CHRISTMAS CRAFTS: WE HAD IT NAILED!

Christmas in the Sixties always stretched my artistic skills. Art was big on Christmas morning and the weeks that followed.

For a start there was that old chestnut Painting by Numbers by brands like Junior Artist. Initially these were pictures of mountains, owls and deer but gradually as TV took over our lives the pictures on offer got more exciting, Thunderbirds being the peak. I still see old Painting by Numbers sets at car boots and in charity shelves but alas nothing TV-related. Here's one I clocked online.

Less TV-based were the craftier gifts my Mum and Dad got me. One I recall was a nail and string affair. It came with a block of wood, on which you hammered the small nails and then strung the string around them in pre-set shapes like owls, deer [yes, more of them!], stars and circles. Good fun as far as I recall. My efforts may have even got hung up in the house not too far from the Vernon Ward flying geese! Here's one I saw on Ebay.

Brass rubbing was another plunge into art meets craft. I think the set contained some pencils and graphite blocks for rubbing across a knight in armour on, yes, another block of wood. Again, lots of fun and it rubbed off on me as later on when I was a young Dad we took our daughter brass rubbing too. I seem to remember coins gave the best results, rubbings of the faces of old coins. Here's a typical Knight I rubbed a lot.

Calligraphy was an early Seventies sensation. Their seemed to have been a general fascination with pens all round. Felt pens in huge wide tins and cases, multi-headed ball-points and Parker fountain pens [I bet we all had one of those!]. 

I remember getting a big set of calligraphy pens one Christmas. The cigar-grip pens had nibs of varying shapes and thicknesses to offer the would-be scribe all manner of lines and flourishes. I must have written my name a hundred times on the special paper that came with that set, each attempt becoming lost in a storm of inky swirls. Seeing this on Etsy, I honestly think its the set I had.

There were other even craftier presents from my Parents in the early Seventies. Macramé, Batik, knot-craft, matchstick models and candle-making. But none of these really lit my bushel and it was always the more toy-based art stuff that really caught my eye: Colour Wheels, Colour Witch, Hammer Tap Pictures [with tacks and tiles but I forget the name], Paint Swirl [it wasn't called that either] and king of the castle, Mist-O-Matic, which I absolutely adored.

A sort of table-top spray shop for making cards and pictures with showers of paint, I spent hours creating masterpieces of mist that year in the fairy-lit past. My favourite was the brand's own Santa Christmas card design, which I must have made for my entire family!

I own very little from my childhood, so I find what I once had second-hand. Luckily I found a boxed Mist-O-Matic at a car boot around 1990 - pictured above - and I've kept hold of it ever since. One day I will replace the paint and have another go, but in the meantime pictured below is the Santa design as it appeared on Denis Fisher's leaflet. Seeing it again, it feels like yesterday.

Do you remember any of these arty items readers? What crafty arty stuff you get?