DIY // COPPER DIPPED GLASS VOTIVE

Copper has taken home decor by storm within the last couple of years and like many others, I fully approve. With it's earthy tones, copper seems to go with everything and adds a little bit of rustic chic. Thankfully, craft stores and craft product companies have jumped on the copper bandwagon and given us lots of different ways to create our own copper accessories. After receiving lots of Yankee votive candles from Santa this year, I realised that I don't have many candle holders suitable for them and so it seemed like the perfect opportunity to get my copper on!

Glass Votive  |  Copper GlasArt Paint  |  Sponge or paint brush  |  Scotch Magic Tape

1. Clean the glass votive and place it upside down. To clean my glass votive, I just washed it with warm water and thoroughly dried it. I then upturned it so that the bottom of the votive was facing upwards.

2. Stick tape all the way around approximately a third of the way down. With the bottom of the votive still facing upwards, I pulled off some Scotch Magic Tape and stuck it approximately a third of the way down. I used several small pieces of tape to try and keep it level all the way round.

3. Use a sponge to dab glass paint on the exposed glass above the tape. For this I used GlasArt Paint in Copper. I poured a small amount out onto a plastic palette and used a sponge to dab the paint all over. The paint I used was transparent (so the light from the candle can still come through!) however this meant that I felt I needed to add a couple of layers.

4. Whilst still tacky, carefully peel off the tape. To make sure I didn't peel off any paint that I didn't want to, I peeled the tape off while the paint was still a bit tacky. This worked well although in a few places where I had an air bubble in the tape, the paint slightly went over the line.

5. Leave the glass paint to dry for at least 2 hours. The paint stayed sticky for quite some time and even after 2 hours I wasn't confident in turning it the right way up so I left it over night. The next day it was completely dry and I was ready to turn it the right way up and pop in a candle.

....and that's it!

This took just 20 minutes to complete (without drying time of course!) and is so ridiculously easy. I love the copper against my white furniture and it just complements my glass and copper box (which a lovely friend got me for Christmas from Oliver Bonas!) perfectly.

I'd love to see your copper crafts or DIY's so post a link of them in the comments below!

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♥

DIY // HOLLY JOLLY CHRISTMAS CARDS

Just 4 days left to go and I still haven't finished my christmas shopping or christmas crafting. Every year I seem get to this stage, having the year before said to myself that next year will be the year I get myself organised in advance of all the craziness that ensues after mid-december. Although I am in a similar position yet again, I have at least planned and made my christmas cards. I've never really wanted to have a go at linocutting, but after watching this year's Sky Art's Landscape Artist of the Year and subsequently finding a great DIY Stamp Set from Tiger, I decided to have a go at cutting my own festive stamps and using them to make christmas cards for my family and friends.

Although the stamp kit came with some handy inks in three different colours (black, pink and blue), I used acrylic paint so that I could mix up a more festive green. I really enjoyed making these and was pleasantly surprised at how long it took to cut the stamps, which was probably less than 2 hours in total, and how well the stamps actually printed. It really was a great kit to get me started however I'm keen to have a go with more tools on lino and so I'm thinking that next time I will invest in a Lino Cutting and Printing Kit.

Have you ever tried linocutting? Have you crafted any christmas cards this year?

Let me know in the comments below! :)

♥

DIY // FAIRY LIGHT CHRISTMAS CANVAS

It's SO nearly Christmas! If you couldn't tell from my consistently festive tweets and instagram posts, I'm just a *tad* excited. My excitement has been slightly delayed this year because of the amount of work I've had for the course over the past few weeks, which has seriously dampened my spirits, however now it is all done and dusted, the excitement and festive crafts are in full flow! I saw the idea for this on Pinterest quite a while ago and I'm not sure who thought of it first, but regardless, I instantly fell in love with it. After putting the tree up, I realised that the fireplace was in need of some festive TLC and remembered this lovely little idea. I'm forever wishing it would snow during the christmas period, and as it's looking less likely this year than ever, 'Let It Snow' seemed like the perfect quote for me to include.

Canvas  |  Pencil  |  Acrylic Paint  |  Paint brush  |  Craft Knife  |  Fairy Lights  |  Superglue

1. Using the pencil, draw out a festive phrase on the canvas in a stylish font. As I wasn't too fussed about my lettering being perfect, I just drew 'Let it snow' out freehand. If you are keen for yours to be more accurate and more evenly spaced, you could always type out your festive phase in Microsoft Word, print it out and trace it onto the canvas.

2. Mix up the acrylic paints to make your desired background colour. As any reader of ISOSCELLA will by now have realised, I love mint/pastel blues/duck egg blue and all variations of them. Typically then, I mixed up a pastel mint shade using my Daler-Rowney Acrylic Paints in white, green and blue.

