A Quick Death

This is a very quick project - the whole thing took me less than ten minutes, and that includes taking the photos - using nothing but scrap from your recycling pile.

All you need to make this decoration is some scrap card, something to cut it, a black marker pen and some glue.

Sketch out the shape of the body, and then cut it out. You'll notice that my cutting is not perfectly straight or symmetrical - this was a deliberate choice to add character to the, er, character.

If you're working to reproduce my version, the squares on my cutting mat are 1cm across - the whole piece is about 8cm tall and 4cm wide. The head is about 2cm tall.

Colour the body with your black marker - you don't need to colour the back, but you do need to colour the edges.

Sketch out an angular skull shape that fits within the edges of the head. I used the head I cut out to mark a rectangle on another piece of card and then drew the skull within that.

I cut the jaw off the main skull just below the line where it joined the skull, and snipped along that cut edge to make teeth.

I cut the eye-holes out with the tip of my scalpel, then rounded them off by turning the point of a pencil in them.

I smeared a little PVA on the backs of the pieces, and pressed them into place - they don't need clamping because they're carrying almost no load.

If you want your decoration to be free-standing, it needs a stand.

Just cut a scrap of card an appropriate size, glue along the edge and then hold it in place for a few minutes while it dries.

That's it, you're done!

You might want to save this project for Hallowe'en, but I'd love to see pictures of your versions when you make them...