Crafty Half Term

Hi guys! I hope you're all having a great half term! Unfortunately I've been very ill so I haven't been able to go out as much as I  have wanted to but......I found a solution! I decided to make lots of beautiful items for myself and as gifts for my family and friends! It's been a very crafty half term! I think it's really beneficial to hand make your own items! It will really brighten your day when you create a new item for yourself-you'll feel a great sense of pride when you see your unique make. Handmade items make a great little gift for your close friends and family. Many people claim that they will more grateful for a gift that has taken ages for a friend to make rather than an easy choice of an expensive gift that has already been manufactured. So consider it, are you going to start making things straight away? I bet you are! Have so much fun-just like I did! You'll soon get the hang of coming up with new art project ideas!

Rose drawing Tutorial in Pictures

Christmas Gifts 2014

I have bought all the Christmas gifts for my friends and my parents but I am yet to buy for my sister because it was her birthday a few weeks ago and I had to buy gifts for that first of course but I have plenty of ideas! I'll start with my parent’s gifts-me and my sister shared the costs. For my dad we got him an American imported pop tart in the cinnamon flavour-I'm not sure how much this was because my sister bought it but it was from Peggy Annes in the Trentham shopping town. I bought a handmade apricot jam jar for him but my sister chose it. It was either £3.50 or £2.50 so it was quite cheap considering how delicious it is (we gave some to him before and tried it) and the fact that it is handmade. In natural World (found in Trentham shopping town) my sister bought an elephant candle for my mum- it was £5.00 but it is very pretty. I found cherry scented body butter in Superdrug which was quite cheap. My mum had asked for some from M&S on her Christmas list but she said not to buy her any from there because it is expensive apparently. The cherry one smells amazing though. I have got presents for 5 friends of mine. For my friend Tilly, I made an advent calendar (I was inspired by TopModel magazine November issue) and it was filled with éclairs and sherbet straws from poundland. I used gift labels as the doors (also from poundland) and I used transfers from the magazine as numbers! I had already put the sweets in the doors already though so I couldn't use them as transfers properly so I just stuck them on! For my friend Emma I got a really good bargain! I bought from the works a set of 2 matching items, a calendar 2015 and a diary with cute puppies on and the 2 of them together in a set, were only £3! She recently got a dog so I thought it would be great for her!  For my friend Keren (who I don't know that well so I just got her generic gifts) I bought a really pretty pencil case tin with sellotape, a correcting pen and a glue-stick (that matched the outside) inside. I also got a really cool pad of sticky notes-they were all square but each one was turned a bit so it had a really cool shape overall! For my friend Izzy I re-used an empty bauble I got last year ( which had chocolate coins in before I ate them) and I bought some sweets-mini gob-stoppers, millions in mixed flavours and wrapped maom sweets to put in. I closed it up and wrapped a loom band (diamond-made by me) around it and secured a lipstick shaped rubber inside it(made by the company TopModel). For my friend Eleanor, I got a handmade fox purse which was made using appliqué, it was £5! Oh, and I also made my Nanna a notebook (I actually binded it by sewing) with a 3D flower on it that I coloured in and shaped myself! I will give this to her because I already made it but I am not buying for anybody else in my outer family (i.e. family who don't live in my house)-however if I have time I might just make organic soap for them using a kit but I am not planning to buy anything because I am running out of time and Mum says I don't need to. I have a cousin robin who is quite young and he would be upset if I didn't get him a gift I'm sure, so I got him a 3 piece set of Mr men books. They were the special ones with glitter and other stuff on it. I bought them from WHSmith and they were £5 but I split the price with my sister. The wrapping paper I will be using some of this year is actually decoupage paper but it is so pretty and smooth with reindeer illustrations on it. it was quite expensive considering the small amount of paper in it but it is beautiful from the works. Enjoy your Christmas and remember to buy gifts everyone. I hope you have been inspired by my post. :)

Halloween costume ideas!

Hello Guys! It's nearly Halloween and you know what that means! That's right-costumes!So if you need a last minute costume idea have a little look at these lists:

Traditional:                   

• zombie                                                      
• witch
• ghost
• skeleton
• Frankenstein
• Mummy
• pirate
• alien
• vampire

Disney villains:

• Maleficent
• Evil queen
• Ursula

unique/a bit different:

• Mexican day of the dead skull
• Michael Jackson thriller zombie
• Roy Lichtenstein's  screaming lady
• scarecrow from doctor who
• beetlejuice 
• voldemort
• snow queen from narnia
• corpse bride

How to draw a Mexican day of the dead skull inspired by Thaneeya mcArdle (in pics)

How to make Halloween Glasses

How to make horrific Halloween 
glasses for party bags or as part
of your  creepy costume





1.) collect a pair of 3D glasses from a cinema by not putting the glasses in the recycling bin but instead bringing it home
2.)using sticky-tape, stick a rectangle of green tissue paper behind both of the lenses once you have popped out the plastic
3.) use scissors to cut the access tissue paper away from the frame to make it look like your eyes are green instead of white
4.) draw the pupils of your eyes with black felt tip pen (put your finger behind the area of paper you are colouring to make sure you don't pierce a hole in it
5.)using a red or yellow pen, draw the colour around the pupils on both sides, to make you look like a monster
6.) using a thin red pen (stabilo fine liners are recommended), draw veins around the colour of your eyes to make you look evil and angry
7.) you can either give this to someone else as a gift/party favour or use it yourself
8.) if you want to use this as a blindfold or you don't care about vision, you can keep the monster glasses as they are but if not, make a hole where the pupils are so you can see.
9.) enjoy Halloween with this easy craft project that can transform an outfit!

HAPPY HALLOWEEN!

My Bread Diaries Homework

INTRODUCTION

Hello reader,

For just under a week now I have been completing  something called "The Bread Diaries". This is a homework project which I was given by my school tied in with our science and our topic work. Our science was micro-organisms and our topic was world war II. The idea of this project was to keep some slightly damp bread in seal-able (and disposable) containers which were transparent and keep them in 7 different locations in our house and garage/shed. We would keep a diary for a little while describing what the bread looked like in the different areas.  This diary could be in any form we liked from photos to power-points. I chose to do a spreadsheet which can be found below. The seven areas we had to put our bread in were: fridge , freezer, a warm,damp place (bathroom), a cold damp place ( garage ), a warm dry place (next to boiler), a cooler dry place (Mum and Dads bedroom)and a dark cupboard (in hallway drawer).I hope you enjoy my science experiment and be inspired by the excitement of it!!! :)


If this spreadsheet does not work properly please click here.

CONCLUSION


My conclusion is that the bread in the cold places have been preserved more than the ones in the warm areas. The one that has been preserved the most is the one in the freezer and the one that has been preserved the least is the one in Mum and Dads room. I think the reason for this is the temperature. In the freezer it is doing exactly that. Freezing it. By "freezing" this  can mean both making something cold but also stopping something. The "freezer" stops bacteria and un-friendy micro-organisms from growing in the bread. Whereas in the warm areas there is no way of "freezing" the bread. This is illustrated in the picture below, where I have arranged the bread roughly in order of temperature which matches the order of the mouldiness. This project has been very fun and exiting to do and I have learned quite a bit. :D