Days Bay Play Paper Course

Wednesday-week an exciting thing will happen – another Dora Papers Days Bay Play class starts! I’m really looking forward to it, with lots of fun things planned. 

This term we will be doing more marbling, including intermediate patterns.

We’ll also be making papier-mâché containers, and marbling them. Here are some I made recently – the two on the right are made by my nieces.

Making marbled notebooks.

And, of course, some origami.

If this looks like a great time to you, and you (well, your child) are aged 8-12 and in the Eastbourne area after school, pop on over to the Days Bay Play blog and check out the details – there are still a couple of places left.

Marbling Craftiness

Palm

As anyone who has done marbling is no doubt well aware, marbling is a ‘small’ craft. There aren’t many around who do it and consequently even appropriate paint can be hard to get hold of – I order mine online from the States. Marbling rakes and combs for sale are somewhat trickier. After an extensive search I can tell you with some confidence that they just aren’t available, or at least not sold by anyone who ships to New Zealand and charges something I'm prepared to pay.

Nonpareil

There is of course a good reason for this, beyond even the small potential customer pool. Everyone develops their own methods in marbling, including their own basins. My main ones are actually the plastic draws of an office organiser, perfect for me as they neatly hold my preferred paper size (A4) with a little space around them - and they can go back to being office furnature when I'm not marbling. The size of the rakes and combs need to be appropriate to the basin size which really means they must be made to fit.

French Curl

I’ve been making do with some fairly awful pin and cardboard combs I put together in a couple of hours last year. The pins shift, the cardboard bends and disintegrates when wet. I only had 1 and 0.5 cm combs and no rakes. Finally I got my act together and hauled out the tools. I’m proud of the result. I now have short and long 1 cm combs, and 1″ and 2″ rakes and a bouquet rake. 

Pretty yet vicious marbling tools

Double-Cabled Nonpareil

Of course they didn’t stay looking this pretty for long. I’ve barely done a month’s worth of marbling with them and they all already have paint splatters – and a couple have some wonderfully marbled sections where I’ve dropped them in the size. Still, they are working very well and haven't broken yet! The marbing pictures on this post are some of my recent experiments with patterns I haven’t been able to make before.

Further Cake Adventures

I’ve been playing with icing again. This time the cake was for my nephew’s birthday. As it was a family party I decided to steer clear of chocolate, as it doesn’t suit everyone (oh the horror). I also wanted a cake I could eat. The result was a gluten free egg-free lemon cake. I’m really pleased with it and the great thing about lemon is that the cake tastes better after a few days, rather than stale.

The nieces suggested a train cake, which sounded like fun to me. This is just one normal sized cake, baked in a square tin then cut to form an engine and carriages. There is a lot of icing – seriously so much icing. There will be icing dreams.

Over all I’m pretty happy with how it turned out, although the many ways it deviates from a proper train bother me a little. For example just how the wheels work when they’re outside the track is a mystery and the funnel placement plain wrong (but necessary for cake structural integrity, unfortunately). The kink in the track is also odd – when I saw how it’d turned out I wanted to create a train derailment, because there is no way a train could get around a corner that tight. Sadly disaster themed cakes are probably not suitable for toddlers.

Children and Literary Earrings

I spent Wednesday afternoons this term crafting with a great bunch of primary school kids. They did marbling, paper making and origami – and they’re fantastic at it too. Take a look at some of their marbled papers. The ones with a textured look are their own homemade recycled paper.

One week I wore a pair of marbled origami crane earrings I’d made, as we were making cranes in class. The reaction was so enthusiastic; I went home and designed some book themed ones to match the notebooks they made in the last few weeks. It turns out teaching is not only great fun, it’s also inspiring.

 

Disliking the bright white of a blank page I’ve turned to Shakespeare – I find one sonnet fits neatly between two ears.

Here is sonnet 19, on white printer paper with marbled cartridge paper for a cover.

And sonnet 116 with a homemade marbled paper cover.

Finally, a Lord of the Rings set, with the poems All That Glitters and One Ring to Rule Them All.

They even have appropriate end papers - Gondor’s white tree and the One Ring.

I love the potential for personalisation in these earrings – a favourite quote, poem or even a recipe. I think I’ll have great fun making many more of them. I hope to take another session again soon too – the kids were great, and who knows what I’ll end up designing next time!

Crafty Week

I've had a pretty productive week, craftwise. I thought I'd show it with some photos.

 I made more of my usual quilled earrings and accompanying origami boxes, both of which turned out well. The earrings this week were mostly in the theme of grey, which I think are rather elegant, though I'm afraid they don't photograph well. There is also a pale pink and black set that remind me of my high school ball dress - if you're wondering, it was a very nice dress.

Then I did my book experiments. I've been meaning to make some as a technique refresher for a while, as next month I'll be teaching children how to marble and then make some of these books.

First I tried the Japanese binding

While I'm very pleased with the effects, I don't think I'll do this one at my course as it's both tricky to make and then, with the tight binding, tricky to use too. Although I may use a variation with handmade paper, as it is a great way to bind single pages.

The second style is just a basic stitched notebook, which I like for its simplicity and ease of use. It satisfyingly meets William Morris' criteria of being both useful and beautiful.