3. Leaving the lettering blank for the moment, paint all over the canvas. Using a large paintbrush (one you might use for your walls!) I painted all over the canvas, keeping my distance from the lettering in the middle. I then went in with a smaller paintbrush and carefully painted in between and all around the the lettering.

4. Mix up the acrylic paints to make your desired lettering colour. For me this didn't take very long or involve much thought as I simply used white acrylic paint, straight from the tube!

5. With a smaller tipped brush, carefully paint the lettering. Here, I used two smaller paintbrushes, one flat paintbrush and one much finer pointed tip paintbrush. For the wider parts of the letters I used the flat paintbrush and for the extremely narrow parts of the lettering I used the fine brush.

6. Using the pencil, mark where you want the lights to come through. Again I did this freehand and quite randomly (snow doesn't fall very precisely after all!) but just ensured that I made no more than thirty-five marks, as I had thirty-five lights.

7. Push a sharp utensil through these marks & widen with the scalpel. For this I used a sharp screwdriver however you could easily use a wide needle or pin, etc. Using a scalpel, I then widened each hole slightly as my holes weren't quite large enough to push my lights through.

8. Turn the canvas over & push the fairy light bulbs through each hole. Once the holes were large enough and I'd ensured that I could get a fairy light bulb through, I pushed the rest of the lights through.

9. Pushing the bulbs slightly further through, dab superglue around the bulb base & stick to the front side of the canvas. Because the bulbs were wider than the base of the lights, the lights were slightly loose and didn't sit at a 90 degree angle to the canvas. To resolve this, I pushed the lights up, dabbed superglue around the base and pushed the bulb down until it was fixed to the canvas at the angle I wanted.

10. Sellotape the battery pack & any uncontrollable wires to the back of the canvas. There were a fair few out-of-control wires (and a few unused lights!) and so to prevent them from sticking out I sellotaped them to the back of the canvas at the bottom.

... then, place your canvas, turn on the lights & enjoy!

I'm really pleased with how this crafty project turned out and can see myself using this, and making variations of this, for many years to come!

Is this something you might make?

Let me know in the comments below! Please share and subscribe :)

♥

DIY // CLAY CANDLE HOLDER

Can you believe it's November?! Having flown out to Malaysia on the 5th (so cool to see all of the fireworks from above!) and come back on the 19th, I feel like I've hardly been in the UK and because of that, this month has literally just flown by. I had such a lovely time in Malaysia and would definitely recommend visiting. It's so different out there, which just adds to how surreal it feels to be back. But, with Christmas just around the corner, there is lots to look forward to and it's probably time to start crafting those handmade gifts (yay)! Something which I've been dying to have a go at is an air-dry clay candle holder. I've seen quite a few clay candle holder DIY's on Pinterest however most of them seem to use polymer clay. For this project, I really wanted the nice matte and slightly textured finish that you get with air-dry clay and so used bits and bobs of ideas from various tutorials to come up with the following DIY.

Air-dry clay  |  Rolling pin  |  Scalpel  |  Cardboard tube  |  Paint brushes  |  Straw

1. Measure the circumference of your cardboard tube. For this I used a toilet roll tube and a measuring tape. I didn't measure the height of the tube as I had a rough idea in my head as to how high I wanted my candle holder to be.

2. Using this measurement, create a rectangle on a piece of paper and cut it out. This will be your template when cutting the clay. Laying the measuring tape out flat onto paper, I used the perimeter of the tube as the length of my paper rectangle and for the height of the rectangle, marked how tall I wanted my holder to be.

3. Knead some air-dry clay until it is soft and then separate into two pieces. Here, I cut the clay into one larger and one smaller piece. The larger piece will make the sides of the candle holder and the smaller piece will make the base of the candle holder.

4. Take one piece of clay and roll it out, elongating it in one direction until it is larger than your paper template. Although I wanted to make sure the clay was larger than the paper template, I also wanted to make sure it was thick enough (approx. 4mm).

5. Lie the paper template on top of the clay and gently roll the rolling pin over it. I've never been very good at keeping templates still as I cut around them and so found that rolling over the paper on top of the clay leaves a nice indent on the clay (that doesn't move around!) to cut around.

6. Using the scalpel, cut out around the paper imprint to create a long clay rectangle. Here, I cut each side of the rectangle in one long movement to try and prevent deforming the rectangles shape.

7. Wrap the clay rectangle loosely around your toilet roll or tube. To do this, I lifted one end of the rectangle and held it against the tube as I rolled the tube over the rest of the clay until the whole clay rectangle was wrapped around the tube.

8. Cut off any excess clay and fix the two rectangle ends together to create a cylinder. Using my scalpel, I cut off any overlapping clay. With the paintbrush, some excess clay and water, I then created a clay putty, which I used to mould the two ends of the clay rectangle together.

