Saturday, August 18, 2012

Summer Craft Classes - Spiral roses card with paper quilling


This is in continuation with my previous post. This project I am sharing was made by my eight year old student. Spiral roses are so elegant and enhance the beauty of any project they are used in. I have used them often for cards, tags as gift toppers etc.  Just change the size of the spiral used to make the rose and you can use it in multiple ways.

Usually when I make these I draw the spiral free hand and cut it. For Sirjan, my student I used a slightly different approach. I drew spirals of various diameters on a tracing paper. And then taught her how to use carbon paper or transfer paper to trace the template on the colored paper for the rose.  That made it easy for her to cut the spiral.I prefer to use text weight paper for the roses though you can use card stock too.

We made many variations of the roses, like inking the edges with markers to make shaded roses or using stamp pads for the edges.

There are quilling kits available with cut spirals though I prefer to cut my own. Here is  a  tutorial  for making the rose after the spiral is cut.  Here is a close up of the roses she made. I am so proud of her.




Friday, August 17, 2012

Summer Craft Classes - Rubber Stamping


This year has been really hectic for me. Lot of travel to meet family and friends..of course I loved it all but that also meant less time for crafting. I have been sneaking out some time for crafting in between but have not been able to share them on CIFA. Today I will be sharing some of my student's work. She is a delightful eight year old who has been coming to learn crafts from me this summer.

This year our focus was learning different techniques for paper crafting. I introduced her to new tools and techniques while making a card so that end of the class she also had the satisfaction of making something to take home.

For the following card we used rubber stamp to create the outline and then she filled them in using pencil colors.She was so excited to use rubber stamps and ink pads on her own.



We also used acrylic stamps. She learned how to use and clean her stamps, how to use stamping block for acrylic or cling stamps etc. Here is one of the cards she created at her home for her friend. I just love how she thought of stamping the owl and adding the tree and leaves to create this pretty card.

Another tool we focused on was paper trimmer. It took her quite some time to figure it out but now she is doing great with cutting straight edges using paper trimmer. Figuring out the measurements and understanding how to position the paper on paper trimmer ( like placing the longer side perpendicular to cutting blade) to get the desired size was her biggest challenge. It was a challenge for me too to come to her level to make her understand things that seem so obvious to me as a grown up :).

We used Cricut paper trimmer.  Here is a card she made and she has cut all the paper pieces for this project herself. It looks like a simple card but for an eight year old girl this was a big challenge. 




In my coming posts I will be sharing some more of the fun projects we did this summer. Hope this will inspire some of you to introduce fun tools to your children this summer. I spent all my summer vacations as a kid crafting and learning new things and I still am thankful to my parents for all those craft classes they enrolled us in as a kid and more for the projects we made with our mom during our leisure time. They are some of the happiest memories of  our childhood.