Crafting together (autumn) - November

It was my turn to get birthday swaps when we met two weeks ago :)
Jolinda and Monique surprised me with wonderful presents for my Hogsmeade cottage!

Monique had made me a Mandrake in a pot, and a Halloween themed cross stitch cushion. The flower basket with the red roses and the macramé wall hanging was made bij Jolinda. They'll get a good spot with Bianca and Penny in the cottage :)

As I mentioned last time, we wanted to make a crow or raven for the small autumn themed scene and maybe, if we'd have time, a scare crow :)
I'd found this tutorial on Youtube that looked very clever. A bit bigger than 1:12 scale but that shouldn't be a problem.
Just getting a proper basic shape for the bird's body, however, certainly was! :)
Monique succeeded a lot faster than Jolinda and I did, but at the end of the time together we all had at least the body finished. Legs, feet and tail were another story though ^^

I finished it a few days later. It wasn't the most easy thing to do, but I felt very accomplished when I managed it! The 3 feathers I used for the tail are form my own lovebird Taco. I cut them and painted them black :)

Time for the crow to go and sit on the fence.

I didn't make the scare crow after all, because I didn't want to add more things in the scene, but I know Monique and Jolinda did. Jolinda's can be seen here in her autumn scene; click!
The little toad is made by Kim from Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo.

 

Next time, in December, we'll be making some Christmas miniatures. And then next year it's time to continue with the Italian project ;)

Sunflowers and a kite

In October we'd started a small autumn themed scene with the mini club. Afterwards I've  added some sunflowers and a kite.

I started without a tutorial, at first following Jolinda's example. The flowers are made from tissue paper, painted with acrylic paint in different shades of yellow and orange.
I used Jolinda's daisy punch, which looks like this one, I think. Each flower has three layers and in the middle I attached an extra paper circle with a bit of herbal tea/coffee mix glued on :)
The stem is made with floral wire and floral tape. I added some extra layers of tape at the end to get it tapered. Then I glued the stem to the back of the flower.

With another (flower) punch and some green painted tissue paper I made tiny bracts (leaves) and attached 5 or 6 from the stem to the back of the flower.

So this is what it looked then;

When I started working on the next flowers I realized I wasn't entirely happy with the transition from stem to (sun)flower. It wasn't fluently enough imo.
So I experimented a bit and figured out a way. I put a drop from a glue pistol on the end of some floral wire, wiggled it a bit while it hardened to get a tear shape, and after that taped it with the floral tape.
I cut the end straight and glued it to the back of the flower, and then did the brackts like I showed before.

On the left is the one without using the glue(gun), on the right is the one with it (first photo without brackts, second photo with them xD);

For the leaves I used a holly leave punch and the green painted tissue paper (two layers glued together this time). The photo shows from right to left how I cut and shaped the leaves and glued them to the floral wire and attached it to the stem. I wrapped some flower tape around that part as well.

The finished sunflowers together against the fence.

Because the glass dome was a bit higher than was needed only for the fence, I thought about something to add that could fill some of the space in the dome.
The idea of a kite, blown away by the wind untill it's string got tangled in the fence :)

The kite is made of an old plastic bag, two cocktail picks, a piece of wire and Durabel cotton nr 6.
I searched for 1:1 scale tutorial for proportions and came up with these measurements (cm).

To get the kite in the air I've put some glue on the piece of wire and tightly wrapped the cotton thread around it.

In the next blog I'll tell about what we did with the mini club two weeks ago ;)

Crafting together (autumn) - October

We've decided last month to put our projects on hold for a couple of times and work on a small autumn themed scene. Our initial inspiration was this lovely fence.

Though I'd decided to do a wooden fence like this one.

 

So I've worked on the base and the fence while they were here and then did some more that evening and yesterday 🙂

I'll add some more sunflowers to the single one and next month we'll try to make a raven with Fimo and a scarecrow.

The little toad Kim from Bibbidi Bobbidi Boo made is very content now that I finally found him somewhere to live :)