I’ve been suffering ‘artists block’ for a bit and so I decided to just go and get some craft kits and see where that took me. I went to ebay and searched for craft kits for adults, I ended up with three.
Paper craft kit
So I call this a fail, not because it didn’t work, but because my cutting skills were not great and I got glue all over everything. It’s a paper kit. You turn the little yellow wheel and the woodpecker “pecks” the wood, just missing the worm every time.
It was medium fun doing this, I guess. But now I’ve got a useless woodpecker that is poorly put together. It’s a bit ‘eh’. I’m not really into the precision of cutting and gluing.
Make your own sushi shaped erasers
This was a Japanese kit, you kneaded sticks of rubber clay into little molds and then set them in boiling water, and you end up with a set of tiny rubbers/erasers in the shape of sushi.
I don’t read Japanese and the translators seemed to hard to implement so I just went with it.
This kit I decided to put together when I had some beers, so not really a great start, and I made the poor decision of using a stove top not the microwave. Where they touched the saucepan they actually melted. Whoops. But hey, beer, I didn’t care!
I do like thatIi now have a tiny sushi mold now to use for polymer clay. It didn’t take long to do and it’s a bit naff. Nothing turned out very well. The problem with a kit like this is they give you a finite set of stuff and you never are good at anything up front, so the first one is never good, and therefore your end result is crappy. Also don’t be drunk when you try an new craft, that’s an important take away. Oh well. They look cuter and more successful in the picture than they are in reality!
Felting
After doing this one kit, I have decided my new hobby is felting. I bought a corgi kit. Again, in Japanese, and it was a lot of trial and error and so much stabbing of fingers. SO MUCH STABBING. Blood everywhere. But once I got into the rhythm and the hang of how it all comes together, I loved it. It’s pure sculpture and so much fun.
I made a little cat that I’m not as happy with, using some of the fur from the long haired cat. Cat fur does not felt overly well, I know there was that book on making felt out of cat fur years ago (I tried doing a cat finger puppet from that book, and failed), now I know why I failed. No felting needle and it’s too smooth.
I used the leftover corgi fibre to make a tiny sock monkey. I am going to need to do designs before I get right in I think, to get proportions right.
One of of three ain’t bad, as Meatloaf so very nearly said. 🙂 It’s worth trying new things, you might find something you really like that you wouldn’t have tried otherwise. Craft kits are a small $ investment too.
