Today's adventures at The Little House in the Park were of the spooky kind, in anticipation of Halloween next week. 

The spider is made from pipe cleaners and furry fabric. You twist four pipe cleaners in the middle, wrap a strip of fur around, then use a long piece of cotton to wind all round the body and in between the legs to keep everything in place. Then you use a darning needle to thread elastic through the top layer of fur, and finish off with googley eyes. 

The bat is cut out of black card, with some strips of netting stapled on top. Again we used a darning needle to thread the elastic through. You can't see in this picture, but the end of the elastic is tied to a stick so you can bounce and fly the bat around. Cool.

The pumpkin is just bits of torn up orange tissue paper glued onto gold card. We sprinkled some green glitter on top too so it catches the light. We were supposed to make it into a mask but didn't quite get round to that (someone lost interest and started running amok with all the stuffed toys. It wasn't me).  

Back in the enamelling workshop today for the first time in ages - trying to get stuff finished off in time for the Christmas craft fairs. 

I had a couple of spare mounts so decided to do some quick and easy pieces to go on them. The piece on the left has round blue glass beads fired onto a base of transparent light blue; the right-hand one has amber-coloured square beads fired onto blue flux. The blue flux layer wasn't quite thick enough so there are little holes in it from being fired for so long (to get the beads to properly melt into it). I kind of like the effect though. 

Always fun messing around with beads - tricky to get the firing time right so that they melt just enough but not too much. 

Last week's theme at The Little House in the Park was apples (in celebration of National Apple Day on 21 October). Here are some of our appley things. 

The biggest one is a willow wreath wound round with wool. Matthew couldn't quite manage the winding but was very enthusiastic about choosing autumnal colours and finding the ends of balls of wool (which he is quite handy at). 

The top right apple is made from plaited ribbon glued onto card in a spiral, and the bottom right one is glitter and other shiny bits scattered onto that sticky foamy stuff (don't know what it's called). We glued a safety pin on the back of that one too, to make it into a badge. 

Can I take this opportunity to sincerely wish everyone a very Happy Apple Day.

This is what we made last week, at The Little House in the Park (where we go every Friday). The session was all about portraits. We started off decorating large cardboard frames with bits of tissue paper, feathers, glitter etc, then we made colourful backgrounds using inky paint and sponges. We stuck it all together with black and white photos on top, and then went crazy with collage. Matthew's choice of white frayed ribbon for his picture led to interesting/disturbing results. Would the Mayor of London please go and wash his inky hands. Now.