If you didn’t already know I take part in a Google Plus hangout most weeks with some other craft bloggers. You can choose to watch them live or catch up later by watching the video on YouTube or on the blogs of those that have taken part.

Last weeks craft hangout was all about felt.

One of the things I like to do is use felt flowers, pin wheels and swirls to decorate presents and gifts.

They’re relatively easy to make and are great for using up remnant scraps of material.

Most felt flowers are suitable you just work around the type of scrap you have.

You can glue them to the gift tag or glue them directly on to present itself as the as the main decoration. 

Don’t be scared about putting large flowers on gift tags. they work really well and there’s always room on the back to write your note.

If you’re really adventurous and have the time you could turn the flowers into brooches or hair accessories first so they become a wearable present.

The video below gives some great ideas for things to make using felt. Use the links underneath to go to the blogs involved.

Red Ted Art (food frenzy) –  Felt Strawberries, Felt Doughnuts

Red Ted Art – Felt Christmas Ornaments

Kids Chaos – Finger Puppets

Zing Zing Tree – Pinwheel Hair Accessories

Zing Zing Tree – How To Make Felt Flowers (coming soon)

Zing Zing Tree – Felt Flower Ring (coming soon)

Me And My Shadow – Cute Felt Mice

Red Ted Art – Bunny Egg Cosies

Everyone loves to play with cardboard boxes. It’s a well known fact that children get enormous pleasure playing with and up-cycling cardboard boxes into wonderful flying machines, vehicles, buildings, monsters etc

Fellowes recently commissioned British artist, Chris Gilmour, to have a play with some of their flat pack boxes. Using mainly glue, a sharp knife and their strong corrugated cardboard storage boxes he recreated some amazing City scapes including Big Ben, Bradenburg Gate and the Eiffel Tower.

Fellowes commissioned the sculptures to coincide with the re-branding of its storage and organisation range from R-kive (get the pun?) to the more global Bankers Box Brand.

The finished replicas of Paris, Berlin and London are  stunning and so worth a peek. You can watch all the cities being built in this short video.

Feeling inspired? Then pop over to the Bankers Box website and down load some templates to help you build Big Ben, a London Bus or a Town House. 

We had a go at making the Town House and London Bus using some storage boxes Fellowes sent us.

I’m rather pleased with the outcome.

The templates  don’t include dimensions and need fine tuning (especially the bus) but they give some good rough guidelines and a bit of customisation is all part of the building fun.

Who knew flat pack boxes could be so exciting? We had a new tenant in our town house almost immediately.

We were sent some Bankers Boxes for the purpose of writing up this post.

So when it cam to book week and one of my daughters asked to be Norman I embraced the challenge. Orange/pink clothes and a few home-made accessories worked wonders.

The Doughnut

You need a large sheet of card board (I used the remains of some flat pack packaging we had) and some polystyrene/Styrofoam blocks (again I took a long rectangular piece pf packaging and snapped it into square shapes. Some brown & pink tissue paper, cellulose adhesive and bright coloured pipe cleaners.

Cut out a two large doughnut shapes and glue the polystyrene/Styrofoam blocks around the inside and outside edge of one of the cardboard shapes. When they have dried glue the other shape on top.

Papier-mache the brown tissue paper (you could use brown parcel paper or brown paper bags) around the outside edge to cover the gap. You want this to overlap about a quarter of the way down the side of the doughnut. Use the pink tissue paper to papier-mache the inside gap and bring that up over the doughnut to form the icing.

Cut some bright coloured pipe cleaners into small pieces and glue them on both sides to make the sprinkles.

The head

We used pearl orange face paint to colour the face. Measure around the head and cut a strip of card about 1-2 inches wide with a couple of triangular points towards the center. Paint the card orange and glue on 2 large paper ovals for the eyes. Add Black circles for the pupils.

To attach the doughnut we used a wide belt around the middle and tied some orange tulle up and over the shoulders and wrapped it around the front of the belt.

The doughnut now sits proudly on their playroom wall as a decoration.

These were briefly shown on the Bottle Top Hangout a while back and are very similar to the Plastic Bottle Top Flowers I have previously blogged about. They’re also very easy to make.

For each flower you need – 2 tissue paper circles (cut your own or use pre-cut), a metal bottle tops, a 30cm pipe cleaner, some PVA  (white) glue and scissors.

1. Take your pipe cleaner and wrap one end around the inside of the bottle top. Allow a little wrap over so you can twist the pipe cleaner on to itself to hold the shape. Take the pipe cleaner out and set to one side.

2. Depending on the petal shape you’re after fold your tissue paper circles and cut out your petal shape. You can use the circles uncut if you prefer.

Have a play with the different shapes you can get. For example the image above shows the difference between 3 , 4 and 5 folds before cutting.

3. Unfold the tissue paper and glue the 2 flowers shapes together by putting a small blob of glue in the middle of one of them and placing the other flower shape on top, off setting the petals slightly.

4. Spread glue on the inside of your bottle cap and carefully push the center of your flower on to the middle of the bottle top. Next glue the pipe cleaner into the bottle top pushing the tissue paper down  You may want to put the pipe cleaner in place without glue to start with to help settle the tissue paper in place.

I should also mention that if you have text on your bottle top you need to check its position as you add the pipe cleaner if you want it to run horizontally. I didn’t check the first flower in the photo at the top of the page.

The finished flowers look really pretty and look great when put in a picture frame, glued on to cards, added to collages etc.

I also like to use squeezy bottle lids as flower holders for them and put them.

