Erin Fox
It’s said that April showers bring May flowers. April showers also mean spending less time outdoors in the fresh spring air and more time indoors. A bit of rain can ruin a whole day out, but instead of letting it dampen your spirits, seize the opportunity to get creative indoors.
Create your own colourful rain cloud mobile to brighten up a dismal rainy day.
For the rain cloud mobile you will need an assortment of coloured card or paper, pencil, scissors, glue and string.
On the white card, draw the shape of a cloud and cut out. Change the shape of each cloud to make several different kinds.
Repeat
For the rain drops, draw a large tear drop. Cut out and repeat until you have several colours. Count how many raindrops you want for each cloud. Line the rain drops and clouds up on your work surface and measure three pieces of yarn long enough to hold the rain drops. Snip the yarn and lay it flat on the work surface. Dab a little glue onto the back of the cloud and attach the pieces of yarn.
When the glue has dried, flip the cloud over and glue the rain drops to each of the yarn pieces. Pierce a small hole through the top of the cloud and thread through some string to hang it up. Leave for the glue to dry completely and then hang up your rain cloud from the window.
Create storm clouds and cut the clouds out from black and grey card. Draw a few lightning bolts on some yellow card, cut them out and glue these to the dark clouds. Cut out a rainbow from the coloured card and glue this to the back of one of the clouds. You can always create a sun from yellow card and position this so it looks like the sun is creeping out from behind the clouds. Or instead of a cloud, hang the raindrops from a rainbow. Include a miniature pot of gold at the end of the middle string.
Use patterned paper for the rain drops too. This is a good way to use up scraps of wrapping paper.
When winter comes, switch the rain drops for snowflakes with a grey cloud for your own snow storm cloud. Because each snowflake is unique, you can make each of the snowflakes on the cloud a different design.