Once a month, I help run a craft morning at my church. We get together do do something creative, and have a short talk from the Bible. I help come up with ideas for the crafts, gather materials together, and I give some of the talks too.
This is quite a new meeting, and we’re slowly getting better at being organised and doing a variety of crafts. Back in June we crocheted flowers, which have ended up on headbands and on cushions. In July we got gloriously sticky making yarn balls. In August we took a holiday.
But now it’s back to school and back to the craft morning, and this month we got really ambitious and decided to do three different activities, all coming under the category of abstract painting techniques.
I showed people how to make ‘stained glass windows’ using an encaustic wax iron. I didn’t remember to take any photos of their creations, but, as a Blue Peter presenter would say, here’s one I made earlier:
All we did was to heat up the iron, cover the surface in wax – in stripes, or wavy lines, or in some other pattern – and then quickly press the iron onto the card, holding it down while we counted to 10. The beauty of this technique is that anyone can create effective pictures. Some of them looked like stained glass windows, or waterfalls, or fish… someone even created one that, turned on its side, looked like a landscape! Several people got really involved with this activity and churned out lots of paintings. They can either be mounted on black card, as I have done here, or put in a photo frame for an unusual gift, or trimmed and stuck onto a blank card… or simply put up on your fridge at home!
The second technique we tried was ‘dotty art’. The supplies for this are simple: black card or paper (we used blank black greetings cards), water-based paint (we used gouache, but you could use any liquid paint), and cotton buds. Dip the cotton buds in the paint, and apply to the card… et voila!
I explored circles in curves, other people did lines and flowers.
We had two small children joining us this week, so we turned this idea into a painting activity that developed their fine motor skills. We gave them an A4 sheet of card, some children’s paint and cotton buds… and let them dot away! I thought they might try and paint with the cotton buds, but they got the idea and their paintings looked very effective.
Last, but not least, we had a go at tape resist canvas art. We bought some canvases, and spray painted them either gold or ‘rose gold’… although it looked more like sparkly pink to me! We left the canvases to dry while we had a go at the other art activities on offer. Once the spray paint was dry (which didn’t take long), we covered it with masking tape. Some people made simple grids, some did more complicated patterns. We ended up with masking tape criss-crossing our canvas, and small sections of canvas showing. We then used sponges to paint acrylic paint on the canvas – we had small tubes of acrylic which we applied directly to the sponge. When we had painted each section, we peeled off the tape… and saw wonderful pieces of art!
So all in all, a busy morning… if you’d like to see more of what we get up to in the craft mornings, you can see pictures here. And if you live near Chichester, why not come and join us? We meet on the first Thursday of every month, between 10 am and 12 noon, at Providence Chapel, on Chapel Street. Next month… polymer clay embellished glass jars!
Coloured Fragments 