Making Mad March Hares

I’ve been making paper mad March hares for next weekend’s event; I love this kind of experimenting and creating.

But…it EATS time!

I started off early, over breakfast! it was a beautiful sunny day and I had a clear(ish) table to work on. Double pleasure; so I got started straightaway with the sun pouring in.

As you can see by the pictures it got to afternoon and I was still at it. To be fair the ideas and scissor chopping, quick sketching bit is quick and fun. Then trying to make the actual templates and instruction sheets takes ages. I don’t mind doing it but you can find you’ve been an hour on one teeny page (I timed it!). Typing and tweaking and cropping and then redrawing.

This process is not my best bit of a project!

I am – apparently- a “starter instigator” according one of those work teambuilding profile things!

Who knew?

Well anyone who knows me lol!

Don’t get me wrong – I DO finish things- but it is not “my best”.
(Love that quote phrase from The Dollhouse- a weird TV drama, stumbled upon a while ago)

Anyhow I now have a couple of Hare finger puppets, a mad ‘revolving eye’ hare head picture, and an animated boxing hare scene (my favourite). Plus of course (being me) some interesting side diversions too maybe work on later.

My clear desk now looks like this;

where I pushed it all back like the tide so I could take the ‘how to’ photos for the publisher instruction pages.
Also, I’m wondering if I can rescale the side profile finger puppet to fit the page better; but without a tiny pair of hands to try it on, I’m a bit stuck with that.

However, quite pleased with this little guy.

His head probably could do with a ‘sink fold’ but I’ve tried to get it a simple as possible, otherwise I will end up making them all instead- not the point and no fun for the children ( or me ).

Simple is hard to get to sometimes; people have no idea when they see a couple of folds and cuts, how much you have to actually leave out!

These are just some of the casualties, ( and why I do most of my trials in scrap paper ) poor little paper people;

time to tidy up, but….
… just for fun; this little chap looked quite like he would love to escape his paper world…

look little hare wants to get out into that sunny hillside..

there he goes

off up the hill!

Sorry about the laundry, but it was the first sunny day a while…

and yes, I do use one of my own pegbags, he is just on the end of the line that you can’t see.

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Tinkerbell went to the ball…

Well – Tinkerbell did go to the ball, or Never Never Land…

The dress was a success, and has therefore moved off the ***(insert expletive of choice) *** sewing list, to the “I made it, yeah!” list.

Just a tip, if using a (stretchy) leotard as a base for a (gathered and stiff) tutu, looks like a good idea; make sure the model is on hand to fit it on at all times! Otherwise you need a willing pair of hands to hold it into stretched mode whilst you fight with the gathers to pin them on. Not to mention while you herringbone petal points all round.
Such fun! Not really. More a labour of love.
The shoes were a labour of love too, but much more fun and we all agree looked fabulous. If only you could wear shoes like this everyday… then we would all feel like Tinkerbell.

I hand crocheted the pompoms with eyelash yarn. They were made as little spheres and then I stuffed them; I think they worked better then normal pompoms but eyelash yarn is weird to work with, in the end I was going on blind faith because I could hardly see the stitches for fronds…

And then…

There were some lovely left overs – lots of bits of bright green sparkly net (tulle) and beads. Some of the bits of net (those not trodden ALL around the house) were put to good use in the last event – “Trees”.

We had tree sprites, leaf bowls and lollypop trees.

The latter two were made with leaf rubbings from real leaves collected onsite. All pleasantly eco minded – the leaves were placed under old envelopes and rubbed with crayons to get the imprint of their veins; the beautiful patterns looked great against the blue print inside the envelopes.

The “bowls” were lots of bits of packing card from Ikea, helpfully cut into cross shaped disks!
They use them to protect stacked china bowls, so it was quite nice to give them a new life as bowls themselves.

We also made miniature trees with the imprints and wooden twigs and sticks;

but my favourite was the tree sprites. I have always loved making little dolls from found natural “found objects” and also from wooden clothes pegs. This time they were both combined and the children made some gorgeous little creatures.

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