Sunday 17 December - Advent 3 Papercrafts - Flexagon

This might be a bit fiddly, but bear with me - I did make these with my Sunday School class of 5-9 year olds. The older children helped the younger ones, and the adult helpers marvelled at their achievement.

It comes from this book which has given me a lot of pleasure 

You need a strip of paper cut in the ratio 1:7, so 1 inch wide and 7 inches long will do. You will end up with a magic hexagon this size;

Magic? It has three faces!

You also need scissors and a glue stick.

At the top of the picture is my strip. It's one I folded earlier, which is why it is creased. Take the LH edge, and fold it over at an angle of 30 degrees - you can do this by eye. What you are after is folding a series of equilateral (all the sides the same length) triangles. The angle is slightly less than half of the right angled corner.

Fold a series of equilateral triangles, accordian, or zig zag, style following the pattern of creases on the middle strip. This means that the words 'fold this edge' wil line up UNDERNEATH the words 'to here'. 

You end up with this springy thing. Open it out - you don't have to number the triangles but I've just done it to show you. Cut off the red areas, once you have made sure that you have 10 triangles!

Fold it back up again, and just open it a bit like a book so the two ends are on the left an the right. Put the glue on as shown, and fold it closed, like the top of the next photograph.

As you try and unfold it, you will find that you can ease it into the form of a hexagon!

Now here's the thing; should you decorate one side (I coloured it blue) and the other side (I coloured it red), you can bring the points to the middle and open it out to reveal a white, uncoloured side!

So there you have it. A piece of paper with three surfaces.

What can you do with it? I have no idea. They make a good fidget toy, or some kind of magic trick. 

Sunday 10th December - Makes and bakes for the second week in Advent!

 Here we go;

The knitted teddy bear glove/finger puppets might take a bit of 'trial and error' depending on the yarn you are using, and the size of hand/finger your are making them for. 

A complete teddy finger puppet took me a day, the glove puppet two days. So if you are looking to use up some scrap yarn and make a small present, this might work for you.   

The papercraft  has to be  the simplest booklet ever - at least, I hope you find it so! A single sheet of A4 paper and a pair of scissors should see you through. Then, the contents are up to you. A little story for a child, pictures, drawings...

And two recipes for cheese biscuits. I've just listened to an audio book by Miss Read, 'Winter at Thrush Green' (I find her books perfect night-time reading and listening - I used to read them when life was threatening to become 'all a bit much' and needed to totally switch off and wind down). They continually have little sherry parties in each other's houses, and I think these little biscuits might have been the sort of thing they served beside the sherry (and whisky for the men, of course!). 

One, the cheesy feet is suitable for Everyone, the other, with mustard, pepper and cayenne, has a bit more of a 'kick'.  

Sunday 10th December - Advent 2 papercraft - mini booklet

 I've gone for this one, as it is astonishingly easy. I used to make these with the children (aged 5 to 8) in my Junior Church group - what used to be called 'Sunday School'. We would then add pictures to do with Bible stories or whatever else we were learning at the time.

All you need is a sheet of paper - A4 is good - and a pair of scissors. If all goes well, you should end up with a booklet with 8 pages, one-eighth of the size of your original piece of paper.

Fold your paper exactly in half length ways, creasing it well, open it out and fold it across the other way, again creasing it and opening it out.

Now fold the shorter sides exactly to the middle crease, and opening it out. You can see in the picture that I have drawn dotted lines along all the creases (you don't that!) to show you, and also marked a red line in the centre.  

Fold the paper across the middle, and cut along the middle line just where the scissors are. Only cut as far as the next crease, and open it out again, so it looks like the second picture below.

  Arrange the creases to match the picture; 'valley' folds at the sides and a 'mountain fold across the top.

Fold in half length ways, and push the LH and RH sides together, making the slit open wide;

Keep pushing, and you will get a star shape.

 Hooray! This is your book! Just fold it up and lay it flat;

If you number the pages; Front Cover, 1, 2, 3 4, 5, 6, Back Cover, you can open it out and see how the fit together;

So when I was thinking about making a Christmas Booklet on decorating the Christmas Tree, I knew which pictures had to be upside down;

Good luck! Once you've got the hang of this, it's a good way to entertain the troops over the Christmas Holidays. There's no reason why you shouldn't make a reversible book as the other side of the paper is completely hidden.