Spring cleaning, chocolate & a Fox amongst the chickens!

Who's that peeping out behind the basket...?

Happy Easter!  I hope you are surrounded by all things yummy today - we certainly seem to have had a massive amount of chocolate appear in our house this morning which will probably take a while to clear!

Talking of  clearing, I recently ran a last ever sale and closed down my bead shop in order to be able to move on a little (workwise) and, with a zillion beads to still sort out & get rid of, have started to knuckle down to the task of sorting out and re-organising my 'creative space'. I guess you could call it Spring Cleaning and of course, what it has really done is reveal just how much of a total hoarder I really am!  There are things I could never find when I needed them and others that are long forgotten but I am doing my best to sort everything out.... 

somewhere in this here pile is something very useful (....I think)

(don't even ask me why I have an old Thunderbirds game in this pile!)

Anyway, I will get there and it should mean that I have a much better space in which to sit, create & dream.  

To kick start the re-vamp I popped off to Ikea and bought 2 nice new white tables (to help give me a sense of clarity) and, now I've got them all set up and have spent a few days sorting around them, I thought I should really stop and test them out  - just to see if they are up to the job.... and so here we are with another little make and all those Easter chickies had better watch out!

Meet Mr Fox...

As you can see, Mr Fox is made of paper and I think he's rather cute!  He's very simple to make and all you need is a square of paper to practise with.  

Want to make your own paper Fox?  Just follow these steps....

 (1)  Begin by folding your square of paper from one corner to another (as shown) to form a triangle...

(2)Fold the triangle in half to give you a centre crease then open back up...

(3) Now use that centre crease as a guide for bringing one of the sides inwards as shown

(4)Do the same on the other side...and you should end up with a square shape like in the picture above

(5)Fold in half 'backwards'...

(6)Hold it down on a flat surface..

(7) Fold the side section over as shown... 

(It should now look like this)

(8) Now open the 'concertina' bit outwards as shown above..

(9) Bend the middle point down to form the 'face'

(10) Put a bend in the 'tail'...

(11 Draw in some foxy face features..(you can also 'open' his mouth if you want!)

Stand him up and put another small kink in his tail and he's done!

Now you'd best go tell those chickens to watch out... 

He's coming...

Watch out chickies!

Well, I think I can say the tables are fit to work on so I'd better be off to do some more tidying... and maybe eat a little of that chocolate :-)

Happy Making!
xxxx

Happy Valentines & the 'Day of Love' free paper

I was hoping to have had my little tatted Valentine's project ready for today but, alas, it is not quite ready so I am compensating with this cheery image and a free to download paper that I have designed for my blog readers :-)

Simply click here to download...     Day of Love Paper or here

Enjoy xxxx

Paper butterflies....

Butterflies are one of my most favourite things - they have a 'special' meaning to me and I guess that's why they seem to end up in every craft medium I've tried!   

With it being nearly time for the kids to go back to school, I have to say it's shame it seems to have been mostly a wet English summer this year which has not only kept us indoors more than we wanted but has affected all kinds of things... not least the butterfly population and I haven't seen half as many as last year so far. 

Well, hopefully these little beauties might go some way to making up for the lack of them this summer!  As you can see, this week I've been playing with paper crafts which are great for kids and it's one of the cheapest indoor crafting activities to do!

I made mine from some free papers that came with a craft magazine a few years back and never got used (yes, I am a hoarder too!) and then several more from colourful fashion magazine pages which are a good thickness for this kind of project - you just need to trim the pages into squares.   Finally, I simply used nylon thread to string them all from a circular plastic bag handle.  They certainly danced around in the breeze like the real thing when I was trying to photograph them!

Check out the tutorials page where I have just posted a new step-by-step for making these lovely, floaty paper butterflies and let me know what you think!

Happy Making :-)