DIY: Pistachio shells tea light holder

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It's days of Diwali celebrations in India and it's a tradition to exchange and gift dry fruits among other gifts. So while you are eating those pistachios, don't toss away those pistachio shells and instead make something beautiful out them. I and my kids made tea light holder from these shells. Here are the easy steps to do these.

 

Things you need corrugated cardboard, glue(fevicol), pistachio shells, tea lights, scissor, pencil.

• Cut out circle of about 4 inch diameter of cardboard. 
• Place the tea light at the center. Draw the rough outline of the tea light.

• Apply glue on the rim of the cardboard. Start sticking the pistachio shells upside down. The base should be inside towards the circle and the pointed end should be pointing out. Wait for at least 15 min to for it to dry.

 

• Start sticking the second round of the shells on the first round of shells.
•  Continue till you reach the penciled circle. And you are done!!

 

We did about four of these. My son insisted on coloring one, but it wasn't  pretty as the natural one.

 

Have a wonderful and happy Deepavali folks..... 

 

Diwali Decor : Crepe Paper Marigolds

Festivals in India are incomplete without Marigolds. These saffron and yellow colored flowers has been one of my all time favorite for their beauty and pungent scent. Today I am sharing with you a tutorial on making the marigold flowers.  Off course they do not match the fresh and real flowers completely but they can be incorporated in your décor. You can use them at the tables, or simple string them to make Toran.
Please note that since these are paper flowers, do not place them near the candles or your wicker lamps.

Gather the items that are required to make the flowers. Please note here that I have taken a thick and strong thread not the regular embroidery floss. I felt that while tying the ends together the regular thread easily slips and you will not be able to form a tight loop.

Using craft scissor with zig-zag shaped blade, cut the crepe paper about 2 and 1/5 inch width.

Taking a thread and a needle, start stringing these strips. Use a running stich along the center of the strip.

When you feel they are of enough volume, tie the two ends of the threads tightly.

For the center part of the flower, create a 1/2 inch wide and three inch length strip. Make fringes. Twist a small piece of crepe paper for a stalk. Glue the fringe to this stalk. Note that the stalk is very small here about two inches but thick enough to get inside the flower.

Insert this into the center of the flower, gluing to the flower.

For the base part, twist the base part of the flower as much as possible, to make it pointed at the bottom. Glue them with a floral tape.

 

 

 

News Paper Crafts : Paper Bells

In my earlier post on Dastkar exhibition, I told you I got few ideas for paper crafting. What I am sharing today is not something new, many people have done it before. Here is the tutorial on paper bells. Don't go by the number of steps, they are simple to do.

Firstly begin with making sticks/reeds from the newspaper. This is bit tough for beginners and you may get sticks of varying sizes initially. But practice makes man perfect. I learnt finally to make uniform and thin reeds. My learning tip here would be don't stop in between. Finish doing your reeds all at once.
Make 4 vertical strips out of one sheet of news paper. Begin rolling at one corner of the paper. Place at an angle and start rolling over the skewer  till you reach the opposite corner. In between you have to pull your skewer slightly out of your roll. At the end of rolling put a drop of glue/fevi stick. Here is a video for this step.

Once you have enough sticks, flatten them by rolling them over a pencil.

Take a thin skewer, in my case I used my knitting needle and started rolling tightly my first flattened stick. At the end of the roll apply glue and hold it for five minutes.

To create the slightly dome shape, slowly push the circle from side by side, all sides. Don't over do it, else the roll may come off.

Start attaching the second roll, to this basic roll. Start gluing at half of the strip. I used totally three strips to make a bell.

 

After the bell is made, apply a coat of glue/fevicol to the bell.

 

Now comes the fun part. Color these bells with colors of your choice. I used acrylic colors and I gave very thin coat both inside and outside. This is to retain the newspaper print on the bells(People should know that they are made of newspaper isn't it?).

 

For the beads, I took shilpakar Epoxy based clay and made beads out of it. I took this because I wanted the beads to be bit heavy compared to the weight of the bells. They are very easy, just follow the instructions on the box. As soon as you make beads make a hole using toothpick. Let them dry for few hours.

 

The final part of putting all your efforts together. I took a chord which I had bought to make bracelet(which never happened -:))) Start stringing your bell and beads alternatively. In order to retain them in place, tie a knot and another two on the same knot. This is to make the knot big enough. This may be not clear, but you will know.

 

 

 You can even use these bells for making torana for your main door..

 

 

 

Update : Add this craft to December  link-up at Just Keep on Creating

 

Paper Bag flowers

What do you do with the paper bag that comes with your shopping? Me, I put gift inside and give it to the intended person or use them for carrying light things till they are worn out. This time the designs on the paper bag made me do these simple flowers. While doing them I realized the underneath of the paper is white. But since this idea was already in my mind I decided to proceed and do them. Tell me what do you think of them.

 

 

Things you need..

• Paper bag preferably same color on both sides
• Scissor
• Pencil
• Small pom poms of your choice
• Floral wire and tape.

1. Cut open the paper bag carefully from all four sides .

2. Make horizontal stripes and fold each stripe of desired width of the petal.

3. Cut the petals to the desired shape. For these flowers I used 5 petals each.

 

 4. I used small brown pom pom. Take desired length of floral wire for the stem. I made few longer and some shorter stems whose length was like half of my palms. Insert the pop pom through it. 