I loved the ‘Bottle Top’ Hangout. I’d never really played with them before and suddenly my head was bouncing with ideas to make with them. I still haven’t managed to blog everything so keep a look out over the year as I’m sure I’ll squeeze them in.

This was another great hangout with lots of really fun things to make. It’s really worth while having a look at the other blogs

The video below shows our lovely hangout and some more great crafts to do with bottle tops. Who knew how fun it would be to bake them in the oven.

With Thanks To

Red Ted Art - Bottle Top Stamps

Playful Learners - Bottle Top Easter Cards

Kids Chaos - Bottle Lid Monster

Zing Zing Tree – Plastic Bottle Top Flowers

Rainy Day Mum - Bottle Top Owl

Anonymous - Spanish Marbles (Chapas)

Knitty Mummy - Bottle Top Badges

Red Ted Art - Bugs, Aliens and a Bunny

]]> http://zingzingtree.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/bottle-top-hangout/feed/ 2 bluebearwood Bottle top header http://zingzingtree.wordpress.com/2013/04/16/bottle-top-hangout/ http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ZingZingTree/~3/TofGuIzUEro/ http://zingzingtree.wordpress.com/2013/03/27/pine-cone-pets/#comments Wed, 27 Mar 2013 13:32:07 +0000 Zing Zing Tree http://zingzingtree.wordpress.com/?p=784 Continue reading →]]> How about this fun craft that allows children to use their imagination and create their own pine cone pets using felt off cuts. It’s really easy to make and is great for taking out and about … felt scraps are always handy to have in your bag!

Using a glue gun to attach googly eyes to your pine cones in places that would make a good face.

Then cut pieces of felt (or play foam) into shapes that can be pushed into the natural gaps in the pine cones to create ears, paws, manes, tails, hands etc (you could also use any pre-made fuzzy felt shapes that you have).

Add a few pom poms to the collection and your ready to create as many weird and wonderful creatures as you can. A plastic needle or cocktail stick can help.

You can even turn them upright and make them into trees!

If you’re feeling really adventurous you could also decorate the inside of a box to make a themed storage container for the pine cone animals to play in.

This craft was supposed to be part of this weeks crafty hangout and although we went and hung things didn’t go quite to plan. There were some great pine cone crafts though so do have a look at the following links below for some other pine cone ideas. You can also see the edited hangout here.

Kid’s Chaos  – A cute Hedgehog (it also makes a great spiky polar bear) using a cone and air drying clay.
Plus 2 point 4 - printing with pine cones
The Frog & The Fairy - small world play trees and a Christmas tree for a doll’s house.
Mum at the Madhouse - cute owl (and has lots of other lovely ideas in her post)
Domestic Goddesque -A gorgeous door hanging using pine cones, pearl paint and ribbon (very pretty),

Me & My Shadow – lovely photo holder (would be great for Fathers day)
Red Ted Art - shared some pine cone babies from her book.

I love all the little characters that you can make with loo roll tubes and the bird feeder is on my list of things to make with my girls.

Watch the video and visit the blogs to get more detail and ideas.

With Thanks To

Red Ted Art – Pirates, Mermaids 

Me & My Shadow – Owls & Peacocks

Here Come The Girls – Cat In the Hat

Thinly Spread – Christmas Carol Singers 

Zing Zing tree – Torus Shape

Kids Chaos – Bird feeder

Red Ted Art – Giraffe Puppet

Domestic Goddesque – Wind socks

I have discovered that the simple card board tuber makes the most fantastic ‘Torus’ shape (imagine a hollow ring doughnut). Have a look at wikipedia if you want a bit more information.

It’s very easy to make (you can make them out of toilet roll tubes as well) and is just simply a wonderfully tactile shape to play with. I have so many ideas for this so expect lots of blog posts over the next few weeks!

To make a ‘Torus’ you need … A card board tube, sharp scissors and some sticky tape.

1. Slightly squash your cardboard tube and cut into segments leaving about 0.5-1 cm uncut at the end of each incision.

2. bend each segment slightly so it starts to curve.

3.  Tape the ends together and you’re done.

The following video explains in a little more detail.

There are so many things you can make with these wonderfully tactile shapes. the simplest being to stack them. You can even cover them with paper before cutting and use them as table decorations.

watch out for this shape reappearing in a few blog posts soon!

This blog post was part of a Cardboard Tube Craft Google Hangout. 

Again some more  great ideas to make and do with help from our lovely trees and bushes. Watch the video and be inspired.

With Thanks To

Red Ted Art - Stick People

Kids Chaos - Shadow Puppet

Zing Zing Tree – Twig Wall Flower

Domestic Godesque - Stick and Pom Pom Puppets

Me And My Shadow - Rustic Heart Wreath

Any way I digress ..

This was my first ever crafty G+ hangout. In fact it was my first ever G+ hangout and it was all about craft ideas to do with pipe cleaners!

It was so exciting and great fun to be a part of this and the craft ideas were great and covered a broad age range. The links to the specific blog posts are beneath the video.

With Thanks To

Red Ted Art - Pipe Cleaner People

Domestic Goddesque – Pipe Cleaner Bunnies

The Imagination Tree – Pipe cleaner beading

Zing Zing Tree - Pipe Cleaner Hearts

Rainy Day Mum - Pipe Cleaner Sewing

Climbing Rainbows - Pipe Cleaner Dragonfly

Me and My Shadow - Dolly Dress Up

]]> http://zingzingtree.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/pipe-cleaner-craft-hangout/feed/ 0 bluebearwood Cotton Pipe Cleaners http://zingzingtree.wordpress.com/2013/03/19/pipe-cleaner-craft-hangout/