Paperwork

Lately I have been making some  crafty bits and pieces, mostly to use as a prop for my photos.  I made 3 headpieces, this one is the first, very easy to do, just some crepe paper flowers, pompom style.

It was meant for my Camera Club January competition, which was themed Contrasting/Complementary colours. Now that I posted here, I see several flaws in it, specially the colour of her top, which went a bit crazy. Sigh, I am sure that the judge will point it out this Thursday.

Have a nice day!

Decorating Hair Pins

Lately I have been trying to use my scrapbooking stash to creative ways. Like leftovers tiny stickers are a fun way to close envelopes. Washi tape is great wherever you need to stick things temporarily since is very low tack. Think sticking things on the wall, fix patterned paper into A4 paper to feed into the print.

This is a long introduction to show something I came up. Decorated hair pins for my daughter. She loves this sort of thing but gets tired of them quickly, so there's no point in making anything time consuming.

I'll put a little tutorial as soon as I find the glue I used; I am like that, keep on misplacing stuff in my craft room.

Have a nice week!

Christmas photos and crafts

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We had a great Christmas and are still enjoying our break  - trying to do something fun everyday.

The children are delighted with their presents and so are the adults. I did buy an early present for me: RadLab, which is a photoshop plugin and very handy to edit photos.My long term aim is to take photos which need little editing, but RadLab is fun to use and can add a little something for an otherwise boring photo.

Take the photo of my son above. He was decorating a small artificial tree which was going to go in his bedroom. That how it looks in real life, taken at night with a flash.

I set the camera in manual mode, exposed for the lights. It looks a little better now.

I then cleaned a bit of the wire and played with RadLab to add a bit of glow to the photo.

I have been crafting and taking photographs, but ironically I haven't taken anIy photos of my crafty projects. I use pinterest to mark interesting things I find in the web; it a great way to have a visual catalog of them. I compiled a few Christmas projects, I'll get some photos taken but in case you want save them for next here, here are the original photos and source:

Source: homemade-gifts-made-easy.com via Elisa on Pinterest

Source: homemade-gifts-made-easy.com via Elisa on Pinterest

Both are relatively easy to make. The second one would be suitable for an older child. Great way to use paper scraps.

Source: blog.maggiemakes.com via Elisa on Pinterest

This is more time consuming, but the result is beautiful.

Source: alittledelightful.blogspot.com via Elisa on Pinterest

Made with my children and one of their friends. We used cookie cutters to make the shapes and let them colour them with markers. We didn't have much time so I let them colour before baking them. To my surprise the colours remained vivid after baking.

Sock Monsters

Before the summer holidays started I sat down with my daughter and asked her to make a list of things she wanted to do while she was off school, I did the same and later I asked the same from my husband and son. It was going well during the first two weeks but then my son got sick,  nothing serious but enough to stop outings, playdates, cinema and such things.

What was left was craft - I make sure my list had enough of them. This week the only thing we made was sock "monsters", using unpaired socks and the ones the children had grown out of.

I looked at some tutorials like this one for a cute owl and armed with enough knowledge made one of my own. It was meant first to be a owl too, but when I stuffed it looked more like a cat so I quickly changed plans.

Then it was time to get the children to make their own. My 9 year old daughter made with my supervision while I helped my son to make his, he choose the eyes and nose and I helped him glue them. I was using a glue gun so I didn't want any accidents.

It had a simple design, a bit like the one shown above, I took a photo of both of their work but accidentally deleted it. Later, when they saw my second attempt, they asked me to put arms, legs and tail on theirs. This is my son's.

The original pair of socks was one I bought in winter and they were nice and fluffy, perfect for this project.

This is the second one I made, using the remaining of the pair.