5. Take another floral wire and tie each petal around the stem and the center tightly. The flower now would be in closed shape.

6. Take the green color floral tape for the stem and wrap it around the floral wire.

7. Open all the petals carefully.

8. Put them into vase and enjoy!

Linking this to weekly story hosted at Colours Dekor

Felt butterflies...

Working with Felt is a wonderful thing. I remember some 5 years back when I asked for Felt fabric in the usual book cum stationary  shops all I would get was a blank look. I had found them finally selling at a high price in the new Itsy Bitsy craft shop in Jayanagar, Bangalore(now no longer exists there). I hadn't done anything with them except making few flowers, book marks. I thought they were too precious -:)

Nowadays we get felt in all craft stores. There are many things you can do with felt mostly small stuffed miniatures, toys, ornaments etc.,.

Cutting felt to the exact shape is a tough job for beginners like me.

I took two equal felt  pieces and used a cut paper butterfly as a model. But yet I was unsuccessful in cutting the exact shape.

One good thing is that I cut both the pieces together at a time. Even if there was any mistake in the shape it didn't matter much. They would be sewn together.

I have sewn both the pieces together by blanket stitch.

Detailed butterfly

Do not put the stitches overlapping, it doesn't look good. The first butterfly I did, the stitches were too close and they looked messed up. Anyway I decided to retain them. Looking from far no one can make out the messed up butterfly.

Do not put stitches too close together

We get colored wooden beads in the craft shop. You can get the plain ones and colored them with matching acrylic colors.

A happy new year..

Happy new year to all my blog readers... Bit late I know, have been lazy for sometime to post anything.

Did a lot of things at home this Jan and last month.
Like turning these old bangles to new wearable ones. All you need are old non glass bangles, cotton threads (or shiny ones if you like), fevicol. Just wrap and wrap around the bangles and in the end stick the end of the thread with fevicol(or any tough adhesive) to the underside of the wrapped bangle.
The best thing about these is that you can have the exact color matching bangle with the outfit you are wearing -:).

I have painted these fishes in Madhubani. 

Apart from these I am trying new dishes in the kitchen like there is no tomorrow. Eating the failures has definitely made me gain few kilos. I successfully could create my favorite sweet Rasmalai after 3 unsuccessful attempts.

Magazine Reed Box

I had seen this magazine reed box at Craftzine long back and wanted to try it sometime. I decided to turn a sturdy shoe box into a reed box. Here are the results..

It hasn't turned out to be as great that as shown in Craftzine but I learnt couple of valuable lessons.
1. I thought making a magazine reed is very simple, but I realized it is not so. As says in the instructions, placing the skewer at 45 degree is IMPORTANT.

2. I just read the instructions twice probably, overlooked many things.
So after making few reeds, I glued them to one side of the box. After gluing, it was the time to cut the reeds to the length, exactly that of the box. Here I failed miserably. The reeds weren't getting cut evenly by the scissor. Later I read the instructions carefully, there is one sentence which says 'you can also cut the reeds to size before you glue them in place'. Then it was simple.
Now I am more confident for my next magazine reed project.

Crepe paper twine ball

Ever since I saw a twisted crepe paper twine in Reliance Timeout, I wanted to try doing it myself. Well, after doing one, I realized making crepe paper twine is not that difficult. I used few of it for gift wrapping. I tried making ball of it later. Here is how I did it. I did three of them, first one turned out to be best. Other two didn't come out well as the balloon I used were not of perfect round shape

Step 1.
Cut the crepe paper into one inch stripes.



Step 2.
Start twisting the papers into thin twines.
Step 3.
Start joining all the individual twisted twines by sticking them together with the glue


Step 4.
Blow up a small balloon, apply thin coat of Vaseline all over it.

Step 5.
Take few drops of synthetic gum and put equal amount of water into it. Apply this mixture on the balloon.

Step 6.
Start putting the twines all around the balloon, completely covering it.

Step 7.
Leave under the fan overnight

Step 8.
Next day the balloon would have shrunken, if not wait for it to shrink naturally.

Step 9.
Once its completely shrunken, pierce the balloon and take it out from the ball.




Although the photos aren't that good(I am very bad in taking photos), believe me it looks good.

This is how I kept it for time being.

New addition to my vase

I had this vase gifted by my colleagues for our house warming ceremony. To this day it has been just lying in a corner surrounded by pebbles without any flowers in it. I always postponed the idea of buying flowers for it, thought I would do something myself for it. Finally I made something for them.
I had initially put some empty branches bought from my morning walk in it.


Later I made few paper beads.


Colored them with fabric paint


Fixed these to the branches.


How is it? The low cost flowers( really buds) made at home.

My first Warli drawing.

This was my first attempt doing a Warli Drawing(I wouldn't say painting since I didn't paint anything, just used permanent marker for filling the drawing). Not very bad for a first timer what do you say? I hadn't intended to frame it. We had to visit the framewallh for few other paintings that we bought, so I was little curious how this would look after framing. You can see unprofessional in the border.

Warli Art kit

Last weekend when we were browsing for a b'day gift for my son, I found this Warli Art craft kit. I just love Warli art but never tried doing it so far. I had decided to start learning myself, browsing the internet for the Warli images. But lucky me I found this kit in Reliance Timeout and I just can't wait to begin. This kit also has guide and lot of pictures of Warli.