I've spent the past two evenings making paper casts for some textile work, and must say its quite therapeutic in front of the tele dabbing bits of paper with a paint brush and water. These are the first lot I made, and being impatient for them to dry, I took them off their moulds and then they dried all buckled .... lesson learnt in what NOT to do!!
These ones are last nights batch drying slowly. You can see I raided the kitchen cupboards for anything that could be used for a mould - bottoms of plates, glasses, bowls, along with all the proper moulds you can buy nowadays.
I also used toilet paper as well as water soluble paper - cheaper, dries faster, and smells nice too. Not sure how well it'll withstand the painting and waxing afterwards, though.
The base of this dessert plate made a great cast using the toilet paper, so I might have a go tonight using the w/s paper and then compare them. The snowflakes was another attempt with the toilet paper.
So after I'd made those I was itching for something else to do, and found a half made Ted in my UFO bag, so got stuck in, literally, to finishing him. He's made using the dry needle felting technique, just rolling up balls of wool and stab, stab, stabbing, building up areas, until you get a shape you want.
Okay, he's not the most handsome bear I've ever seen. No matter how many attempts at making his face smiley and sweet, he ended up looking mean and scary, but he still looks like a bear, albeit one with a bad case of mumps and arm and leg joints that don't line up LOL!! But he does have a hump and a tail.
I'm sure I can only get better with practice. I've seen other techniques for doing this too, so might try them later on if I can withstand the stabbed fingers (watching tele whilst doing this could be reason why I stabbed myself so many times). As happy as I am to finish him another attempt can wait a few months - I think it'll make a good winter craft, but when you're sitting in 40C heat the wool just sticks to your fingers and gets a bit frustrating, then to calm you down you go and get some chocolate and then that melts and gets on your bear and ...... you get the drift.
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I've been wanting to try the paper moulding for ages, just haven't found much to mould yet. Seem's pointless setting it all up for just one or two bits. I'll keep looking, your results are great. And the bear is really cute too!!
ReplyDeleteThe only drift I'm seeing is a SNOWDRIFT! I tried moulding paper a few years ago and it was fun. Like these!
ReplyDeleteOoooh the paper moulding looks like a lot of fun and really effective too...is this for C and G or just for fun? Little Ted is really cute too! Not sure I could manage all that punching in 40 degree heat!
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