9. Using a straw, cut out some holes from the clay cylinder. Here, I pushed a straw into the clay until I felt it hit the cardboard tube and twisted it until I was sure that the straw had completely cut out a hole.

10. Put this to one side and roll out the other piece of clay into a large circle. Using my trusty non-stick rolling pin (possibly the best thing I've ever bought from Hobbycraft!) I rolled out the clay into a circle larger than the circumference of the clay tube.

11. Dip your fingers into some water and lightly spread it over the clay circle. Place the cylinder on top of the wet clay circle. Here I've found that wetting the clay makes it sticky and so when you place the clay tube on top, it moulds together quite quickly.

12. Using the scalpel, cut around the cylinder removing the excess clay circle. To do this, I roughly cut off the excess clay until I was a few millimetres away from the clay tube and then more carefully cut around it.

12. Turn over and fill any gaps between the cylinder and circle. Using the paintbrush, and a mix of clay and water, fill the gaps around the edge between the clay cylinder and circle.

13. Whilst it is upturned, use the wet paint brush to smooth out any marks on the bottom of the clay circle. I had a little trouble getting the bottom of the clay candle holder (formerly the clay circle) off of the acetate and so had to coax it off using my scalpel. This left quite a few indentations on the bottom which I gently smoothed over using the paintbrush and some water.

14. Place the clay candle holder upright and leave to dry overnight. Here, I left the clay holder to dry a little with the cardboard tube in the middle (as support). After a couple of hours, when I felt that the clay was sturdy enough to support itself, I gently pulled out the tube and left the holder to dry for approximately 24 hours.

15. Once dry, smooth the clay with a damp piece of sandpaper. Here, I used a fine sandpaper to smooth out any paintbrush strokes and any lumps and bumps. To minimise dust particles (although as you can see, there were still quite a few!), I dampened the sandpaper.

... and that's it!

I'm really happy with how this little project turned out and think that it would make a nice gift for family, friends or for yourself and if you use a mini star cutter, as opposed to a straw, would make a chic little christmas decoration.

As always, I love to hear what you think so let me know in the comments below!

♥

BAKING // MOJITO CUPTAILS

It's getting close to party season (yay!), which can mean only one thing; cocktail-flavoured cupcakes or cuptails as I fondly call them! I've made these for almost every party I've ever thrown and every time I have, they have always gone down a treat. Mojito's are my absolute favourite cocktail and at my last party, where I made both Mojito cuptails and Chocolate Vodka cuptails, the Mojito cuptails were not only my favourite, but also my party guests'. They are actually pretty easy to make and as they make a nice little addition to any party or gathering, I thought that I would share with you how I made and decorated them. I found the recipe from the Good Food Channel's website. I often get my recipes from here because it has such a good variety of interesting recipes and explains them so simply that even a kitchen-phobe like myself can understand them.

After making and baking the cupcakes, I left them to completely cool. Once they were cool, I broke off some mint leaves and gently rubbed it across the top of each cupcake. I then poured some brown rum (unlike white rum as the recipe suggests!) and lime juice into an egg cup and using a pastry brush, brushed the rum-lime mixture onto the top of each cupcake. This is such a good method of infusing cakes and cupcakes with alcohol without having to adjust the proportions of the mixture - I don't know about you, but that always confuses me. Leave the rum-lime mixture to soak in thoroughly before brushing on another layer. I repeated this quite a few times (haha!) so that they were thoroughly alcohol infused, however you can alter this to your own taste.

Before the final layer of the mixture was completely absorbed, I lightly sprinkled on some brown sugar so that it dissolved into the mixture on top of the cupcakes. For the icing, I mixed up some flora buttery (instead of butter!) with icing sugar and added a drop of green food colouring gel and the remainder of the rum-lime mix. I found that adding these in, as well as using Flora instead of butter, meant that I needed a bit more icing sugar than the recipe suggested. Once I was happy with the consistency of the icing, I put the icing into a piping bag and using a round tipped nozzle, piped a high cone shape into the middle of the cupcake. Then, starting from the outside edge of the cupcake, I piped in a spiral towards the centre of the cupcake, going up the sides of the cone until I reached the top.

To decorate the icing, I sprinkled some brown sugar over the top, cut up some straws and pushed these into the centre of the icing at an angle. I then added a sprig of mint and cut up some lime into small wedges, which I pushed into the icing around the straw to give it more of a 'cocktail look'. Sadly I didn't take a photo of how they looked before I served them, as guests started arriving whilst I was finishing them up and I dashed off to get changed so I'm sorry there's no final picture!

What cocktail would you like as a cupcake?

Have you ever made cuptails?

Let me know in the comments below and don't forget to share and subscribe!

♥