homespun from Lincraft at $4pm).

Changes Made

• I didn’t have any cornflour to hand and so used plain old self raising, I didn’t notice any problems arise from this.
• For the dye I used “Designline Soft Fabric Paint” that I bought from my local Riot for $10 a bottle, one bottle of red and one of yellow meant that I could also get an orange layer in there. I watered it down about half and half and then put it in a spray bottle from a dollar store. Using paint as opposed to dye made it a little “crunchier” than I would have liked, but after a couple of washes it seems to have softened up.

Tips

• I thought it would be a fabulous idea to pin my fabric to the frame of an old pinboard. What I didn’t think about was the cardboard on the back. The fabric obviously became wet with the dye and firmly attached itself to the cardboard and ripped it off when I took it off. It’s come out with a couple of washes so it’s not the end of the world, just not the smartest idea on my part! What would be awesome for this is this Stretcher Frame from Ikea, it’s 50×50 so would give you a decent size of fabric, and at only $5 it’s not going to blow your budget.
• I used a squeezy ketchup bottle, and my lines aren’t as fine as I would like, right after I finished my husband asked me why I didn’t just use a ziplock bag, the same way I ice cookies - snip off a corner and pack it in and squeeze. Duh. Using this method would give you far greater control of the line size - to make it wider just snip the corner higher up, and once you’re done you can just chuck the bag away so there’s no messy clean up. It doesn’t look terrible with the squeezy bottle, I would have just liked a finer line on the finished product.

I LOVE this project, waxless batik FTW! Particularly for children (assuming you have fairly patient kids who don’t mind a bit of waiting in between stages!), it’s an excellent way to introduce children to the art and concept behind batik without having the risk of hot elements and melted wax around. Plus, it’s cheap! My favourite crafts are ones that I can do with what I have laying around the house. I could see this as a great way to make some personalised artwork for your home, or design your own fabric for cushion covers. Why pay $20pm for batik quilting fabrics when you can make your own?

Every week Arounna Khounnoraj posts a craft walkthrough on Bloesem Kids, they’re generally very kid focused and excellent for introducing different mediums to younger children. My son isn’t quite at a level to be able to do this yet, so this was entirely done by myself - I think I need to get my niece and nephew round for a day of art so I can thoroughly test all of the child related tuts that I have on my “to do” list.

All of Arounna’s tutorials can be found here. I’m sure you’ll see a couple more of these turn up on CraftBlog in the future, there are some awesome ideas!

Tutorial: #12 Water Colour Flowers
Level: Easy - great for kids!
Time taken: Half an hour
License: N/A
Materials Used: Canvas board, watercolours and a permanent marker.

Changes Made

• Arounna used watercolour paper, I couldn’t find mine anywhere so ended up using canvas board instead, this is more suited for acrylic work, so I think it affected the spread of the paint, I think the blobs would be more “blobby” if I’d have used watercolour paper as it would have saturated properly, but overall using canvas didn’t make a huge difference.
• I don’t have any india ink, in my first piece I used a fine sharpie to create the contrasting lines, it led to more of a sketchy effect which I wasn’t too keen on. For the second one I used a thick black permanent marker and it really made the colours pop out of the canvas, originally I think I was worried about making the lines too heavy and overwhelming but I think the thicker lines work really well.

Tips

• Let loose! The first piece I did I was fairly uptight that my paint was doing exactly what I wanted and that everything was going to look perfect, I think that’s a product of being a grown up though. Let your inner child come through and have fun instead of worrying that everything is precise.
• As I said above, don’t be worried about the heavy lines, the contrast is what makes this piece look so great.

I love the effect that you end up with for such a small amount of work, I could see a collection of these used to brighten up a hallway or even if done on a smaller scale to make very cute handmade greeting cards, I’m sure kids would be more interested in writing thank you cards to long lost relatives if they get to blob paint everywhere first!

You can see other people’s versions of this tut here.

If you would like your tutorial reviewed by someone on the CraftBlog team, please contact us with a link and brief description and we’ll find the person best suited to take it on!