Salaric

I made this card for my friends who had just moved into their shiny new (old) house. I used a sheet of orange card, yellow card, pink card, one maroon and one gold metallic gel pen from a large pen set from WH Smiths, pritt stick and a pair of scissors.

I decided to go for highly stylised houses so cut out three vastly different sized ‘wonky’ rectangles out of the yellow card. I then cut out appropriately-sized triangles for the houses’ roofs out of the pink card.

I then arranged the houses on the orange card, which I had folded in half and then in half again to get a good card size. I actually decided to rotate the rectangles by 90 degrees as I thought it looked better - fortunately all but one roof still looked fine. I then stuck them in place.

I then used the gold metallic gel pen to draw the doors and windows on the three houses - making sure that they were scaled appropriately as I had one tiny house, one medium-sized house and one large house. I found I needed to weigh the corner of the card down whilst I did the drawing and postioning of houses on the card - the scissors worked nicely for this.

Using the maroon metallic gel pen I then added the words “NEW HOME” at two different angles above the houses to sort of represent the slope on house roofs.

In the same pen I then added “WELCOME” underneath the houses. Of course the pens produced too thin a line for what I wanted to do, so I had to carefully trace round each letter several times to get the thickness required. The colour and effect of the pens has not come out well in the photos unfortunately .

This ghost was incredibly easy to make, my little two year old loves it and drags it around by its string. I used:

• One empty minni trifle pot but a large yogurt pot would do just as well

• One square sheet of white packing paper, this had a slight greese proof shiny quality to it, the size doesn’t really matter as long as it will cover the pot you are using - too large a piece of paper may make things a bit unwieldy. I think this paper came with some electronic components but any thin paper or material will do.

• One black circle just a bit smaller than a two pence piece - I used a shiny black plastic sequine type thing that would normally be used in card making.

• Two goggly eyes, I chose relatively large ones. They where also self adhesive though peeling off the backs was a bit fiddly. But you could just glue some on.

• A pair of scissors

• Some black string - I used a cotton yarn as I had lots of that lurking around the place.

First of all I squeezed out a spiral of PVA white craft glue onto the minni triffle pot - on the outside of the pot which was standing upside down on the table. I then placed the white paper square over it so that the centre of the paper was over the centre of the pot. I then gently pressed the sides of the paper onto the sides of the pot. I had to hold it cupped in my hand for a while to let the glue soak into the paper and hold it in place. I then glued the googly eyes and mouth onto the ghost.

Once the glue was dry I carefully poked a whole with the scissors at the top of the ghost - this was for the string which I poked through and then tied a knot in so that it would pull back through easily. That was it - really simple.