Although my son turned down my offer to spend his days and or nights at my house, he has been coming earlier and staying longer on the days he already comes. So this week I decided to take advantage of this and asked if he would mind it I followed the Mid-Week Makes session live. He was fine with this and watched TV while I went up to my study to log onto Zoom.

This week, as I discovered, was Iris Folding.

One of my friends has been sending me these sorts of cards for Christmas for several years.My favourite is the one with the apple which is actually the first one she sent.

The first few photographs were taken in the evening under artificial light and the light has not been too good for the others either.

When I opened the bag I found.Having been shown the general method, it was suggested that we start with the oval card.

This was a bit tricky because the aperture in the card was not the same shape as the template and it was hard to keep the card flat.I struggled through it however and produced this.However the next day I decided to continue. Towards the end of the session the virtues of batch processing for crafts such as crochet was mentioned and I realised that if I cut the paper into strips first, then went about folding them in half and only then started with the glue, things would go more smoothly.

I had saved my animal biscuits for the morning.I was really not happy with the oval template and card so I decided to start with the square one. Even here if you refer to an earlier photograph, you can see that the card aperture did not match the template. But at least here I could choose to just create the sun.

Here you can see my work space, with strips cut and folded and ready to go with the glue.
Here is the finished card.The instructions with the template said to use card for the round sun but we hadn’t been provided with any card and the only yellow card I had was very pale., so I went with a piece of paper.

Moving on: I decided that there was no way I was going to try and use the oval template as it was.

Here you can see the difference in the shapes.

The circle drawn inside the card is a bit faint because I used a pencil.

I decided that I could probably use my photo editing software to modify the template and here you can see the result inside the card.
I decided that this time I would be more organised.

So I cut and folded all the strips first. I made the purple ones a bit thicker as I didn’t think the suggested 2cm would be enough in places.

I then worked carefully having worked up a system and made the second card.

Here are both of the finished cards.

I must say that I have found these last two sessions less satisfactory that the ones before Christmas. The first one because there was no way you could get very far with the project in the hour and this one because of the mismatch between templates and aperture cards.

Next week we need to have a brush and a ramekin and scissors. I think it involves diluted glue. I am going back to watching the video the next day. I will do better then, being a morning person.