How long has it been? Far too long. Once you slip out of the habit of posting, it's hard to find your way back sometimes! But Christmas seems a good time to try, so here's a 'sweet' little craft - egg carton Christmas puddings to hang on the tree.
You will need:
Egg cartons
Paint
PVA glue
Green paper or plain
red sequins
(or red foil sweet wrappers)
Thread and a needle
1. Cut a cup from an egg carton - you want it to be roughly 2cm/¾in. high. The thing is, egg cartons vary a lot - some have large cones and little cups and others have good sized cups and little cones. For the puddings a deeper, rounder cup is best, though using cardboard packaging means sometimes we have to work with what we've got. But if you spot a carton that might be better for puds (or flowers) then hang onto it! (says the person often found loitering around the egg isle in a supermarket..)
2. Push up the top of your pud with your fingers, to make it a more rounded shape.
3. Paint light brown around the sides (not the top).
When that's touch dry, mix the same quantity of white paint and PVA glue together and brush it on, keeping the paint thick and gloopy (but not too runny..), and bring it down the sides a little. Sprinkle glitter over your gluey icing and leave to dry.
4. While that's drying, use the base of something round to draw circles on some spare egg carton lid. You want the circle to be slightly bigger than the pud. Cut out and paint both sides.
5. While the plates are drying, us a black pen to add some dots for raisins on the cake part of the pudding. Then make your holly decoration. Fold a small piece of green paper in half, (or colour-in some plain paper) and cut small triangles on the fold. Open up and glue two on top of each other, so they cross.
6. This step needs to be done by an adult - thread a needle, and push it up through the top of the egg carton cup from underneath. Make sure it goes through the middle of the holly.
7. Thread on a red sequin (if using) and then push the needle back through the hole you've just made, remove the needle, check you have a good sized loop for hanging the decoration, and tie the two ends together, making a decent knot. Snip off any tails. Dab on some glue underneath where the knot is, and a small dot under the sequin to secure it in place.
Glue two more sequins to the middle sequin, either side of the loop. Or you could roll up some small balls of red tin foil and glue to the holly around the thread loop (see the green plate pudding at the back, in the pic below).
8. Glue to the plate - for a bit of extra sturdiness, you could scrunch up a small piece of newspaper and glue inside the pud, then brush glue on the newspaper as well as the edge of the egg carton cup before attaching to the plate.
Your pudding is ready!